Painter, draughtsman and printmaker, born in Northampton, who graduated with honours from the Slade School of Fine Art, 1995–9, taught by Norman Norris. Wright obtained national press coverage in 2001 after he won First Prize in the BP Portrait Award with his painting The Six Presidents of the Royal Academy. In that, six notabilities sitting around a tea table were tinged with a surreal quality characteristic of Wright’s narrative and portrait work. Wright termed the £25,000 prize “a glass of water in the desert…the difference between having a career and working in Burger King,” and launched a fierce attack on the Tate for “simply buying conceptual pieces and ignoring the total abundance of figurative painting and sculpture in this country.
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” Wright was a Travel Award Winner in the 1998 BP Portrait Award, resulting in a solo show at the National Portrait Gallery in 1999, From Eastbourne to Edinburgh; he won Third Prize in the Singer & Friedlander/Sunday Times Watercolour Competition in 1999; and in 2000 was British Finalist in the Winsor & Newton Millennium Competition, gained a grant award from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and was a Garrick/Milne Prize winner. He also entered for the Hunting Art Prizes in 1998; showed with the RBS in 2000 at the Mall Galleries; and was included in Being Present, Jerwood Space, 2004. Among Wright’s portrait subjects were the film director Mike Leigh; actress Brenda Blethyn; actors Richard E Grant, John Hurt and David Thewlis; ballet dancer Adam Cooper; and Charles Saumarez Smith, director of the National Gallery, earlier of the National Portrait Gallery. Wright listed many influences, including Flemish Old Masters; William Hogarth; German twentieth-century painters of the inter-war period, such as Otto Dix; Elizabethan painters, including Nicholas Hilliard; Richard Dadd; Stanley Spencer; early Lucian Freud; Ken Currie; and Jennifer McRae. The National Portrait Gallery and other significant collections hold examples. Wright divided his time between London and Eastbourne, Sussex, where he had a solo shows at the Arts Centre in 1994 and 1995.
Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)
