Joshua Uvieghara

I make paintings driven by processes of assemblage and mark making. This begins with a question of reconciliation: How might the ineffable be expressed through the materiality of painting? While this question resists a fixed answer, it opens a space where painting becomes a process of discovery—a testing ground for thresholds between material, image, and meaning.
As a student in upstate New York in the late 1990s, I studied neon sculpture. Neon’s luminous fragility impressed on me its capacity to transform space, and I sought to turn those tubes inside out, translating their phosphorescent shimmer into pigment. This interest in inversion—the dynamic between concealing and revealing—remains central to my work, where colour and surface act as sites of transformation between light, shadow, and body.
Recurring motifs in my paintings resemble deltas. These forms suggest the meeting of forces, the negotiation of edges, and the dynamic between constants and variables. For me, they are not only compositional devices but also tropes that resonate with heritage, memory, and belonging. Like the shifting yet grounded boundaries of water and land, they echo porous thresholds of identity while offering a pictorial structure through which transformation can unfold.
I approach painting as a mode of expression that resists containment within established codes. Each work becomes a sign that refuses to settle within convention, pointing instead toward psychic or experiential resonance. The uncertainty about whether picturing or painting itself allows a subject to emerge is critical. In these moments, as material becomes thought and thought returns to material, painting opens onto visionary possibilities while remaining anchored in its own substance.

Biography
Joshua Uvieghara is based in Brighton. He studied Fine Art at the University of Brighton, Alfred University in New York, The Essential School of Painting and Turps Art school in London.

Uvieghara has exhibited in several solo and group exhibitions including: 35 Blumen in Germany, The Royal Academy, The Freelands Foundation, Schwartz Gallery and The Deptford X Festival at Core Gallery in London, Towner Gallery in Eastbourne, Grey Area and Phoenix Art Space in Brighton, The International Biennale Exhibition of Painting Wales in Swansea, Surface Gallery in Nottingham and Fringe MK Painting Prize in Milton Keynes. He was a steering group member at Grey Area Gallery in Brighton and is currently a member of the London Group.