Richard Wright

The Modern Institute is pleased to announce the Solo Exhibition in its new Gallery by the 2009 Turner prize artist Richard Wright.

Following his recent commission, The Stairwell Project, for the Edinburgh Arts Festival at the Scottish National Gallery, Richard will show a series of new wall paintings at The Modern Institute.

The largest of these new works uses a repeated motif that plays on perspective, becoming ever so slightly smaller as the eye travels down the wall.

 “The way Wright orders his motifs over the walls in his different projects varies greatly. Occasionally he will isolate a motif (or a pair of them) and make a focused composition. Sometimes he will work with symmetries or Rorschach-like doublings (although this is more common in his independent drawings). But, most commonly, he has recourse to the multiple repetitions of forms. The forms can be purely geometrical, such as lines, but they can also be complex, organic shapes, as he has used in The Stairwell Project.’’[1]

Wright considers paintings less as discreet objects and more as ideas.  In an interview in 2000 he said: “About ten years ago I began working in what for me was a new way. This seemed to have something to do with the action of painting and turned out to mean working directly on the wall, which in turn implied thinking about context and architecture as part of the content of the work.”

Once completed, unfolding in this architectural space is what Wright describes as the ‘event of looking.’ The paintings only become activated by the vision of the spectator and, exhibition ended, the work is painted over and the event is complete. This temporary nature is deliberate: ‘I am interested in the fragility in the moment of engagement-in heightening that moment. To see a work knowing that it will not last, he said, emphasizes that moment of its existence.’