Richard Wright (Photograph: Linda Nylind)
The Turner Prize has no equivalent in the United States. This annual award to a U.K.-based visual artist is like awarding just one Oscar for “Best Artist in All the Land”. The build up, the anticipation, the dissenters, the enthusiasts—it is a yearly cycle that I observe with interest from this side of the pond year after year.
This year’s winner delighted me. Here are a few excerpted reactions from the art press in the U.K.:
Rachel Campbell-Johnston in the London Times:
Wright’s work is wilfully elusive. This subtlety, in the context of the story of the Turner, is significant. The prize has progressed a long way in the 25 years since its inauguration when a small but dedicated gaggle of devotees gathered to hear that Malcolm Morley had been appointed the first winner. Then, contemporary art was regarded as a potentially embarrassing outpost of high culture. But before long the Turner would be appointing household names — Gilbert & George and Damien Hirst most prominent among them. Fame and money are bedfellows and soon contemporary art had become much like any commodity. It didn’t matter what you made as long as it was money. This year’s shortlist reflects today’s calmer mood. It is less about superficial appearance and more about the processes of looking. Wright suggests that we question the power of capitalist markets, perhaps. His murals cannot be owned. They will be painted over at the end of the exhibition. All that glitters is not sold in Wright’s glimmering world.
Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian:
To make his untitled wall painting for the Turner prize exhibition, Wright employed the painstaking techniques of Renaissance fresco-makers – drawing a cartoon on paper and then transferring it to the wall in what he called “an incredibly medieval way” by pouncing – piercing the cartoon with holes and rubbing chalk through it to create “the ghost of a work” on the wall. The image was then painted with size (adhesive) and covered with gold leaf.
Despite the toil involved, when the show closes at Tate Britain on 3 January, the work will be painted over in white emulsion and lost for ever.
The temporary nature of the piece is deliberate: none of Wright’s wall paintings is intended to survive the immediate circumstances of its commission. “I am interested in the fragility of the moment of engagement – in heightening that moment,” he said. To see a work knowing that it will not last, he said, “emphasises that moment of its existence”.
Asked how he felt to experience the destruction of his work, he said: “Sometimes I feel a sense of loss; sometimes of relief.”
Adrian Searle in the Guardian:
There have been no shocks and few real surprises in the 2009 Turner prize. Richard Wright’s work still feels the strongest; and as a single installation, with a drawing rendered in gold leaf on the wall of an otherwise almost empty space, it is a joyous and tantalising experience.
The image never settles down. There are bursts of sunlight, the rays reminding you of an old engraving; these shafts of drawn light are set among boiling clouds and apparitions. In fact, the whole thing is like some monstrous and lovely apocalypse, its sections duplicated, reversed on themselves and inverted. The gold leaf itself catches the gallery light, losing parts of the image in glare and dulling other sections down to a greyish-green, as you move around it. Wright makes this constant flux more than a decorative effect.
And from my favorite art guy, Jonathon Jones, also in the Guardian (God bless them, their coverage of the art world is the most diverse and multi-voiced):
I was won over by Wright even before I saw his wonderful room at Tate Britain. While he was creating it, he also made a silver painting on the ceiling of the Gagosian Gallery in Mayfair. Light from the gallery’s long window produced sublime and elusive effects in a perspective illusion that evoked Islamic decoration, or the mathematical designs of Leonardo da Vinci.
Ah, Leonardo. While I was on this jury I was also finishing a book about Leonardo and his rival Michelangelo, which will be published in April 2010. It was surprisingly easy to shift gear between the Turner prize and the Italian Renaissance. And the theme of my book probably predisposed me to love Wright: it is about vanished wall paintings. And Wright makes wall paintings that vanish.
Wright is, in my opinion, one of the worthiest Turner winners ever. He’s also one of a handful of painters to have won it since I started following the exhibitions in 1993.
He is a painter for our time – and only for our time, because he does not want his works to last. His view of his art, his acknowledgement of its mortality, is deeply moving. The abundance and generosity of his room at Tate Britain first seduces and delights you, then becomes ever more impressive, resonant and rich.
See it before it fulfils its destiny and becomes a lost masterpiece, a dazzling memory.
I was wondering what you thought of him. I just like how so much of the press has mentioned that he was a figurative painter once upon a time. Before he saw the light or came to the dark side? I can’t decide. I have this rather dumb and unformed idea about the Turner selections leaning toward a kind of Adorno sense of modern barbarism. Like the act of bearing so much witness has made all attempts at art so barbaric that the thing to do is to retreat into abstraction. I don’t mean to suggest that all abstraction is a retreat, but there’s a sense I have about some of the art world’s current darlings that a safety net has become necessary. Or perhaps it’s more a matter of decorum, this obsession with pattern, texture, color producing spaces more for contemplation and meditation than explicit storytelling. A respite in beauty because there’s really no way to explain how/why the world is so. A reprieve. (And all the while I’m wringing my hands and saying, tell me. Tell me.)
Ditto to what the Virgin said.
I had read the Jones piece this morning, and I enjoyed the video to which the Jones piece linked. Thank you for the other reviews.
My husband’s son is a sculptor who works in wax and often he creates pieces designed to literally melt away by the end of a show. The pieces are beautiful even as they are disappearing. I’ve always felt a bit sad when they are no more. For him, it is the making that matters most.
Wright’s work is gorgeous and will be destroyed deliberately, making it impossible to collect. And yet it will be photographed and talked about and filmed and so live on in a different way. In memory, too.
Great comments, all. Virge, I have a very specific point of view on the issue of abstraction some of which we have discussed in the past. But I do think there is an element of stepping away from what has been de rigeur in the Art World in the choice of Wright. He’s not a self-promoter, he doesn’t play the Damien Hirst/Gilbert and George media game, and of course he doesn’t want his piece to survive beyond the exhibition. The choice has a resetting quality to it, which I applaud.
But aside from all of the contextual concerns, I think his work is fascinating. He’s employing Renaissance pouncing techniques and using them for a very contemporary result. It IS beautiful, and how refreshing after all the brutalism of the last few years. I can’t help but be pleased.