For Resilience of Scale, his first major solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in New York, British artist Thomas J Price will present five towering bronze figures and a large-scale photographic work comprising 18 separate framed images in the gallery’s SoHo location.
Together, the works amplify traditionally marginalized bodies and redress structures of hierarchy, inviting questions about who we chose to celebrate in art. Resilience of Scale presents an environment where mobility is truly felt: viewers will be able to move through the space to engage with the works directly and from all vantage points, positioning themselves within the artist’s narrative rather observing from a detached distance.
Soaring to heights as great as 12 feet and installed directly on the floor, Price’s bronzes honor everyday people by granting them the grand scale and material finish long central to Western traditions of monument making, a genre and medium historically reserved for members of the social, economic and cultural elite. In the work titled ‘A Place Beyond’ (2025), Price takes this notion even further by using a golden bronze alloy, a color which has deep cultural significance across many traditions––from ancient Egypt to modern-day consumer culture––representing wealth and prestige. Each of the works’ fictional identities are composites derived from images and people observed on the street, in magazines and at open call castings. Constructed using digital sculpting and lost-wax casting techniques, these figures often don casual clothing and stand in deliberately casual poses, seemingly lost in their own thoughts, unbothered by the viewers over whom they soar. Through this combination of operatic scale, laudatory medium and quotidian subject, Price challenges the longstanding aesthetic conventions that underpin representations of power.
The artist’s photographs likewise draw attention to the ways in which historical institutions—typically regarded as arbiters of truth—have limited society’s understanding of and openness to socioeconomic mobility for all. ‘Hand Arrangement (The Complex Journeys of a Simple Form)’ is comprised of a grid of individual photographs depicting different versions of Price’s own hands interacting with images of classical sculptures. Here the artist creates new compositions––and thus also new contexts for interpretation––by selectively covering or manipulating parts of the pages of the book he is examining, extending the artist’s investigation of identity, provenance and implied context beyond sculpture. Through this conceptual intervention, Price invites viewers to engage with a narrative that is both personal and critical of the conventions that have historically shaped art and culture.
Concurrent with Resilience in Scale in SoHo, Times Square Arts will present Thomas J Price’s massive bronze figure, ‘Grounded in the Stars’ (2023) in Times Square, at Broadway and 46th Street, from April 29 to June 17, 2025. Price’s stop-motion animations from his ‘Man Series,’ will also be presented on over 90 of the Times Square district’s billboards nightly from 11:57pm to 12am, from May 1 – 31, 2025 as a part of the Midnight Moment program.
