Triptych: Mais Mais Wright Wright

Image: Jessica Mais Wright
Immemor
(detail), 2004-2008, oil paint and enamel on canvas, 250 x 200 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Dusseldorf

 

This unique exhibition features the work of one family: Hilarie Mais, Bill Wright and their daughter Jessica Mais Wright. While each of these artists has formulated their own vision, this exhibition highlights the similarities and differences in their art, illustrating how the family unit has influenced the creative process.

The format of Hilarie Mais’ most recent work both contradicts and extends her long-term investigation via the Grid of the relationships between literal, perceived and layered space. In essence these works are truly ‘Primary Structures’ but in a new developmental sense within Mais’ oeuvre, a form of Abstraction made actual through its interaction with the two hard-wired species survival spheres, the human Gestalt – the perception of nature – and the generative unitary system within all nature, Growth.

Bill Wright’s works of the last fifteen years are both rectilinear and shaped panels that have such a density of surface that they manifest equally as objects as they do as paintings. Tacitly socio-critical while primarily concerned with the poetics of light and seeing, they are rich with foreboding and mnemonic after-images; it has been said that they contain all the colours of darkness.

Jessica Mais Wright’s aesthetic is intimately concerned with the provocative role of materiality, of paint and its support media. In her work liquid paint is manoeuvred and orchestrated to make a vibrant shallow space of mysterious veils and edges. Rejecting illusionism for a sensual actionist process Mais Wright speaks of her work as a conversation between convergent forces, of the object as a record of the artist’s presence, ” the painting bears the trace of the artist, it does not act as a signifier.”