Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Mapping the Middle, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles artist Erin Wright. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and in New York City. On view at 372 Broadway from September 5 through October 18, an opening reception will take place on Friday, September 5 from 6-8 pm.
In this focused suite, structure, surface, and perception converge in a rigorous examination of domestic architecture. Executed at near one-to-one scale and developed iteratively, each canvas builds on the last through the precise and rule-bound logic of architectural drafting. Largely evacuated of personal gesture, particular details admit moments of intimacy and observation from the artist’s daily life, her son seated at the threshold of a glass door, her wife’s bare feet standing at the top of the staircase, a neighborhood cat napping on a skylight. For Wright, ‘the middle’ names the domestic threshold, the “literal thickness where interior and exterior find common ground. At the edge of buildings, intimacy and exposure meet to form a zone of transition.”
The compositions begin on the floor as pink-pencil drawings and progress through a multilayered spray process, finished with delicate brushwork detailing. Isometric projection organizes the compositions, distinct not only for its diagrammatic accuracy, but also for its conceptual implications of non-hierarchical order. There are no vanishing points, no figures elevated above the painting’s ground. Wright articulates headers, sills, reveals, and seams with tectonic clarity. The resulting paintings are contemplative stages, neither interior nor exterior, neither fully flat nor illusionistically deep, recasting assumptions of indoor-outdoor California life as questions of domestic solitude, sightlines, and civilization’s relationship to nature. In Wright’s terms, the middle is “the threshold between dreams and things.”
Wright treats the American house as subject and instrument, drawing focus on thresholds, apertures, and finishes—tiles, blinds, curtains, skylights, stair tread. Surface is rendered with industrial calm that traces a lineage to art historical genres such as Precisionism’s measured geometries and the cool scrutiny of Photorealism. Specified materiality: woodgrain, stucco, hardware, and powder coated metal recall architectural visualization and product photography as much as studio painting. The house is a catalogue of discreet parts. Painted nearly to the edge, Wright leaves a fractional border around the compositions reinforcing the idea of the two-dimensional display. These are images as spec sheets, as propositions.
Wright’s specific color palette binds these paintings in a single climate. Blushes, warm wood, greens—bleached or rich—circulate from canvas to canvas as they shift from ornamental notation to optical field. Throughout, viewers are taken through the technologies of seeing: frames emphasize, shadows diagram, reflections and window frosting suggest filters and screens. Eschewing the heroic author, the signature mark, Wright tests how the removal of the personal gesture opens a door for projection and presence. Together, these paintings are devices for looking and reveling in the private delight it enables.
