WTF?:Richard Wright @ the Gagosian.

What the fuck!? It gets weirder, it gets ever more pointless. Richard Wright's exhibition at the Gagosian on Davies Street (which finished last week so you've missed it) really doesn't make much sense at all. It's one small room, which I shared with a nonplussed invigilator, and a few abstract paintings, a few books (including Huxley's Doors of Perception) with abstract squiggles on them, and what appears to be a psychedelic gym locker.

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What could it all mean? There's certainly nothing in the gallery to tell you so instead, on returning from the exhibition, I retreated to the Gagosian's website to see if I could make any sense of the work. These works are intended to "invest architectural spaces with new optical and associative complexity" and "alter the viewer's perception of space".

To be fair, the Op Art style gym locker did actually do that. The other works, though colourful and pleasantly distracting, did not so much. Of course the press release has to go further and it's not long before it starts touching on mythology, religion, literature, and psychoanalysis. Oh - and Russian Constructivism too.

 

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Phew! Was worried they'd missed that out. The Constructivist art of El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko is great and I can see echoes of it in Wright's work but it's hardly on a par. There's not much I can say about it (that's why I'm leaning so heavily on the press release although I do, when it's pretentious enough, enjoy taking the piss out of press releases in these blogs). All I can really do is present it you.

Do you look at it and have thoughts about mythology, religion, literature, and psychoanalysis? You probably don't do you? You probably look at it, like I did, and think "what the fuck is this?". Somebody gets paid for making this stuff.

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