The Kunsthalle Krems is dedicating the British artist Thomas J Price (b. 1981 in London) the first exhibition in Europe outside his home country.
Price’s multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, animation, photography and painting. In his figurative sculptures, he confronts preconceived attitudes towards representation and identity, foregrounding the intrinsic value of the individual and subverting structures of hierarchy.
Many of the works are created in a multi-stage process using a hybrid approach of traditional sculpture and intuitive digital technology. His sculptures are not depictions of real people but fictional "everyday heroes", as he calls them. The artist's aim is to provide cues for a deeper human connection. He is interested in how we individually interpret the world and perceive each other in society, without differentiating and categorizing.
From Price’s early performance work Licked (2001), conceived as an expression of presence in absence, he has pursued a line of conceptual enquiry into what it means to become literally a part of a place and its physical material history – A Matter of Place.
In public spaces, Thomas J Price presents his monumental sculptures without pedestals to distinguish them from heroic monuments, instead they stand on floor-level in direct relationship with the viewer. The large-scale sculpture Reaching Out (2020) will be placed in front of the Kunsthalle Krems. With the work, which depicts a young woman looking at her cell phone, Price balances between experiences of isolation and connectedness in a modern age.
Curator: Florian Steininger
Wir haben die Gelegenheit, eine Gesellschaft mit stärkerem Zusammenhalt zu schaffen, wenn wir sie denn ergreifen wollen. Schreiben wir das derzeitige System der Auswahl historischer Gestalten als Repräsentanten von Werten, denen wir nachstreben sollten, weiter fort? Oder suchen wir nach den Gemeinsamkeiten, die wir alle haben, und begrüßen Darstellungen derer, die bisher stigmatisiert oder unsichtbar waren?