Grace Wright: Enchanted Ecstasy

WHEN AUCKLAND-BASED artist Grace Wright travelled to New York for the first time, she kept returning to Albert Oehlen’s Home and Garden exhibition at the New Museum. Struck by the German painter’s command of colour and form, Wright felt his work “contained a kind of exultation of gesture, a tension and release in the composition.”

The same can be said about Wright’s paintings. Choosing to work predominantly on an expansively large scale, Wright’s brush-strokes are expressive and generous with movement, sweeping grandly across her surfaces in opulent hues. While her flowing abstract style speaks to modernity, the scale and soaring compositional arrangements of Wright’s paintings recall majestic Baroque theatrics and the incandescent colour palettes of cathedral frescoes. Allusions to the masculine and feminine are also present. “Painting on a monumental scale is usually associated with masculine values,” she explains. “I aim to subvert this, creating work that is bold and unapologetic, while also fully embracing its vibrant feminine attraction and visual pleasure.”

The rhythm inherent in Wright’s gestural marks speaks to the physical labour involved in creating such large works. Initially trained as a musician and contemporary dancer, in addition to her visual arts practice, Wright plays bass guitar, drums and piano. This blend of creative experience informs the way she moves paint across her images, bring- ing together layers of colour in harmonious chorus. Wright’s current style is a departure from earlier paintings where she focused on breaking down architectural forms into abstracted line and shape. Encouraged to experiment while studying at Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts, Wright was prompted by a supervisor to begin exploring representations of the body – not from photographs but from a sensory and subjective point of view.

“The real turning point for how my work looks now was in my fourth year at Elam when I began depicting a sense of the body,” says Wright. “I put aside reference images and started painting the feeling of what I was trying to express. Suddenly these coiling, curving gestures came out and started weaving and interlocking. I was really excited by this new way of working as it felt like it had its own language, a painting language.”