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. There is awe here, and revulsion. It is a confrontation with the vulnerable materiality we all share.
notes curator Martin J Tickner.
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.
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.
Thomas D Wright, A Corporeal God, 23rd May – 1st June 2025 Gallery 46
PRIVATE VIEW Thursday 22nd May 2025 6PM – 9.30PM
About the artist
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 Gursky, Wright’s unique history and approach gives you images that speak to the body as well as the mind.
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
