NATASHA WRIGHT

A Place To Stand

The show includes a collection of expressive oil paintings and works on paper completed in New York during quarantine in 2020 - a period that has now become synonymous with flux and transition. 

Wright completed her MFA in 2018, sighting Canadian American painter Philip Guston (1913-1980) as one of her biggest influences - “We shared the same studio at the original sight of the Whitney Museum and his commitment to painting is a lineage I’m interested in carrying forward.”

Wright’s paintings critique the representation of women throughout history, incorporating a wide range of inspiration to create her own personal narrative. References to The Three Graces, ancient fertility goddesses, Matryoshka dolls and contemporary culture from advertisements and the pages of fashion magazines often weave their way into Wright’s paintings. 

The paintings are rooted in the body, but take on abstract forms and shapes. Through painterly exploration, Wright has developed her own iconic language and emblematic representation of the female form. In A Place To Stand 1, the schematic structure of the painting suggests both the form of a vessel and the feminine X chromosome.

The artist’s fascination with materials can be seen in the haptic surfaces she builds up. Paintings will often combine a wide range of materials such as mica, glass beads, sand and black magnum. In this series, Wright uses a paired back pallet of rich golds, earth tones and a variety of different blacks.  

The paintings have a playful openness and confidence that can be seen in the linear forms that emerge intuitively. Monochromatic lines often bring figures into sharp focus; the women Wright paints balance both the grotesque and the beautiful. They are not naive to the history and male subjectivity they inherit, claiming their space to discover who they are on their own terms.