PRESS RELEASE
Primary is proud to present Sky, Sea, Fruit, Hand, Seed, a selection of new ceramic sculptures by Wade Tullier. This exhibition marks Tullier’s third solo presentation with the gallery, examining the monument not as a site of power, but as a structure for care, nourishment, and relation.
Monuments have historically been built to honor authority, conquest, and control. Here, Tullier redirects that scale toward fruit—forms defined by sustenance and the quiet centrality of growth. Enlarged beyond the human body and arranged in vertical compositions, these elements take on an architectural presence, shifting the language of monumentality toward something essential and life-giving.
At the center of the exhibition, a blue-and-white hand holds a vertical stack of fruit. The gesture is one of offering rather than possession. Its glazed surface, evoking sky and sea, situates the work within an atmospheric register, where scale and material transform an intimate act into something expansive and destabilizing. The viewer encounters not dominance, but a condition of being held—one that does not require equivalence.
Throughout the exhibition, a recurring set of forms—fruit, owls, tears, knives, flame—operates within a shifting system of meaning. These elements resist fixed symbolism; instead, their significance emerges through proximity and arrangement. A knife beside a pear, a tear near a face—each configuration recalibrates the emotional and spatial logic of the work. Meaning is produced not through singular objects, but in the relationships between them.
Tullier’s sculptures emphasize compression, balance, and dependence. Forms stack, lean, and touch, creating moments of tension and pause. Sweetness is not treated as fragile, but as fundamental. In this context, the monument does not elevate power—it gives scale to what has always sustained life.
Rather than commemorating dominance, Sky, Sea, Fruit, Hand, Seed proposes a monument grounded in care, observation, and interruption. It asks the viewer to consider, even momentarily, the structures—seen and unseen—that hold us.
Opens April 4, 2026 at 5 PM
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Wade Tullier (b.1988, Baton Rouge, Louisiana) is a visual artist working primarily in ceramics and sculpture. His work and process explore how form, memory, and identity become embedded in objects, often through a logic of transformation, chance encounters, and dreamlike juxtaposition. Drawing on archetypal objects, trinkets, and fragments of architecture or nature, Tullier reconfigures objects through stacking and assemblage, dislocating them from function to uncover their mythic potential. His sculptures feel both ancient and contemporary, staging encounters where meaning emerges from juxtaposition, chance, and symbolic repetition. Influenced by oral traditions, the uncanny logic of Surrealist objects, and the quiet power of relics, he considers how clay itself participates in the telling—and retelling—of history and personal myth.
Tullier holds a BFA from Louisiana State University and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent shows in Miami, Chicago, and Detroit. His work is included in ‘With Eyes Opened: Cranbrook Academy of Art Since 1932’ at the Cranbrook Art Museum and is included in ‘Clay Pop’ at Jeffrey Deitch New York. Cranbrook Art Museum, Detroit, MI, The Progressive Art Collection, Jorge M. Pérez Collection, John Marques Art Collection, Miami, The Bunker Art Space, Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, West Palm Beach, FL.
Primary (Est. 2007) is a context and research-driven curatorial collective with an emphasis on public art. We thrive amongst the self-taught, working-class misfits, who explore the margins of a new Americana through pungent, human-focused narratives. Our program engages with the raw and uncanny, celebrating border voices, bootleg culture, and intergenerational commentary, connecting the new and unseen with broader audiences and evolving collections.
For further information, please contact info@thisisprimary.com
