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Painter, draughtsman and printmaker, born in Northampton, who graduated with honours from the Slade School of Fine Art, 1995–9, taught by Norman Norris. Wright obtained national press coverage in 2001 after he won First Prize in the BP Portrait Award with his painting The Six Presidents of the Royal Academy. In that, six notabilities sitting around a tea table were tinged with a surreal quality characteristic of Wright’s narrative and portrait work. Wright termed the £25,000 prize “a glass of water in the desert…the difference between having a career and working in Burger King,” and launched a fierce attack on the Tate for “simply buying conceptual pieces and ignoring the total abundance of figurative painting and sculpture in this country.

Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)


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