Wishing Well by Gwenn Thomas, Nikolai Nekh and Gonçalo Pena

For Immediate Release

Figura Avulsa is delighted to present Wishing Well, showing recent and new works by Gwenn Thomas, Nikolai Nekh and Gonçalo Pena, opening Saturday July 22, 5-8pm.

The exhibition brings together paintings, sculptural objects, a photograph — that happen to triangulate wishes around an old well, a Figura Avulsa’s architectural trait. Somehow, and with some distance it now feels that we’ve pulled the works out of this magical, liquid, resonating and dark non-space, as the show revealed itself.

Gwenn Thomas is an artist who lives and works in New York City. She studied at the Sorbonne, Paris and is a graduate of the Cooper Union School of Art, New York.
Thomas's work exists in a space between sculpture, painting and photography. Her object sculptures of awnings, windows, doorways and rooms — exterior and interior architectural spaces — initiate a back and forth between looking out and looking in. Her most recent series of works are part urban landscape, part abstraction and part found object (objet trouvé). Recent solo shows: Exile Gallery, Vienna, Mélange; ung-5, Cologne, Germany; Exile Gallery, Berlin, Germany; Southfirst, Brooklyn, NY; Regina Rex, NY; 57W57 ARTS, NY; Art Projects International, NY; Point of Contact Gallery, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY.
Recent two-person and group group shows: Facts of Light, Cathouse Proper, Brooklyn, NY; DUST: The Plates of the Present, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Gwenn Thomas + Jason Mur- phy, Abattoir Gallery, Cleveland, OH; Re-visions, Pinakothek Der Moderne, Munich, Germany; Please Enter, Franklin Parrasch Gallery, NY.

Nikolai Nekh lives and works in Lisbon. His artistic practice consists in the production and distribution of images. He is interested in the trajectories of capitalism and its modes of representation.

Gonçalo Pena (1967) lives between Lisbon and Guimarães, and works primarily in painting and drawing. Having been recognized for his dense and figurative painting, since 2015 he has been restructuring his work as meta-painting, in other words, trying to address, in con- ceptual terms, the problematic crossroads where painting stands today. This task is articulated through drawing and the use of various possible supports. His drawings have been published by Mousse Publishing, starting in 2014 with successive editions by João Maria Gusmão. In 2021, the third volume “Barber Shop” was published on the occasion of an exhibition in the Serralves Museum (Porto) of the same name. He holds a PhD from Universidade Nova de Lisboa.