Interview: Richard Wright, Turner Prize winning artist

Published on Sunday 6 December 2009 11:05

IT IS lunchtime at Glasgow's CCA and, while the café is busy, the galleries are in darkness. The installation team is hard at work putting together a new group exhibition, Votive, which will open in a couple of days. From the gloom, the artist Richard Wright emerges blinking into the light.

At 49, he's one of the country's most important painters and a nominee for the Turner Prize, which will be announced live on Channel 4 tomorrow. The Turner is the annual bunfight for critics of contemporary art. It's often hard to know just what those critics think artists get up to, but they probably didn't have Wright's week in mind: a series of 12 or 14-hour shifts in the gallery where he is painstakingly making new work in situ, involving frosty cycle rides to and from the studio when it's four degrees below. Though he doesn't make a point of it, it's clearly hard work.

• Note: This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 6 December. Richard Wright won the Turner Prize yesterday. Read the report here.

Nobody at the CCA has mentioned the Turner, Wright says when I ask. "I'm sure they have no idea. Why should they? They're just wondering who that guy is who's hanging around the gallery."

"Hanging around the gallery" is an essential part of Wright's work. He has come to prominence, in a kind of slow burn, after 20 years of working directly on to the walls and ceilings of museums and other buildings. His Turner nomination is for two exhibitions: a tiny, exquisite intervention in Edinburgh's Ingleby Gallery and an eye-popping transformation of a gallery at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, one of the most prestigious international showcases for contemporary art.

Trained in Edinburgh and Glasgow, Wright has remained in Scotland and, in particular, Glasgow, where he has spent most of his life after moving from London with his family when he was a child. "What's great about it here is that you can be engaged with a dialogue and a scene, but also it's easy to just to work away with nobody looking over your shoulder…" he explains.

"I think when you're in London or Berlin or New York, you're inevitably circulating in a situation that's more exclusive and it's very easy to believe the hype, to think that you are somebody. But it's very important to be reminded that you are not and Glasgow's very good at that."

Wright definitely is a somebody, but that dialogue between visibility and invisibility is key both to the man and his work. Although Scotland will get a new permanent work in the stairwell at the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh next year, almost everything he does will be painted over when he is finished. The beautiful exhibition in Edinburgh's Inverleith House a decade ago? Gone. The major show at DCA? Long painted over. The exquisite wall of gold leaf sunbursts, angels' wings and psychedelic abstraction that has caused a sensation with Turner audiences and critics? Well it has until January.

Personally, I've never seen a Turner Prize show that so clearly rose to the occasion. Wright's untitled work was handmade in "an incredibly medieval and old-fashioned way", by making drawings, which were then transferred on to the wall through pricking thousands of holes in the paper, applying chalk, then glue to the wall, and finally painting on flat gold leaf. But the work seemed to speak directly to a modern audience not only about what he has been doing for the past two decades, but also about the art that inspired him as a young man, much of which they could see in the galleries around them.

There are references to Turner and the visionary art of figures such as Samuel Palmer and William Blake; this is contemporary art that does not turn its back on the past.

"My history with the Tate goes back to my teenage years when I used to get the overnight bus to London, go and see the show at the Tate, go to the National Gallery and then get the next bus home," he says. "It was the only way, at that time, of seeing a lot of art and, of course, the Tate had the collection of not just British art but everything. There were a lot of memories tied up with it."

Wright was pretty miserable at school, he recalls, but drawing was something he could do. "There was no art in my background, it wasn't something that was easy to do in the context, and it wasn't encouraged. I think it took me a while to realise that art still happened.

"I used to go to the library and get out books about Leonardo and just assume that art happened at that time. I really think I might have been 12 or 13 before I realised."

It may be because of that experience that he is keen to understand the Turner, not as some elite insider event, but as an opportunity to show his work to a much wider audience. "The fact that 70,000 people who don't normally look at contemporary art will be encouraged to go and see art in this place, I find that really interesting. In a way, it's a more real audience than the audience I normally work with."

Inevitably, as Wright prepares to return to the gallery, we must raise the question of winning. Does it matter?

I've interviewed a lot of artists on this point and they are often diffident or embarrassed. In contrast, he is frank. "Yes of course it does," he says. "I can say churlishly that if I was interested in competition I would have become an athlete and, of course, at one level it doesn't matter… there are some very good artists who haven't won or who have never been nominated, but saying that, I know I'll be disappointed when I don't win."

It's not a matter of status, he says. "I think the reason for that is that I put everything into what I do." And, with that, Richard Wright must get back to work.

The Turner Prize Exhibition, Tate Britain, London, until 3 January

This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on December 6, 2009