Turner Prize winner, Richard Wright is an English installation artist who specialises in site-specific projects where he paints intricate temporary works directly onto gallery walls or ceilings, often in neglected spaces in response to the enclosing architecture.
Read MoreThe artist's works are highly complex and patterned, with repeated geometric graphic elements and sometimes metallic paint. In more recent works, he has been greatly increasing the scale and interacting with given light from windows or skylights, using lead-lights and coloured glass.
Wright won the Turner Prize in 2009.
Though born in London, Wright spent most of his childhood in Scotland. He gained a BA from the Edinburgh College of Art in 1982, and made figurative works on canvas. Becoming disillusioned, he trained as a sign painter.
After attending The Glasgow School of Art (19931995), he abandoned the object to paint ornate, gothic abstractions directly on walls for short durations, knowing they would be painted over.
Following his graduation from art school, Richard Wright produced small intimate angular works, such as Untitled (2002) and No title (2010), painted in gouache in normally ignored parts of the gallery space. However, he soon became internationally known for his innovative interventions into architectural space.
When he was nominated for the 2009 Turner Prize, Wright greatly increased his scale in his installation to use a whole wall and fresco patterns featuring the unusual application of gold leaf. He again used Renaissance techniques and scale in a Queens House commission several years later for Royal Museums Greenwich.
Later works, like No title (2015) and No title (2014), use coloured glass and lead light within windows and skylights, generating slowly moving patterns of reflected, refracted light and shadows on the walls over the duration of each day, as well as being encountered as optically complex, colourful compositions directly.
Louise Neri has commented on the breadth of Wright's art historical allusions, the many references within his complicated interventions:
'Oscillating between illusion and abstraction, they evince associations with both pure and applied art, as well as subculture: Minimal art, Classical, and Renaissance murals, the Russian avant-garde, De Stijl, Abstract Expressionism, and Op Art; clothing, commercial art, and porcelain; goth and punk. The ciphers that he has developed over time tend to be geometrical (repeated lines or forms), organic (plants), or drawn from popular culture and sometimes a mixture of all three.'
Wright has completed several public commissions, including for Tottenham Court Road Elizabeth Line Station, London (2022); the Great Hall at Queen's House, Royal Museums Greenwich (2016); Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2013); The Millbank Project at Tate Britain, London (2011—2013); the Dean Gallery, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2010); Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2007); and Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (2007).
Richard Wright has participated in many solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include Richard Wright, Gagosian, Park & 75, New York (2019); and Richard Wright, The Modern Institute, Aird's Lane Bricks Space, Glasgow (2017).
Group exhibitions include Rohstoff Pourquoi, BQ, Berlin (2020); The TURNER, Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, Glasgow (2019); State of the Arts, Selfridges, London (2019); Why are my friends such finks, BQ, Berlin (2018); and Open House, Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco (2018).__
John Hurrell | Ocula | 2022
