Richard Wright, who won the Turner Prize in 2009, is known primarily for his site-responsive, and usually temporary, ceiling and wall-based paintings. His major survey at Camden Art Centre includes new work of that type and far more: some 40 paintings, drawings and leaded glass works, and many illuminated books.
Gallery 3 has your main intervention in response to the site. How does it relate to the architecture?
I want painting to be part of everything else and I see architecture and the world around me as a conversation that has already started. Architecture is order, form, ornamentation, but architecture is also an emotional geography, and its atmospheres are quiet reservoirs of memory – everything echoes. This room is a reading room: that is important. Somehow the painting is part of this. This painting will be soon erased so its presence here is also a flicker, like the thoughts of reading.
I want the painting to have a quality of object-ness, to sit somehow between being a sign and a thing and perhaps offer no meaning like the door, the wall and the window. This painting is a constructive work in the way that it is the simple placing of one thing on top of another. It sets out a relationship between object and ground: an exchange between positive and negative.
Richard Wright: No Title, 2025 – Acrylic and graphite pencil on wall
But the ground is the room, rather than the canvas?
Yes…. It begins with light, the light of this room. I feel that the work sits not on the wall, but somehow between me and the wall. Like a projection it has this quality of dispersing the materiality of the wall. It becomes part of the air. But then as you approach it returns to being this solid obstinate thing. One object on top of another.
The dispersal here comes from what I would call the interference effect. In the proximity of one object in relation to another a tension is developed and a third object is sensed. An object that is not there but feels more there. The material disappears and reappears. The critical part here is that the work must sit in the light, it must be the light. The light of this room.
Richard Wright: Untitled, 2022 – leaded glass, metal frame 235 x 261 x 4 cm
What is the particular appeal of leaded glass?
I had made paintings on glass many years ago but working with leaded glass began with a piece that I made as part of the remodelling of Tate Britain. It might have ended there but I was drawn into the material because it does something that I want painting to do – it captures light. The outside becomes inside. On the material level, it is just drawing with lead, positive and negative. Each piece of glass is hand blown and hand cut in a way that develops its innate prismatic effect. When the light passes through it, its structure leaves a trace in that light as it is carried into the air. The air is illuminated.
You are also showing many works presented more in the manner of paintings on the wall?
I have never shown so many of these works before. But they do exist. Drawing is the basis of my practice and much of this drawing uses conventional materials. There is a practical aspect to this. Mostly the drawings are thoughts which come to nothing but here are some thoughts which may be returned to.
Richard Wright: No Title, 2024 – Poster colour and enamel on paper, 80.5 x 114 cm
This is one of several geometric works using poster colour. Can you tell me about that?
I was always interested in Mondrian and Rodchenko and the language of constructivism. There was a kind of factualness to this work that freed painting from the effete language of fine art. This work could be a play on a cubist still life, but it has a readymade quality and could be an incidental product of some industrial process. For me there is something liberating in this concreteness or emptying out of language. It is as much a fact as it is an image – it is straight out of the tin.
I studied painting at art school. But after that I trained to be a sign writer. I thought this might become some kind of side hustle. But it ended up having a huge influence on me. The sign writer wants the material to be invisible and to carry only the sign. This discipline is a kind of attention and has as much to do with revealing the space between letters as it has to do with the letters themselves.
Training as a signwriter started with ticket writing – the practice of painting posters for billboards and the theatre. This piece uses those materials and might be pasted on a wall outside where it would have a very different life.
And you worked as a sign writer for some years?
Perhaps I am still a sign writer.
Richard Wright: No Title, 2019 – Watercolour on paper, 76 x 117 cm
Other works are more organic in form, and tend to use watercolour?
Perhaps this is the opposite of what I have just said. I am also seduced by painting. Watercolour is the material I started with. It might be the simplest form of painting; it is just spit and mud and it’s a material that you see in almost all cultures. It is fragile and reversable – it can be washed away. Palmer and Blake were enormously important to me at the beginning and maybe a work like this remembers them in some way. Perhaps it also concerns itself with a concentration of the mind.
Richard Wright: No Title, 2012 – Gold leaf on paper, 120 x 120 cm
How do did you make this work in gold leaf?
I dip an old-fashioned cartographer’s pen into gold size, which is a fluid kind of glue, and draw the whole thing with that. I put a tiny bit of pink into the glue so I can see it as I work. I lay sheets of gold leaf over the top of that and then burnish them onto the surface. The gold sticks to the area and marks that have been drawn with size. The gold leaf has the material quality of being both there and not there as it catches the light or not. Sometimes the gold can totally disappear.
Richard Wright: ‘No Title’, 2018 at Tottenham Court Road station
As in the vast work people can see at the Elizabeth Line station at Tottenham Court Road?
Yes, the ceiling work at Tottenham Court Road is almost not there, but as you come up the escalator your position changes in relation to the light and it unfolds somehow in front of you. Gold is an element – it is not a colour. It also represents the sun and an enlightened state of mind. I guess this has something to do with the way it holds light.
Richard Wright: Watercolour on wall (see also top image)
In gallery 1B a wall painting in watercolour feels as if it might have escaped from a nearby work on paper?
There is that play, yes, though the work on paper was made some years ago and the wall was painted a few days ago. I draw all the time… you become a person who can do something through practice, and you can turn from one language to another. Painting for me is connected to touch – it’s a place where you touch the world, where we try to pass our hands through the solid to the other side – the thought of perspective is that you can reach into the world that is not this world, beyond the picture plane.
Richard Wright: Installation view, Gallery 2, with No Title, 2025 – Oak table and books from the artist’s personal collection
You are also showing a table covered with books on which you have drawn?
I was brought up in a house where there was no art and, in a place, where there was no art gallery. The library and its books were a place of escape and magic. Often, I would draw the things in the books and there was something more in this than just copying. Drawing brought these things closer – made them seem more real somehow.
In the morning, I go down to this table and start drawing. Often, books like these may be on that table. As a young person who drew, I thought painting had something to do with the past; perhaps it stopped with Impressionism. I was drawn to commercial art: record sleeve designers such as Rick Griffin and Roger Dean; and Von Dutch and Dean Jeffries, who painted flames and flying eyes on custom cars. This aspect of customisation still resonates with me. Painting alters everything. The books are customised; they are also illuminated.
Richard Wright: detail from No Title, 2025
Top Photo: Richard Wright in Room 1B at Camden Art Centre. Photos in order by Paul Carey-Kent (1,3,5,7,10), Rob Harris (2,6,8,9) and Keith Hunter (4).
Richard Wright continues at Camden Art Centre to 22 June 2025