Two years ago, British artist Thomas J Price was commissioned by Hackney Council to create the first permanent public sculpture to celebrate the contribution of the Windrush generation and their descendants in the UK. The new artwork will be unveiled in June 2022, but, in the meantime, the artist will be having his first solo exhibition in Switzerland at Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz (12th February - 14th May).
One of the most important British contemporary artists of his generation, Price studied at Chelsea College of Art, completing his MA at the Royal College of Art in 2006.
While he was still a student, Price tried to cover the walls of an entire gallery with his saliva in three days. As his tongue began to bleed profusely, he ended up covering the walls with blood rather than saliva. Since this performance piece ("Licked", 2001), Price moved on, focusing on the language of monumentalism and sculptures, exhibiting at the National Portrait Gallery, London (2016) and The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2019).
Inspired by the people he saw in Brixton, where he lived, he often attempts a representation of ordinary men, rather than heroic types and usually focuses on disenfranchised, urban young Black men, subjects rarely seen in art galleries.
The exhibition in St. Moritz, entitled "The Space Between", explores the artist's passion for ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian traditions of monumental sculpture, his interest in innovative digital technologies and his desire to explore the power and hierarchy of materials.
The event includes a selection of small and large-scale sculpture spanning two decades, alongside two of his film works that show another dimension of his practice.
Among the other sculptures included in this event there are also "Lay it Down (On The Edge Of Beauty)" (2018) and "Reaching Out" (2021): the former is the first sculpture of a woman's head he did and continues his investigation into deities, while pondering on Black womanhood, the stigma associated with hairstyles and formal conventions of beauty.
The latter is instead a representation of a woman in a relaxed modern pose looking down at her mobile phone. Set to represent a Black everywoman, the work has a double meaning: the figure is using her phone but we don't know if she is calling someone or receiving a call, but she is also allowing the artist to reach out to other people through her.
Price's head sculptures integrate ancient, classical, and neoclassical sculpture with modern representations, but this parallelism is replicated on the material scale. Materials and methods used in Greek and Roman statuary are indeed combined in his sculptures with 3D scanning and modelling to generate transhistorical forms.
For example, in "Numen (Shifting Votive 1, 2, 3)" (2016), a series of heads on marble columns, Price combines the traditional process of lost-wax casting with aluminium, a material more commonly associated with modern engineering; his "Icon Series" (2017) adopts gilding, a technique which dates to Ancient Egypt and hints at luxury and splendour, alongside 3D printing to create the casting molds.
Placed on quartzite plinths, the "Icons", lost in thought and with their gaze firmly focused on a point beyond the viewer, invite visitors to ponder about the current iconography and the unmediated immortalisation of triumphant figures.
Price's works can be defined as contemplative: their features are imagined as the artist assembled them by combining facial features of observed individuals and stereotypes represented in the media in a Dr Frankenstein-like exercise, with elements of classical and neoclassical sculptures. The head sculptures function as psychological portraits, prompting viewers to think about identity and socially learnt attitudes.
These themes are extended in "Power Object (Section 1, No.1)" (2018) and "Sonic Work (Collective Palette #01)" (2020/21), works characterised by shapes that evoke the dynamism of Umberto Boccioni or the aesthetic of 20th century Modernists à la Henry Moore and Anthony Caro.
Yet "Power Object" actually depicts the cross section of a groin of a male figure in jogging bottoms with an ambiguous object in a pocket.
With this work the artist asks viewers to consider the misinterpretation of Black male identity, the title itself revealing the racial disparity of Britain's stop and search policy, "Section 1, No.1".
The exhibition will also feature two films, "Man 10" (2012), a stop-motion animation focused on subtle shifts in facial expressions and movements that hint at the history of racialisation and at the complexities of deep social tensions, and "From the Ground Up" (2016), a two-channel work which presents the artist lacing and cleaning different pairs of shoes from a fixed bird's-eye view perspective. Working his way through an array of footwear, from white trainers to black leather shoes, Price explores themes of material culture and the value we place on objects, as well as the social cues they instigate.
The event at Hauser & Wirth - coinciding with "Witness" at Marcus Garvey Park with the Studio Museum Harlem, NY (until October 2022), as well as the installation of the sculpture "Reaching Out" at Chillida Leku, San Sebastian (on view until June 2022) - is dedicated to traditionalists who can appreciate the classical and technical skills behind Price's sculptures, and to art fans with more contemporary tastes, as the materials employed often hint at the digital age. But the most important thing about Price's ouvre is that all sorts of visitors to his exhibitions can contemplate the issues the works raise about race, class and identity and the social commentary provided by these pieces.
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