LONDON.- Kate MacGarry is presenting Francis Upritchard’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery, featuring figurative sculptures, ceramics, and fabric masks. Made for her recent show Any Noise Annoys an Oyster at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, the works weave together subtle references and connections to antiquity and the natural world.
Mythological references surface throughout the show. In Medusa, the gorgon’s snake hair is reimagined as writhing eels, while Sing Siren invokes the song of the mythic women who lured sailors. Upritchard draws freely on these archetypes, infusing them with a playful strangeness and emotional ambiguity. Made out of balata, a natural rubber that must be quickly manipulated into shape while submerged in water, they maintain a sense of urgency and visceral unpredictability.
As Upritchard notes, “The point is visual. The communication aspect is secondary. I try and embrace how incorrect memory can be. I’m working the material in reference to human bodies, but remembered human bodies. For me it’s quite important, the incorrect and the not looking just right or just so. Working with the rubber is certainly a chaotic process. It’s so fast, and you cannot control things.”
Upritchard often works across a range of scales, deliberately flattening hierarchies of size and status. Smaller sculptures and busts line various shelves, referencing yet also unsettling classical modes of display. The bust, a form rooted in Greek antiquity and revived during the Renaissance, is here reinterpreted with a contemporary lightness. The Shopper looks like a figure by Alberto Giacometti heading out on an errand. Ceramic vessels reference ancient forms such as vases, urns and jars and are glazed with scenes from Greek mythology. A collection of fabric masks hover between costume, relic, and puppet. They evoke the theatricality of ancient rituals or folk traditions while remaining unmoored from any specific culture.
Upritchard’s work continues to resist categorisation, drawing viewers into a web of subtle connections. It reflects the artist’s ongoing fascination with how the human figure can be abstracted or reassembled. The result is a quietly uncanny field of imagined figures and misremembered bodies in which the ancient and the invented coexist.
Francis Upritchard was born in 1976 in Ngāmotu / New Plymouth, Aotearoa / New Zealand and lives and works in London and Aotearoa / New Zealand. She was selected by the Art Gallery of New South Wales to undertake a large-scale commission, Here Comes Everybody, unveiled in 2022 outside the Naala Badu building at the new Sydney Modern, Australia. Her installations Save Yourself and Viva Arte Viva represented Aotearoa / New Zealand in the 53rd (2009) and 57th (2017) Venice Biennales.
Solo exhibitions include Any Noise Annoys An Oyster, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark (2024); A Loose Hold, Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel/Bienne, Switzerland (2022); Surf’n’Turf, Kate MacGarry, London, UK (2022); Paper, Creature, Stone, Christchurch Art Gallery, Aotearoa / New Zealand (2022); Big Fish Eat Little Fish, Museum Dhondt- Dhaenens, Belgium (2020); Wetwang Slack, The Curve, Barbican Centre, London, UK (2018); Francis Upritchard, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA (2014); Potato Poem, Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa, Japan (2013); A Long Wait, Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center, Ohio (2012) and A Hand of Cards, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK (2012).
