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Artist Bio
Steve Wright is a contemporary painter based in London. Born in Bath, England in 1975, he studied Fine Art at Wimbledon School of Art and Newcastle University, gaining his MFA in 2001. His work has been included in exhibitions around the UK and in the USA. Solo exhibitions have taken place in London, Leeds, and Cambridge, including ‘Perpetual Motion’ in August 2025. Artist Statement Steve Wright makes abstract paintings that contain layers of meaning behind their vibrant surfaces. Small objects are transformed through a process of ‘Cosmic Abstraction’ into meditations on time, space, and the potential for an image to represent several things at once. Inspired by the slow spinning motion of space stations and spiral galaxies, recent works employ rotational symmetry and looping shapes to create a sense of movement, contraction and expansion. “I’m interested in how a small thing like a child’s fidget toy or a decorative tile can be the starting point for a painting that is simultaneously small and expansive, playful and deep, suggestive of molecular activity and astronomical phenomena. It’s all collapsed into a single motif”. The square format and concentric composition, borrowed from Kenneth Noland’s ‘Target’ paintings, liberate the imagery from any sense of being earth-bound, with the sky above the land. there is no ‘up’ or ‘down’ in outer space. However, Steve Wright rejects Noland’s flat colours in favour of richly worked surfaces that owe more to the late paintings of Jack Whitten and Prunella Clough. Earlier works depict vehicles and other objects, in relation to the space around them or the ground plane, creating a sense of suspension in place and time. |
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