Camden Art Centre presents Richard Wright’s (b. 1960, London, UK) first solo exhibition at an institution in London, and his largest institutional exhibition in the UK for more than 20 years.
The Turner Prize-winning artist is known primarily for his ceiling and wall-based paintings, which are created in direct and very sensitive response to the architecture of their site.
This exhibition will include a monumental new site-specific work, painted directly onto the interior of the building, as well as works in glass, on paper, and three-dimensional objects which reveal lesser-known aspects of Wright’s practice. It foregrounds an approach to painting on its own terms – not as representation or subject, but as a form of image-making that reveals itself as a kind of reality. Situated across all of Camden’s galleries, the exhibition is conceived as a series of moments that respond to the Victorian and post-war architecture of the building.
Wright’s glass installations extend the interplay of space and pattern into a fourth dimension, temporal. Working with practitioners in the age-old craft of leaded glass, Wright composes abstract, highly intricate, geometric compositions which, when installed, cast ethereal patterns of light against floors, walls and ceilings. In Camden Art Centre’s Central Space – a large atrium filled with natural light from Victorian skylights – two monumental glass panels will be suspended from above.
The exhibition brings together more than 50 works on paper made across the artist’s 30-year career. Some of these drawings are made directly on the pages of books, another kind of site, surface, or architecture for him to intervene in and occupy. Others evoke more baroque, transcendent spaces, picturing amorphous, antique spaces of the sublime. A group of works in gold leaf will also be included, reminiscent of the wall drawing he created for his Turner Prize-winning exhibition at Tate Britain in 2009.
“Painting is an act that connects reality and consciousness. It is more than a collective codification of signs. It is a performance that awakens the delirium of vision. Drawing describes the mind in the act of seeing, but this action comes before consciousness. It is only through touching this concrete world that I can leave myself. The silence of things is disturbed into vibration. The task is not conceived, it is not understood; it is lived. The painter goes out into the world and momentarily changes the way things are. The hand has become part of the tool, and the tool has become part of everything that surrounds it. If there is knowledge here, it resides in the muscles.”- Richard Wright
Richard Wright (b. 1960, London) lives and works in Glasgow and Norfolk. Wright has exhibited internationally since 1994 and was awarded the Turner prize in 2009. He has produced several major commissions, including those at Tottenham Court Road Station, London (2022); Queen’s House, Greenwich (2016); Tate Britain, London (2013); Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2013); and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2010). Selected solo exhibitions include: Kunshistorisches Museum, Thesus Temple, Vienna (2013); Works on Paper, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow (2012); 55th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego (2007); Centre d’Art Contemporain, Le Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Bignan (2005); DCA, Dundee (2004); and Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (2001). Selected group exhibitions include: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland, Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh (2014); Kunst und Philosophie, NBK Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2011); Draw A Straight Line and Follow It, Tate Modern, London (2008); Intelligence, Tate Britain, London (2000); Drawing Now: Eight Propositions, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2002); My Head is on Fire but my Heart is Full of Love, Charlottenborg Museum, Copenhagen; and Painting at the Edge of the World, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis (2001).