In conversation with Richard Wright: celebrating 10 years of the Great Hall ceiling

Join us for a special evening marking 10 years since the remarkable contemporary artwork by Turner Prize-winning artist Richard Wright was installed on the ceiling of the Great Hall in the Queen’s House.

In this exclusive conversation, Wright will be joined by art historian and curator, Christine Riding (Director of Collections and Research at the National Gallery and formerly Senior Curator of Art at Royal Museums Greenwich). Together, they will reflect on the inspiration, creation, and legacy of Wright’s striking installation, commissioned in 2016 to transform the previously empty ceiling of the Great Hall.

The space had been without a ceiling painting for centuries. Between 1636 and 1638, Orazio Gentileschi, working with his daughter Artemisia Gentileschi, was commissioned by Queen Henrietta Maria to create a magnificent cycle of nine canvases celebrating the Allegory of Peace and the Arts under the British Crown. Installed in the ceiling of the Great Hall in the Queen’s House, the paintings remained there until 1708, when Queen Anne gifted them to her close confidante, Sarah Churchill, and they were removed to Marlborough House.

For more than three centuries, the ceiling of the Great Hall was empty. In 2016, Christine Riding commissioned Richard Wright to respond to this historic space with a contemporary work that engages sensitively with the architecture and light of the Queen’s House.

In this event, Wright and Riding will explore how the artist drew inspiration from the building’s elegant architecture to create a design that both honours the past and transforms the experience of the Great Hall today. Discover the story behind the artwork’s conception and installation and consider its place within the continuing history of one of London’s most celebrated historic interiors.

Painting is an act that connects reality and consciousness. It is more than a collective codification of signs. It is a performance that awakens the delirium of vision.
Richard Wright

Richard Wright is known for large-scale and site-specific – but often temporary – painted and applied metal-leaf installations and leaded window works that invest architectural spaces with new optical and associative complexity. 

Shifting between illusionism and abstraction, his projects alter the viewer’s perception of space. Incorporating graphic and ornamental elements, his work often alludes to Minimalism and Renaissance art as well as to commercial images. In his stylistically diverse works on paper, Wright employs ink drawing, gilding, printmaking, enamel, and watercolor painting techniques that Camden Art Centre director Martin Clark described as having an "allover quality that seemed to exceed the limits of the paper, a field of indeterminate shapes and matter: drifting, coalescing, accreting and dissipating, like the curl of vapour in an alchemist’s alembic."

Wright was born in 1960 in London and moved to Scotland with his family when he was young; he now lives and works in Norfolk, England, and Glasgow, Scotland. He graduated with a BA from Edinburgh College of Art in 1982 and an MA from Glasgow School of Art in 1995. 

Initially producing figurative painting, Wright became disillusioned with the methodology in the late 1980s and abandoned his art practice altogether for two years to train as a professional sign painter. While studying in Glasgow he destroyed all his work on canvas and began painting directly onto the walls of exhibition spaces, often focusing on corners and other marginal areas to emphasize the interaction of his imagery with its built environment.

Wright’s earliest site-responsive works are characterized by geometric shapes, but the artist soon began to also adopt motifs inspired by Gothic iconography and other visual disciplines such as tattoo illustration. The first solo exhibition of his work took place in 1994 at Transmission Gallery in Glasgow, and he quickly came to be considered – alongside Martin Boyce, Douglas Gordon, Simon Starling, and Cathy Wilkes – one of the key artists to have emerged from the city over the course of that decade. 

Since then, Wright’s work has been shown in major exhibitions worldwide, and he has also taken public institutional commissions. In 2009, Wright was awarded the Turner Prize.