Eerie landscapes as revisited by a London-based artist playing memory games with his hometown, the prophetically named Mt. Gilead, Ohio.
Behold This Heap (2020), oil on canvas
[ID: image shows an oil painting of a heap of stones set up on a cliff edge in a rocky mountain range. There is a crack in the rock below the heap. Across the crack is written in the ground the word ‘MIZPAH’]
PRIVATE VIEW: Wednesday 8th September, 6-9pm
RVSP essential
Exhibition continues until 9th Oct 2021, Tue - Sat 12-6pm
*PLEASE NOTE: The exhibition will be closed at 5pm on Friday September 17th and Saturday September 18th due to events taking place in the gallery space.
The Horse Hospital is delighted to announce a new exhibition by artist Eric Wright. Featuring over fifty paintings, Ohio Lands: Heap of Testimony is a fervent investigation of a place half-remembered and half-remade by fantasy - both the artist's own and those protruding, live and dead, from the past. Saturated with recycled tropes and styles of ‘the American weird’ as well as traditional landscape painting and a particular folk-tinted postmodernism, the eerie and desolate US landscapes appear as revisited by a London-based artist playing memory games with his hometown, the prophetically named Mt. Gilead, Ohio.
Mapping myth onto familiar territory, Eric Wright re-imagines his native patch of Ohio, USA. Mount Gilead is a small town of 3,661 souls in the centre of the state. The biblical Gilead, or “heap [of stones] of Testimony”, is ubiquitous in the Old Testament but mostly as a backdrop upon which history passed through, rather than a specific origin or location of any major events, say like Jerusalem or Jericho. A location in the Midwest for the miraculous, without the pressure of having to live up to anything in particular.
The artist is taking a second pass at history, and he “re-biblicizes” his subject matter with meticulous detail. The forbidding crags, sudden drops and heroic vistas he paints in oil on canvas don’t seem native to Ohio, but in fact it’s an inscrutable mix of conjured up locations and actual sites from his past. Wright’s illuminations are mountains, pastures, and fields, with tasseled banners floating in mid-air inscribed with their borrowed ancient names. These are simple landscapes in composition, that seem the typical fare of storybooks and epic poems. But they are also records and retellings accrued human stories emanating from a specific place, Mt. Gilead, growing more exaggerated over the generations. Ohio Land’s narrative is about this accumulative process, and the trajectory from normal life into legend.
-William Corwin
Eric Wright
Born Mt. Gilead, Ohio, Wright lived in NY in the 1980s where his painting techniques were influenced by the TV maestro Bob Ross. His work has been curated by Paul Noble at City Racing Gallery, Stephen Friedman Gallery (London UK) and Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s ‘Life/Live’ at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (Paris, FR). Collaborative exhibitions with Cathy Ward include PS1/MoMA (NY USA); ‘Transromantik’, Chamber of Pop Culture, The Horse Hospital (London UK); Mercer Union (Toronto CA); ‘Destiny Manifest’ at Southwark Park Galleries (London UK) and ‘Tender Vessels’ at Aspex Gallery (Portsmouth UK). His landscapes and portraits of country and western stars are found in collections in Europe and Nashville including that of George Jones. This will be Wright’s second show at The Horse Hospital, London’s longest-running underground gallery.