HONG KONG.- Flowers Gallery Hong Kong opens Roadkill, the first solo exhibition in Asia by acclaimed British painter Stuart Pearson Wright.The exhibition presents a new series of paintings created over the last five years, offering a deeply personal and darkly humorous reflection on one of the most challenging chapters in the artist’s life. Best known for his psychologically-charged portraiture, Wright uses the language of painting to explore the tension between vulnerability, absurdity, and resilience, featuring the artist’s renowned embodiment of rich surfaces and fine detail. In this body of work, anthropomorphism becomes a central device: human figures merge with animal traits, everyday objects, and theatrical exaggerations. These hybrid presences serve as both unsettling and comical stand-ins for the human condition.

Humour functions here not merely as an artistic strategy, but as catharsis—providing an irreverent and playful counterweight to themes of grief, isolation, and fragility, which the artist experienced during recent struggles in his personal life.Through distortion, disguise, and surreal imagery, Wright captures the paradoxical ways in which comedy emerges from pain, and how imaginative reinvention can be an act of survival.

“These paintings embrace the ridiculous because sometimes laughter feels like the only way out of despair,” says Stuart Pearson Wright. “By reimagining myself and those around me in animal or hybrid forms, I found a form of honesty that was impossible through realism alone.”

The works continue Wright’s longstanding engagement with the traditions of portraiture, but with an increased sense of theatricality and allegory. Drawing on influences from Renaissance portraiture, British satire, and the absurdism of literature and theatre, the paintings situate themselves in a liminal space between sincerity and parody.

Stuart Pearson Wright (b. 1975, Northampton, UK) is celebrated for his provocative and technical- ly masterful approach to portraiture. A graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, he has received numerous awards, including the BP Portrait Award in 2001. His works are held in many prestigious collections, including the National Portrait Gallery in London. This exhibition marks his first major presentation in Hong Kong.