Thomas J Price

For his first solo exhibition in Switzerland, titled ‘The Space Between’, Price presents a selection of small and large-scale sculpture spanning two decades, alongside two of his film works that show another dimension of his practice. The exhibition is an exploration into the artist’s long-established preoccupation with ancient traditions of monumental sculpture, alongside an intrinsic understanding of the symbolic power and hierarchy held in materials.

Price refers to his fictional subjects as psychological portraits of the viewer: ‘The viewer brings themselves to the works, they bring their understandings, their schemas, their set of values which they use to navigate the world around them’. His figures and heads are amalgamations of various sources, from observed individuals and stereotypes represented in the media, to references to ancient, classical, and neoclassical sculptures. Materials and methods used in Greek and Roman statuary are combined with 3D scanning and modelling to generate transhistorical forms. 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.

This theme is extended in new modes of display within both ‘Power Object (Section 1, No.1)’ (2018) and ‘Sonic Work (Collective Palette #01)’ (2020/21). The two distinctly abstract bronze works share an aesthetic of 20th century modern masters, critiquing an art historical canon that has contributed to the misinterpretation of Black male identity. At first appearing as an abstract monument on a Carrara marble plinth, ‘Power Object (Section 1, No.1)’ depicts the cross section of a groin of a male figure in jogging bottoms. Price considers whether this object is projecting power, or rather subjected to it. The title itself reveals the racial disparity of Britain’s stop and search policy, ‘Section 1, No.1’.

Harnessing the narrative power of performance, film and animation have been a consistent element throughout the artist’s career to date. ‘Man 10’ (2012), a stop-motion animation, demonstrates an early desire to respond to the history of racialisation and magnifies the complexities of deep social tensions. Drawing upon his own lived experience and commonplace observations, Price elevates our awareness of unconscious forms of communication through subtle shifts in facial expressions and movements.