Richard Wright

16 Apr-22 Jun 2025

Overview

Camden Art Centre is proud to present Richard Wright’s (b. 1960, London, UK) first solo exhibition at an institution in London, and his largest institutional exhibition in the UK for more than 20 years.

The Turner Prize-winning artist is known primarily for his ceiling and wall-based paintings which are created in direct and very sensitive response to the architecture of their site.

This exhibition will include a monumental new site-specific work, painted directly on to the interior of the building, as well as works in glass, on paper, and three-dimensional objects which reveal lesser-known aspects of Wright’s practice. It foregrounds an approach to painting on its own terms – not as representation or subject, but as a form of image-making that reveals itself as a kind of reality. Situated across all of Camden’s galleries, the exhibition is conceived as a series of moments that respond to the Victorian and post-war architecture of the building.

Wright’s glass installations extend the interplay of space and pattern into a fourth, temporal, dimension. Working with practitioners in the age-old craft of leaded glass, Wright composes abstract, highly intricate, geometric compositions which, when installed, cast ethereal patterns of light against floors, walls and ceilings. In Camden Art Centre’s Central Space – a large atrium filled with natural light from Victorian skylights – two monumental glass panels will be suspended from above.

The exhibition brings together more than 50 works on paper made across the artist’s 30 year career. Some of these drawings are made directly into the pages of books, another kind of site, surface or architecture for him to intervene in and occupy; others evoke more baroque, transcendent spaces, picturing amorphous, antique spaces of the sublime. A group of works in gold leaf will also be included, reminiscent of the wall drawing he produced for his Turner-Prize winning exhibition at Tate Britain in 2009.

An edition of Camden’s ‘File Note’ series will be published with an essay by Martin Clark, Director, Camden Art Centre.