Richard Wright

Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition by Richard Wright featuring painted objects, works on paper, books, and painting executed on the gallery interior.

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, they allude to Minimalism and Renaissance art, as well as to commercial image making. In his stylistically diverse works on paper, Wright employs ink drawing, gilding, printmaking, enamel, and watercolor painting techniques.

A new site-specific painting at the Davies Street gallery incorporates the surfaces of an internal door, Wright once again disrupting the traditionally static relationship between artwork and viewer by drawing attention to an architectural feature that, while habitually considered purely functional, maintains a rich symbolic history. In mythology, religion, and literature, doors suggest the transition from one world to another; in psychology and psychoanalysis, they represent choices and decisions. Painting on a large twentieth-century wood solicitor’s deeds cabinet, Wright recasts the still-functional piece as a vessel of abstract visuality. The gridded design, characteristic of his most recent work, suggests patchwork quilts or tiled walls, while also evoking the dizzying retinal effects of Op art.