For ‘Resilience of Scale,’ his first major solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in New York, British artist Thomas J Price will present five towering bronze figures and a large-scale photographic work comprising 18 separate framed images in the gallery’s SoHo location. Together, the works amplify traditionally marginalized bodies and redress structures of hierarchy, inviting questions about who we chose to celebrate in art. ‘Resilience of Scale’ presents an environment where mobility is truly felt: viewers will be able to move through the space to engage with the works directly and from all vantage points, positioning themselves within the artist’s narrative rather observing from a detached distance.
Soaring to heights as great as 12 feet and installed directly on the floor, Price’s bronzes honor everyday people by granting them the grand scale and material finish long central to Western traditions of monument making, a genre and medium historically reserved for members of the social, economic and cultural elite. In the work titled ‘A Place Beyond’ (2025), Price takes this notion even further by using a golden bronze alloy, a color which has deep cultural significance across many traditions––from ancient Egypt to modern-day consumer culture––representing wealth and prestige. Each of the works’ fictional identities are composites derived from images and people observed on the street, in magazines and at open call castings. Constructed using digital sculpting and lost-wax casting techniques, these figures often don casual clothing and stand in deliberately casual poses, seemingly lost in their own thoughts, unbothered by the viewers over whom they soar. Through this combination of operatic scale, laudatory medium and quotidian subject, Price challenges the longstanding aesthetic conventions that underpin representations of power.
The artist’s photographs likewise draw attention to the ways in which historical institutions—typically regarded as arbiters of truth—have limited society’s understanding of and openness to socioeconomic mobility for all. Hand Arrangement (The Complex Journeys of a Simple Form) is comprised of a grid of individual photographs depicting different versions of Price’s own hands interacting with images of classical sculptures. Here the artist creates new compositions––and thus also new contexts for interpretation––by selectively covering or manipulating parts of the pages of the book he is examining, extending the artist’s investigation of identity, provenance and implied context beyond sculpture. Through this conceptual intervention, Price invites viewers to engage with a narrative that is both personal and critical of the conventions that have historically shaped art and culture.
About the Artist
Thomas J Price
Thomas J Price’s multidisciplinary practice confronts preconceived attitudes towards representation and identity, foregrounding the intrinsic value of the individual and subverting structures of hierarchy. Celebrated for his large-scale figurative sculptures, Price draws our attention to the psychological embodiment of his fictional characters, highlighting nuanced understandings of social signifiers and predetermined value. Amalgamated from multiple sources, the works are developed through a hybrid approach of traditional sculpting and intuitive digital technology. Price balances methods of presentation, material and scale to challenge our expectations and provide cues for deeper human connection. He encompasses historic constructs with a newness that at first glance can go unnoticed, but that live in the public realm as silent totems for change.
Price’s practice extends beyond a strategy of figuration, harnessing the narrative power of performance, film, photography, animation and abstract sculpture consistently throughout his career. The poignant early performance work, ‘Licked’ (2001), features Price repeatedly licking the inside of a room, conceived as an expression of humanity, a desire to make the internal visible, of becoming a part of a place and its physical, material history. The artist’s presence continues in ‘Sonic Work (Collective Palette #1)’ (2020), an abstract bronze sculpture in which Price has cast the inside of his own ear. Although not immediately identifiable, the work seeks to capture the invisible space between the outside world and our innermost thoughts, calling into question how we translate what we experience into our perception of the world around us.
Price compels the viewer to consider how and why things are made, embedding references to ancient, classical and neoclassical sculpture alongside a sophisticated understanding of the symbolic power of materials. In ‘Head 18’ (2017), Price intentionally exposes the seamline of the plaster to reveal the process of casting, commenting on the relationship and ownership between artist and artefact. Sculptures of polished bronze and marble are luxurious and monumental, appearing to be rooted in the canon of 20th Century sculpture, yet the line of conceptual enquiry challenges our awareness of current iconography and the unmediated immortalisation of triumphant figures. In ‘Numen (Shifting Votive 1, 2, 3)’ (2016), Price combines the traditional process of lost-wax casting with aluminium, a material more commonly associated with modern engineering, to present a series of emblematic heads raised to eye-level on marble columns. The works set out to challenge traditional holders of power, to question provenance and instead bind one human experience to another in a manner that feels inclusive.
Born in 1981, Price lives and works in London. He studied at Chelsea College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London and has held solo exhibitions at institutions including: The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada; The National Portrait Gallery, London, UK; the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, UK; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; Kunsthalle Krems, Austria; and Kunsthal Rotterdam, Netherlands. Price’s work is held in collections such as the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; Brooklyn Museum, New York NY; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York NY; and The Legacy Museum, Montgomery AL. Price was the recipient of the Arts Council England Helen Chadwick Fellowship in 2009.
Price was commissioned by Hackney Council to create the first permanent public sculptures to celebrate the contribution of the Windrush generation and their descendants in the UK, unveiled in June 2022. His solo presentation, ‘Witness’, in collaboration with The Studio Museum in Harlem was on view in Marcus Garvey Park from 2021 – 2022.
Current Exhibitions
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