Mark Wingrave

Negative Positive

July 3rd – 25th, 2026

Catalogue MARK WINGRAVE Negative Positive

The Negative Positive by Mark Wingrave presents a series of paintings developed from a recent residency in Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia. While there he travelled through Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and brought back many photographs of the region.

Predominantly images of buildings and textiles: decorated wooden houses, Soviet towers, dazzling carpets; a mix of figure-ground forms and eroding structures. Each offers an echo in some way. The traditional Kyrgyz shyrdak is a felt rug created by cutting two layers of colored felt in mirrored patterns. The pieces are swapped and stitched, producing two rugs with inverse colors: a red-on-black and black-on-red pair. Whereas the Soviet facades and painted houses, decaying Russian forms, hover between ornament and functional structures.

The exhibition reformulates these tensions at a distance, alongside reference to Central Asia. An accordian book notes a journey as minimal diary entries of place names and translated fragments from a 1920’s dystopian tale. Through inversion and doubling the paintings create an unsettling tension, where forms shift between presence and absence as if day is night and night is day.