The Concept Of Sculpture: Thomas J Price “Beyond Measure” At Hauser & Wirth DTLA

Thomas J Price’s “Beyond Measure,” is the first comprehensive solo exhibition in the United States of the British-born London-based sculptor, exhibiting his large-scale bronze figures made for the LA exhibition, as well as a series of marble heads, a shelf of smaller heads, a more abstract golden sculpture, a painting, and an artwork composed of a series of photographic prints.

As you enter the South Gallery at Hauser & Wirth in Downtown Los Angeles you are confronted with an array of larger-than-life- figures, 9 to 12 feet tall, displayed in the gallery’s columned rectangular space at angles to each other so that you need to navigate between and around them. Four of the sculptures are of Black women, dressed casually; a fifth is of a young Black man, in a double-breasted suit and dress shoes.

Although Price’s sculptures look like real people, they are not literal portraits. Price held casting sessions in LA where individuals were interviewed, photographed and in some cases 3D-scanned. Using a combination of modern technology that allows for precision carving and rapid manufacture, and traditional techniques to work the surface details, Price then created amalgams – “Fictional people depicting real moments,” as he calls it.

Although the standing figures are made of bronze, Price has covered them in a chemical black patina he formulated that looks almost like a plastic or rubber resin coating, adding to the feeling that we are looking at a captured moment, frozen in time and place. In creating the sculptures, Price is challenging himself, asking: How can we use technology to see more? To create a psychological moment? In a sense, these five figures are our guides, our Virgils if you will, leading us in Price’s artistic inquiry.

Two of the female figures stand with their hands on their hips, two are holding their phones. They appear self-possessed. Apart from the young woman in the sculpture, “A Place Beyond,” whose attention seems held by something in the distance, they are not looking at the viewer or in any direct way engaging the viewer.

By contrast, the sculpture of the young man, “A Kind of Confidence,” betrays a certain anxiety.

“It’s all about his shoes basically,” Price said, laughing. “The suit fits. But he’s not so sure. And that’s [the] flex in the title. I think that’s also because I worked for a long time with the idea of vulnerability being actually a strength.” The question is: How is he inhabiting the space he is in? Does he feel lesser than others? Does he feel he is being judged?

“It’s really about seeing, isn’t it?” Price said to me, as we walked among the Greek and Roman sculptures of the Getty Villa Malibu where I had asked Price to meet me, because as contemporary as his work is, in both subject and manufacture, his sculptures are engaged in conversation with antiquity.

Price was born and raised in London. As a child, his mother took him often to museums such as the National Gallery and The British Museum where he was enamored of the art and often brought a sketchpad. He attended the prestigious Chelsea College of Art as well as the Royal College of Art, both in London.

When I asked Price about his experience at art school, he said: “I had teachers that were very kind to me. But to be honest, when I started to work with the figure, it was not cool,” he said, laughing. “That generation had rejected figuration.”

In 2004, for a student show, Price was given a large wall to exhibit one of his pieces. What Price ended up showing was a work he called, “Mixed Feelings about Bus Drivers,” a very small plaster bust of a head of a Black man, on a plinth of cheap wood fastened to the wall with just one screw, taking up a small fraction of the space allotted him.

Price recalls the reaction at the time, as “What?” “That’s when I realized that I’m seeing the significance that is being missed here,” Price told me, and that he needed “to keep working that space.” Price realized that because the conceptual space his work was engaging in was not interesting to the art school establishment, it was a space he could inhabit and make his own. “I hadn’t realized exactly how but at the time I was just instinctively like, that’s interesting. So, I just poured myself into it.” That work now sits at the far end of the gallery at Hauser & Wirth, an unobtrusive Rosetta stone to the current exhibition, launching the investigations central to Beyond Measure, such as:

Who takes up space? Who is valued? What is their worth? Why are some people more valued than others? Who is considered a hero? What does heroic look like – or as the Blackgama fur campaign articulated it long ago: What becomes a legend? And, as Price put it, “What kind of role do Portraits and Sculpture play…What is a monument and what is monumental?” What gives an object, or a person for that matter, status?”

At the Getty Villa, Price marveled at the building’s harmonious architectural proportions, with its columned walkways, interior courtyard and the Wow! factor when one first exits to the garden. Price was particularly taken by how the Romans were able to use perspective to direct the eyes to certain elements of the reflecting pool and gardens.

Price remarked that his sculptures were installed in the gallery downtown in such a way that the columns there, like those at the Getty Villa, “create the same sense of distance… so you can be confronted by scale.”

Price doesn’t really think of himself as a figurative sculptor because he is creating abstract characters and the issues he confronts in making the sculpture, the materials, the details, even the negative space created in the crook of an arm or how a head is poised – all of those are abstractions to Price.

To Price, his sculptures are about rhythm. “It’s about what you take out, or what do I add in that creates [a] surface rhythm that builds….” Price added that, “I love playing with the levels of detail — where it happens and where it doesn’t happen.” Negative space, he said, is ” so charged for me. There’s something so powerful, dramatic, in that potential, in that space.”

At the Getty Villa, there was a bust of a man wearing a toga whose folds were amazingly rendered – I had the same feeling looking at the folds in the pants of the young man’s suit in Price’s sculpture. Looked at closely, the details in Price’s work do almost become abstract sculptures unto themselves.

This is all the more true for the marble heads in the exhibition. The marble heads all have a vacant look: The pupils in their eyes are all hollowed out. “I want us to fill them… I want us to project ourselves into the works, to complete that last bit of where they’re looking…” At the same time, one can really see the fine hand-detailing Price carves in making the figures’ hair in particular, which are like abstract compositions of their own.

In the Upstairs gallery loft, Price has placed one of his “Power object” sculptures. Covered in gold, it looks like an amoeba-like amorphous shape, not unlike a mini-Henry Moore sculpture. However, Price confessed that of all the pieces in the exhibition it is the most documentary, as it is an actual cast of the inside of his ear, that he then turned on its side. The series is called “Power Object” because it refers to the power of gold, but also the power of listening. Listening and being heard, and speaking and not being heard and the absence of power when you must listen – for example under Britain’s Section One law, their version of “Stop and Frisk” which grants Police power over Black men, for which they have to listen – or face consequences.

Similarly, among the works on exhibit at Hauser is a painting Price made that is the first in a series. The canvas looks like a series of broad brushstrokes, totally abstract – but in fact it is actually a diagram, dictated by where the eye lands on a picture and how it reads it.

Finally, along the wall of the entryway is an assemblage of 18 photographic prints that together form a series called “Hand Arrangement (The Complex Journeys of a Simple Form). In 2010, Price was awarded a Helen Chadwick Fellowship and spent four months at the British School at Rome, where he spent a great deal of time in their library, looking through their great books of classical sculpture.

Price recalled that he was often making copies or taking pictures of images that struck him. When he saw his own hand holding the page in one of the images, it inspired him to create this series, where we see Price’s arms and hands interacting with the pages of the art books: Completing, framing, and finally becoming the gesture present in the work. The series questions the meaning of provenance; and how importance and identity are validated. By placing his own hands in the frame, Price is asserting his own place intervening, and, in a greater sense, in continuing and extending the classical tradition.

Looking at the 18 images on the wall, and then to the standing figures and busts both large and small pf Price’s work, I felt suddenly a moment of displacement, of transport, as if we were still wandering in the Getty Villa.