Turner Prize Winner 09: Richard Wright

From the sheer amount of notes pinned on the wall at Tate Britain this year, it was pretty predictable that Richard Wright would be this years Turner Prize winner.

Wright, 49,  was nominated for his exhibition at the 55th Carniegie International in Pittssburgh and a show in the Ingleby gallery, Edinburgh.

The man who created the extremely intricate gold leaf fresco in “an incredibly medieval way” was a shocked and surprised winner.  Wright used Baroque methods to form his untitled wall painting, drawing on paper to start and rubbing chalk through it.  The image was then painted with adhesive and covered with gold leaf.

The most shocking thing about Wright’s work for the spectator is that it will be disposed of when the Turner Prize exhibition closes on the 3rd of January next year.  None of Wright’s works are intended to be any more than temporary, as to see a work that you know will be destructed, “emphasises that moment of its existence”.

The work of this contemporary artist cannot be bought or sold as each is created for a particular environment.

Wright won the prestigous art award against Lucy Skaer, Enrico David and Roger Hiorns and was awarded a total of £25, 000.  The runners-up received £5, 000.

Turner Prize Entry: Richard Wright

By Julie Scrase

It takes a mere fleeting glance at the comments scrawled by visitors as one leaves the exhibition to see that, were it up to the public vote, Richard Wright would win. Hands down.

‘A fresco painter interested in formal beauty’ is how Wright has been benevolently described. Such a label misleadingly suggests a naivety or simplicity which I think can no longer exist in the evermore intellectualised realm of ‘high-art’. If one paints frescos in 2009, and is consequently nominated for the Turner Prize, we can be quite sure that one does so as a commentary upon or allusion to the vast history of fresco painting through the ages. Or, as is particularly the case for Wright, we are aware that it functions as a provocation of architectural surfaces, as a fresh revelation of internal spaces and as a comment on temporality. If one is interested in formal beauty it s not an innate delight in the oh-so mysteriously, divinely occurring golden-ratios. It is a canny questioning of the meaning of beauty, the decorative –and hence typography & tattoo etc- in contemporary culture with, once again, more than a hint of academic allusion to art’s history. In short, Wright is of the post-modern breed: making art about art -resulting in a ‘hybrid graphic Esperanto’.

The big feature of his Turner Prize exhibition piece is a baroque-style painting in gold leaf which sprawls in geometric progressions and repetitions across an entire wall of the gallery. The use of gold leaf is both visually impressive and metaphorically loaded. Gold is a compound whose symbolic meaning is made of deity, glamour, wealth, politics, geography, exploitation and veneration. It takes us delving underground and ascending to heavenly heights and it is the common currency which carries us through the ‘civilized’ terrain in-between: from church to catwalk to commerce. It seems that art and gold have lived parallel if not intertwined, lives.

On close inspection one sees (as is typical of, indeed fundamental to, Wright’s paintings) no attempt to smooth over the imperfections of the wall’s surface, not even electrical sockets or switches. In this sense he is not a ‘white-cube’ artist, every work of his is essentially site-specific and refers not only to itself but to its context – because the two entities cannot be separated. Site-specific work can be problematic as it may too easily be made crass by literal, theatrical or laboured metaphorical envelopment or enrobement of context. However Wright’s subtle method incorporates its context with remarkably elegant fluidity. Furthermore if one feels that the baroque swirls and use of gold-leaf are out-modedly grandiose, the bleakly temporary nature of the work (which a few licks of paint down the line will be gone forever) functions as a slickly sombre and modern counterbalance.

All very nice, but what’s the art world’s most publicised prize without a spot of controversy? And this time it does come down to something as apparently innocent as a few rust-red spots above a doorway at the opposite end of the room to his larger wall painting. It just so happens that it entirely diverts the eye from what woud be a well framed view of Lucy Skaers’ installation. This is intelligent one-upmanship at its coolest. But, being a late addition to the show, it has an undoubtedly sneaky feel to it that is at once nasty and delicious in its witty competativeness. It is an effortless exploitation of context par excellence!

Finally, as for the many Wright-supporters out there…I wonder which of those erudite nuances lilting through his ‘graphic esporanto’ inspired them most? Or perhaps they were simply relieved by a pretty picture at last, enjoying that formal beauty of a good ol’fashioned fresco which asks no questons, tells no lies.