LONDON.- Gagosian announced the publication of a long-awaited monograph on Richard Wright, surveying works made between 2010 and 2020. The book documents projects made for both well-known public spaces and otherwise inaccessible private residences around the world and is now available for purchase.

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.”

Painting does not represent; painting is the thing itself. —Richard Wright

Among the many works pictured and discussed in the new book are Wright’s prestigious permanent installations at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh; Queen’s House, London; and Tottenham Court Road station (Elizabeth Line), London. Featured too are all his works in leaded glass, beginning with his 2013 project for Tate Britain, London. The book also documents almost all of the works on paper that Wright has made over the past decade. Significantly, the publication functions as an important record of many temporary works that no longer exist, including installations at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; Volksbühne, Berlin; Lismore Castle, Ireland; and Gagosian, Britannia Street, London.

The book includes essays by Martin Clark, director of Camden Art Centre, London; social anthropologist Tim Ingold; and the artist himself, and features an in-depth conversation with Will Bradley, director of Kunsthall Oslo. Clark, in his text “Process and Reality,” draws parallels between the orientation toward ephemerality in Wright’s work and the ideas of physicist David Bohm and philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, who theorized that objects exist in a state of unending “becoming”—and entirely in relation to one another. Ingold’s contribution, “Fleeting Sounds, Glittering Stars and Orphan Spirits,” explores Wright’s projects for the Rijksmuseum, Queen’s House, and Scottish National Gallery, focusing on how the artist’s use of color, pattern, and ornamentation resonate with the distinct features of the three historic buildings.

“Painting is an act that connects reality and consciousness,” writes Wright in his own commentary. “It is more than a collective codification of signs. It is a performance that awakens the delirium of vision.” Tracing connections with other artists from Piet Mondrian and Alexander Rodchenko to Donald Judd, Lygia Clark, and Gerhard Richter, he provides a fascinating individual perspective on the progress and purpose of his chosen medium. Finally, Bradley quizzes Wright on subjects including authorship, artisanship, and the relationship of his work to performance. The artist recalls making early, adrenaline-fueled works at Kunsthalle Bern and arguing for the time needed to produce his elaborate gold-leaf work for the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate, London, in 2009.

Organized on the occasion of Wright’s exhibition at Gagosian, Davies Street, which opened on March 29th, a conversation between Wright and Martin Clark was held in April at the Gagosian Shop in London’s historic Burlington Arcade.

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 Book

Published by Gagosian
Texts by Will Bradley, Martin Clark, Tim Ingold, and Richard Wright
Designed by Graphic Thought Facility, London
Distributed by Rizzoli International Publications, New York
Format: Hardcover