Richard Wright at Gagosian Rome
Gagosian Gallery Rome presents an exhibition by British artist and musician Richard Wright centred on new leaded glass works.
Known for his site-specific yet transient works, Wright creates art that unites painting with graphic and typographic elements as well as draw on architectural spaces to challenge the dynamic between artwork and viewer through optical complexity.
The artist creates his paintings directly on the interior surfaces of buildings, walls and ceilings in a wide variety of scales and often in overlooked areas. Often, his paintings and applied metal-leaf creations last only as long as the exhibition, making his works a fleeting gratification.
Extracted from experience, artworks and artefacts, Wright’s paintings are characterised by rhythmic structures and balance between illusion and abstraction. They cross from pure to applied art such as minimal art, renaissance painting, Russian avant-garde and abstract expressionism to clothing, record covers, commercial art and porcelain.
Recent years have seen the artist experiment with leaded glass, exploring its material as well as non-material qualities such as its natural ability to capture and lose light. Resonating with the transient nature of his wall paintings, the new glass works generate unique drawing patterns that shift through space according to the passage of light and time.
The most elaborate to date, Wright’s new glass works for Gagosian Rome replace three five-metre tall windows with 12 evenly sized leaded-glass panels. Facing South, two of the windows are clear, colourless glass while the third experiments with colour as the artist’s first.
An intensive preparatory process of physical composition involving drawing and folding on a 1:1 scale is behind the works. Each panel consists of hundreds of handmade geometric glass elements of various transparency and texture. Each angled section is framed in lead building into a field of complex rhythms. Through these, daylight streams in, filling the gallery with celestial and ephemeral presence.
The exhibition will be on show from Tuesday 29 September – Tuesday 10 November 2015.
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