Biography
Stuart Pearson Wright is an artist living and working in East London. He grew up in Eastbourne, a seaside town in southern England.
Born in 1975 in Northampton, Stuart drew with enthusiasm from an early age and after flirting with the idea of becoming an actor, finally opted for art school. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where his work received an ambivalent response from the tutors.
During his time at the Slade, Stuart won a travel award from the National Portrait Gallery as part of its 1998 BP Portrait Awards. He set out in a van on a trip around Britain, producing sketches and paintings as he went. The resulting exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery was called From Eastbourne to Edinburgh-a Painter's Odyssey. Godfrey Barker in the Evening standard labelled Stuart "A Hogarth for our Times" (see Press Cuttings) and Brian Sewell was to describe the paintings as "images of such eccentricity and even madness that they fit perfectly the English tradition of the odd man out, the Blake, Spencer, Cecil Collins line, and the largest of them (very large and very mad) should at once have been bought by the Tate". Instead, the painting concerned: Tisbury Court 1999- a Tragicomedy , a large canvas with a neoclassical proscenium frame was bought by novelist and disgraced peer Geoffrey Archer.
After graduating from the Slade, Stuart returned to Eastbourne for a year. Working in a studio above his Mother's antique shop.
In 2000 Stuart returned to London. A chance encounter with the actor John Hurt in Old Compton Street led to a small portrait on oak, which was subsequently bought by the National Portrait Gallery along with a portrait of the Ballet dancer Adam Cooper.
Earlier that year Stuart's career had taken an unexpected turn when he won the first prize in the BP Portrait Awards for his painting Gallus gallus with Still Life and Presidents. During the course of a telephone conversation with a journalist, Stuart made a flippant, unguarded and regrettable comment about the Director of the Tate: Sir Nicholas Serota, suggesting he should be sacked. Next day, after the announcement of the prizes this story made the front page of the Telegraph. A brief media frenzy ensued.
Stuart was to make the headlines again in 2004 with the release of a portrait of the Duke of Edinburgh. The painting featured a bare-chested Prince with a bluebottle on one shoulder. The portrait, which had been commissioned by the Royal Society of Arts, was unexpectedly refused. The tabloid newspapers enthusiastically printed a number of the Duke's characteristic responses to his own portrait.
Later that year Stuart organized an exhibition at the Jerwood Space in London called Being Present. This featured the work of eight painters.
Another commission which inevitably made the headlines, was a portrait of the children's author J.K.Rowling. Commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery. This portrait took Stuart nearly a year to complete and saw his work moving in a new direction. The portrait was conceived in the manner of a regency toy theatre, with the figure painted onto a flat cut-out, mounted in a three-dimensional space.
Stuart's interest in the theatre, and the concept of artifice led to his next exhibition in 2006, called Most people are other people: a collection of forty portrait drawings of British and Irish actors. The work was shown at the National Portrait Gallery and the National Theatre in London.
In 2007 Stuart had a solo painting show at Galerie Huebner in Frankfurt called The Hole in the Bucket.
In 2009 Stuart co-ran a project space on Vyner Street called Five Hundred Dollars. He curated a group drawing exhibition called Kunskog which featured the work of Gillian Wearing, Michael Landy, Paul Noble and Ged Quinn, amongst others.
Stuart is now represented by Riflemaker and his first solo show there opens on May 5th 2010.