Richard WrightThe Stairwell Project, 2010

Acrylic on wall

Permanent installation, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

About the artist

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. —Richard Wright Richard Wright is known for large-scale and site-specific—but often temporary—painted and applied metal-leaf installations and leaded window works that invest architectural spaces with new optical and associative complexity. Shifting between illusionism and abstraction, his projects alter the viewer’s perception of space. Incorporating graphic and ornamental elements, his work often alludes to Minimalism and Renaissance art as well as to commercial images. In his stylistically diverse works on paper, Wright employs ink drawing, gilding, printmaking, enamel, and watercolor painting techniques that Camden Art Centre director Martin Clark described as having an “allover quality that seemed to exceed the limits of the paper, a field of indeterminate shapes and matter: drifting, coalescing, accreting and dissipating, like the curl of vapour in an alchemist’s alembic.” Wright was born in 1960 in London and moved to Scotland with his family when he was young; he now lives and works in Norfolk, England, and Glasgow, Scotland. He graduated with a BA from Edinburgh College of Art in 1982 and an MA from Glasgow School of Art in 1995. Initially producing figurative painting, he became disillusioned with the methodology in the late 1980s and abandoned his art practice altogether for two years to train as a professional sign painter. While studying in Glasgow he destroyed all his work on canvas and began painting directly onto the walls of exhibition spaces, often focusing on corners and other marginal areas to emphasize the interaction of his imagery with its built environment.

About the artist

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