Jimmy Wright’s large scale oil paintings and pastel works of sunflowers reimagine the subject’s meaning, becoming what the artist calls “repositories of emotion.” Wright began painting still lifes in 1988, during the height of the AIDS epidemic. As he was caring for his partner, who was gravely ill with HIV/AIDS, Wright was looking for a studio practice that would allow him to work intermittently and preserve his sense of self. Never having painted still lifes before, he purchased giant sunflowers from a farmer’s market and watched the petals twist and shrink as the flowers withered. These flowers reflect a broad and fluid array of human emotions, and they became powerful memento mori and vessels for themes of grief, memorialization, selfhood, and resurrection.

Not all of these blooms are elegiac, many are fiery and exuberant, the capacity for transformation and expressing joy being integral to the work. Wright experiments freely with layering and juxtaposition of bold, vibrating color that pushes beyond observed reality. In some works, monochromatic compositions explore the full range of a color’s possibility, while others play with vivid, complementary hues, recalling the intensity of post-Impressionist painters. Textured surfaces created by cross-hatched pastel marks and thick, impastoed oil paint emphasize the emotional heft contained within the forms.

The works on view, completed in the 2000s and 2010s, involve combinations of dried and fresh flowers, creating variations in form and capturing these ephemeral phases of blooming and decaying. Wright’s decades-long exploration of the subject creates an archive of feeling, pausing time and preserving the most ineffable human emotions.