Tuesday 22nd until Sunday 27th November
The Gallery in Redchurch St
50 Redchurch Street
London E2 7DP
In this reaffirmation of portrait painting and the power of the individual, Tim Wright takes a contemporary cast of full-length, clothed figures and assembles them to reveal their splendid isolation. The subjects are combined and recombined in indeterminate social spaces - "like people plonked in a room with people they don't know" - without injuring their integrity.
Against the spirit of the age, Wright eschews celebrity subjects and cropped images in favour of a classical tradition of portraiture which privileges the body, the clothed form and the painted surface. While the characters may be drawn from obscurity, they assume roles which show off their inner and outer lives in life-size grandeur. By insisting on full scale, Wright sets up and proposes that appreciation can best be derived from a critical distance.
This is portraiture that starts with flesh and blood and alchemises into a virtuous reality of paint, layered with the past.
"The proper study of Mankind is Man"
(Alexander Pope, Essay on Man)
Christina Hemsley 2011
