‘A Corporeal God’
Thomas D Wright
Between tenderness and brutality, capturing both the technical grace of the human hand and the raw physicality of the body laid bare.
“In a world increasingly mediated by screens and disembodied experience, these works bring us abruptly, almost rudely, back into the body,” notes artistic Director / curator Martin J Tickner. “There is awe here, and revulsion. It is a confrontation with the vulnerable materiality we all share.”Through Wright’s lens and brush alike, the clinical space becomes a stage where life, death, and intervention meet in a strange and compelling ballet. Surgeons are portrayed mid-operation: gloved hands buried in flesh, faces obscured by masks, expressions focused to the point of abstraction.
OPENING / PV
Thursday 22 May 2025
6 – 9.30
Supported by
www.plexarinteriors.com
CUSTOM ART PRINTS
EXHIBITION
23 May – 1st June 2025
Daily
12 – 6 pm
TICKNER BELL YOUNG & LEBENSON
GALLERY46
46 ASHFIELD STREET
LONDON
E1 2AJ
Dates
Exhibition Dates
22nd May – 1st June 2025
Daily
12 – 6pm
CLOSED
Monday
Please check insta for any changes
Artists
Thomas D Wright
It is with an inbuilt fascination of medical imagery that Thomas D Wright’s practice revolves around, the historic and symbiotic relationship between art and medicine. His research has led him to St. Bartholomew’s hospital, London where he attends cardiac surgeries, documenting the experiences through photography and sound, capturing the profound intensity of the operating theatre, which he translates into paintings that blend both qualitative and quantitative observations.
The visual language draws inspiration from a lifelong passion for the baroque, the opulent beauty of the Renaissance, and the limitless realms of surrealism. His work explores themes of the temporality, and fragility of life, self-destruction and rebirth. Blending this his own contemporary insights and life encounters, to create a distinctive and unique artistic style.
His work primarily in oils, blending bold expressive mark making with pockets of graphic detail, playing with both sympathetic and parasympathetic imagery. He considers the works, both photographs and paintings, to resemble abstract poetry that creates thought provoking possibilities.
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Emerging from the underground creative scene, RCA MA Painting graduate Thomas D Wright creates emotionally charged work that reflects a world shaped by personal experience and raw introspection. With a background spanning tattooing, rave DJ and producer, Wright delves into themes of medicine, addiction, self-destruction, and rebirth, weaving these with a long-standing fascination for surgical imagery.
As an observer of cardiac surgeries at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, he merges clinical reality with painterly invention, producing bold, visceral oil paintings finding the beauty in the grotesque. Heavily in influenced by the essence of baroque religious painting, Francis Bacon and Andreas Gurskey, Wright’s unique history and approach gives you images that speak to the body as well as the mind.
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Exhibitions
‘PURGE’ – Group exhibition, THE PAVILION CLUB, Knightsbridge, 2024
‘SUMMER EXHIBITION’, ROYAL ACADEMY, London, 2023
‘StArt’, SAATCHI Gallery, 2021 and 2022
Solo Exhibitions
‘FEAR AND SALVATION’, MOLASSES HOUSE Gallery, Harpenden, 2024
ECLECTIC Gallery, London, 2021
Projects
Surgical photography at St. Bartholomew’s hospital, two photobooks published
‘LUNGS OFF’* Volume I, Volume II – purchased by the Wellcome Collection Library, 2024
*words spoken before a procedure
Thomas D Wright studied
MA Painting, Royal College of Art, 2023
BA Hons Illustration and Visual Media (1st Class), 2018 LCC/UAL
He lives and works in London
Information
There is a particular kind of stillness that exists within the violence of precision. In ‘A Corporeal God’, Thomas D Wright’s forthcoming solo exhibition at GALLERY46, the artist turns his unflinching eye toward the operating theatre—rendering, in large-scale paintings and haunting photographic works, a visceral meditation on the choreography of surgery.
Through Wright’s lens and brush alike, the clinical space becomes a stage where life, death, and intervention meet in a strange and compelling ballet. Surgeons are portrayed mid-operation: gloved hands buried in flesh, faces obscured by masks, expressions focused to the point of abstraction. The images oscillate between tenderness and brutality, capturing both the technical grace of the human hand and the raw physicality of the body opened and laid bare.
Wright, whose background straddles both the aesthetic and the anatomical, approaches his subject matter with neither sensationalism nor sentimentality. Instead, he constructs a visual language that is at once documentary and painterly — pulling from traditions of medical illustration, classical figuration, and contemporary realism. The photographs are uncomfortably intimate; the paintings, monumental and immersive, draw the viewer into the stark ritualism of clinical procedure.
‘A Corporeal God’ continues GALLERY46’s commitment to presenting challenging and conceptually rigorous contemporary practice. Occupying two floors of the East London townhouse gallery, the exhibition offers a rare and compelling insight into the theatre of modern medicine — one where aesthetics and ethics meet under surgical light.