Neill Wright

Familiar unraveling, 2023

Acrylic on canvas, 70×60 cm

A different kind, 2023

Acrylic on canvas, 70×60 cm

This side of paradise, 2023

Acrylic on canvas, 120×120 cm
Biography
Neill Wright (1985, Johannesburg, South Africa)

 

Born in 1985 in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he currently lives and works. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2007. He was awarded the “Simon Gerson” prize for the exceptional quality of his artistic research. In 2009, he obtained a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Arts, specializing in printmaking, and in 2013, “The Times” named him one of the top 10 emerging South African artists to keep an eye on.

Wright explores various mediums of expression, including sculpture, printmaking, and painting, taking inspiration from the interconnected worlds of media, popular culture, politics, and social interactions. His bold, layered, and colorful work speaks of a curiosity and affection for the natural world, while the geographically impossible juxtapositions suggest the chaos of everyday life. His work has been featured in several solo exhibitions, including: “A New Solitude” at Everard Read, Johannesburg (2022); “The Atrophy and the Ecstasy” at Sulger-Buel Lovell Gallery, Cape Town (2015); “The Hilarity of Reality” at Circa on Jellicoe, Johannesburg (2013); “Spectacular but Empty” at The Lovell Gallery, Cape Town (2013); and “Protect Your Roots” at Salon91 Contemporary Art Collection, Cape Town (2011).

He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions in South Africa and England, including “Spring” at Everard Read, Johannesburg (2021); “Bronze, Steel, Stone” at Everard Read & Circa, Johannesburg (2015); and “Liberation un(masked)” at Sulger-Buel Lovell, London (2014).

Everything in its (Right) Place

Group Show- Everything in its (Right) Place

PRESS RELEASE

A.MORE gallery is pleased to announce “Everything in Its (Right) Place“, a group show with works by Thorbjørn Bechmann (1966, Copenhagen, Denmark), Pietro Campagnoli (1994, Turin), Andrea Fiorino (1990, Syracuse), Marty Schnapf (1977, Indiana, USA), and Neill Wright (1985, Johannesburg, South Africa), curated by Domenico de Chirico.

With the aim of safeguarding the question of identity, “Everything in Its (Right) Place” reflects on complex issues such as freedom and authenticity, both generally antithetical to control. It seeks to investigate the often discordant and sometimes deceitful relationship between the body and space, between forms of knowledge and power, between naturalness and human intervention, and between behavior and attitude in relation to the paradoxical concepts of utopia and heterotopia, or ideal and real. Based on these premises, this composite collective exhibition intends to outline a new path for all citizens, especially free thinkers and ecstatic creatives, that aims to create a place where they can first meet and then confront each other, enabling a calm process of rethinking and firmly designing a new and thriving urban regeneration, infused with ideally gentle and sincere human relationships that wisely support eco-sustainability and everything favorable to the proliferation of education, introspection, interconnections, and culture.

Therefore, “Everything in Its (Right) Place” is composed as follows: Thorbjørn Bechmann, with his non-representational painting, explores issues of process and representation through visibly abstract languages. The central concerns of his artistic practice revolve around communication, sensitivity, and a specifically non-representational language where thoughts are articulated through the artist’s hands and eyes. In doing so, his works, conceived as blurred visual memories, are oriented towards the perpetual process of experience and transformation, skillfully layered with a heterogeneous multitude of colors, shades, and shadows, ultimately reaching an ideal stage known as “transparency”. Pietro Campagnoli investigates, through his lyrical and granulated sculpture, the fragility of the human figure and the surrounding objects. In the sophisticated attempt to represent the bodily form of animated and inanimate beings, devoid of any identity, his sculptures are true casts, imprints, and impressions of everything that is part of his vital, sensitive, and tactile hemisphere, an august metaphor for the artist’s own impossibility of accessing and understanding the most hidden aspects of the other. In Andrea Fiorino‘s painterly work, frames from gentle dreams and stormy conflicts alternate, images of sometimes rediscovered, sometimes lost objects, postcards of returning dancing loves, and poses of solitary figures. His disjointed painting is defined by an incisive and rough mark that often distinguishes it, constantly in harmony with rich, contrasting, pasty, and always vibrant colors. Definable as pure “joie de vivre,” through his exploration, he wants to share his experiences as if in a game with an immediate dialogue with images that continually return and blend, echoing one another. The delicate and unsettling works of Marty Schnapf evoke the ephemeral, sensual, and psychological space of dreams, desire, memory, and premonition. Structurally dematerialized environments surround and penetrate the amiably superimposed or thoughtful figures, animating his paintings in complete solitude. Through the displacement and dissolution of compositional elements, Schnapf addresses the question of the instant not only as it is but also as it could be. In this way, his work acknowledges the multiple possibilities of the so-called simultaneity. Schnapf weaves complex and layered works that evoke an immediate and ever-evolving psychological impact. The multidisciplinary and empirical Neill Wright explores various mediums such as sculpture, printmaking, and painting, considering them harmoniously as modes of expression, drawing inspiration from a variety of sources within his lived real-life experience. The bold, layered, and colorful work speaks of curiosity and love for the natural world in relation to the inherent chaos of everyday life. Abstract and representational elements coexist in a seductive yet threatening manner, evoking both jubilation and terror inherent in the unknown.