Menu

Gagosian Quarterly

September 25, 2015

Richard Wright

This fall Gagosian Rome will present the first major exhibition of Richard Wright’s work in Italy. For this exhibition, which is also the first view in continental Europe of his work using leaded glass, Wright has intervened in the architecture of the elliptical gallery, replacing the floor-to-ceiling windows with panels of staggering complexity that “paint with light.” Louise Neri discusses Wright’s new exploration of glass works.

Richard Wright, No title, leaded glass, 181 ⅛ × 68 ½ inches (460 × 174 cm)

Richard Wright, No title, leaded glass, 181 ⅛ × 68 ½ inches (460 × 174 cm)

Louise Neri

Louise Neri has been a director at Gagosian since 2006, working with artists and developing exhibitions, editorial projects, and communications across the global platform. A former editor of Parkett magazine, she has authored and edited many books and articles on contemporary art. Beyond the exhibitions she has organized for Gagosian, she cocurated the 1997 Whitney Biennial and the 1998 São Paulo Bienal, among numerous international projects.

See all Articles

Richard Wright is best known for his rigorous site-specific yet transient works that unite painting with graphic, typographic, and ornamental elements. Actively engaging the laws of visual perspective, he charges architectural spaces with a fourth dimension of subtle yet extreme optical complexity, subverting the static exchange between painting and viewer. Treating painting as “the art of the infinite surface” he makes his works directly on the interior surfaces of buildings at greatly varying scales—sometimes comprising tens of thousands of hand-drawn and painted marks. Searching out the “problem” in the space as a starting point—as each space and problem is unique, the strategy is sustaining—Wright works as often in overlooked, interstitial areas (edges, safety features, corners) as on vacant walls and ceilings. Paradoxically, these elaborate and time-consuming paintings and applied metal-leaf drawings usually disappear after the exhibition, an act resistant to the age of rampant commodification.

Richard Wright

Images of the installation process of Richard Wright at Gagosian Rome

Wright’s paintings are rhythmic structures extracted from things, experiences, artworks, and artifacts. Oscillating between illusion and abstraction, they evince associations with both pure and applied art, as well as subculture: Minimal art, Classical and Renaissance murals, the Russian avant-garde, De Stijl, Abstract Expressionism, and Op Art; clothing, commercial art, and porcelain; goth and punk. The ciphers that he has developed over time tend to be geometrical (repeated lines or forms), organic (plants), or drawn from popular culture and sometimes a mixture of all three. If the first two are most often inspired by art-historical sources, such as nonobjective art or Art Nouveau, the last owes much to music and musical sources such as record covers and fanzines. Slowly over time, Wright’s repertoire of forms has become ever more complex and intricate, probably a result of the elaborate drawings that he makes each day. Whether metal filigree or dizzying lines of force deriving from a graphic technique used in engineering, his paintings are feats of painstaking complexity.

Richard Wright

Richard Wright, No Title, 2015 (detail)

Given the central role that light has played in his work to date, it is perhaps not surprising that recently Wright has begun working in leaded glass, exploring both its material and nonmaterial qualities, such as its natural tendency to capture and reflect light. The results are nothing short of extraordinary: Echoing the fleeting nature of his wall paintings, the new glass works generate dynamic drawings and patterns that shift through space according to the passage of light and time.

Working with the York Glaziers Trust, one of the oldest stained-glass conservation studios in Europe, Wright began to experiment with leaded-glass technique in response to a permanent commission for the Tate Britain renovation, The Millbank Project (2011–13). His large arched window with its complex geometric panels in clear glass is now a prominent feature at the Millbank entrance. In a subsequent project at the Modern Institute in Glasgow, intricately figured leaded-glass panels were inserted into the skylights of the otherwise empty space, drawing the eye upward. Throughout the day, the sun traversed the skylights, giving rise to dazzling and ethereal light shows that projected shafts and skeins of pure and palpable energy into the space below.

Richard Wright

Richard Wright, No Title, 2015 (detail)

The new glass works for Gagosian Rome are Wright’s most elaborate to date and, importantly, give the viewer a new proximity to the work. In the elliptical gallery, he has replaced each of three 5-meter-tall, floor-to-ceiling, south-facing windows with twelve evenly sized leaded-glass panels. Two of the windows are clear, colorless glass, while in the third he has experimented with color for the first time. Generated from an intensive daily practice of physical composition that involves drawing and folding paper at a 1:1 scale, each leaded- glass panel comprises hundreds of handmade geometric elements that vary in transparency and texture. Each angled section is framed in lead, building into a field of staggeringly complex rhythms.

And through these rhythmic matrices, daylight streams, filling the gallery with its celestial and ephemeral presence.

Artwork © Richard Wright. Photos by Matteo D’Eletto M3 Studio. Richard Wright is on view at Gagosian Rome, September 29–November 10, 2015.

Artist Richard Wright sits looking at something outside the frame

In Conversation
Richard Wright and Martin Clark

Richard Wright and Martin Clark, director of Camden Art Centre, London, discuss Wright’s latest body of work, recent commissions, and new monograph, which provides a comprehensive overview of his practice between 2010 and 2020.

No Title

No Title

In an excerpt from his forthcoming monograph, Richard Wright pens a personal and philosophical text about painting.

Richard Wright, no title, 2019 (detail), silver leaf on ceiling and walls at Gagosian, Park & 75, New York. Photo: Rob McKeever

Behind the Art
Richard Wright

In an interview with Kay Pallister, the artist explains his relationship to drawing and the importance of time in his site-specific works.

Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2019

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2019

The Summer 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail from Afrylic by Ellen Gallagher on its cover.

Black and white portrait of Lisa Lyon

Lisa Lyon

Fiona Duncan pays homage to the unprecedented, and underappreciated, life and work of Lisa Lyon.

Interior of Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland

Goetheanum: Rudolf Steiner and Contemporary Art

Author and artist Ross Simonini reports on a recent trip to the world center of the anthroposophical movement, the Goetheanum in Switzerland, exploring the influence of the movement’s founder and building’s designer Rudolf Steiner on twentieth-century artists.

Black and white portrait of Alexey Brodovitch

Game Changer: Alexey Brodovitch

Gerry Badger reflects on the persistent influence of the graphic designer and photographer Alexey Brodovitch, the subject of an upcoming exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.

Installation view with Douglas Gordon, Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now... (1999–)

Douglas Gordon: To Sing

On the occasion of Douglas Gordon: All I need is a little bit of everything, an exhibition in London, curator Adam Szymczyk recounts his experiences with Gordon’s work across nearly three decades, noting the continuities and evolutions.

Detail of Lauren Halsey sculpture depicting praying hands, planets, and other symbol against red and green background

Black Futurity: Lessons in (Art) History to Forge a Path Forward

Jon Copes asks, What can Black History Month mean in the year 2024? He looks to a selection of scholars and artists for the answer.

Inkjet print of Jeff Wall's "In the Legion" (2022)

Jeff Wall: In the Domain of Likeness

The Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, has staged a comprehensive Jeff Wall exhibition including more than fifty works spanning five decades. Here, Barry Schwabsky reflects on the enduring power of and mystery in Wall’s photography.

Portrait of Simon Hantaï holding on a blue and white canvas in his studio

Simon Hantaï: Azzurro Blue

In conjunction with Azzurro, an exhibition of paintings by Simon Hantaï at Gagosian, Rome, we share the catalogue essay by curator Anne Baldassari. Here Baldassari focuses on the significance of blue in the artist’s practice, illuminating his affinity with Italy and the influence on his work of its classical painting tradition.

poster for an exhibition with two figures

The Beginning: A Life in Art

Delphine Huisinga and Alison McDonald chart Larry Gagosian’s formative years on the West Coast and contextualize the Los Angeles art scene in the mid-1970s.