About

Born Mt. Gilead, Ohio, Wright lived in NY in the 1980s where his painting techniques were influenced by the TV maestro Bob Ross. Selected for the artist residency at the Banff Centre (Alberta, Canada) by Canadian pop artist Greg Curnoe, he later relocated to London. His work has been curated by Paul Noble at City Racing Gallery, Stephen Friedman Gallery (London UK) and Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s ‘Life/Live’ at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (Paris, FR). Collaborative exhibitions with Cathy Ward include PS1/MoMA (NY USA); ‘Transromantik’, Chamber of Pop Culture, The Horse Hospital (London UK); Mercer Union (Toronto CA); ‘Destiny Manifest’ at Southwark Park Galleries (London UK) and ‘Tender Vessels’ at Aspex Gallery (Portsmouth UK). He engineered the virtual side of ‘Chain Letter’, the largest group exhibition ever, conceived by Doug Harvey & Christian Cummings for the London satellite: Swarm of Consciousness. His landscapes and portraits of country and western stars are found in collections in Europe and Nashville including that of George Jones.

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Eric Wright seems to be frequently deploying techniques in which value judgements are difficult to make and not easily able to be adhered to stable yardsticks. He often makes it impossible for us to work out whether the work is ironic sophistication or genuinely a piece of outsider art. Only by piecing together the clues that are on offer do we begin to understand what is less of a Deconstructivist practice and more of a ‘reconstructivist’ practice in which available visual languages cannot purely be judged from the canonical perspective of European philosophical thought but are, instead, pitted against the fundamentally autonomous traditions growing out of disjointed and isolated settler and fringe communities.
–Ken Pratt

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Brief Timeline