Richard Wright & Samuel Beckett

28 June - 5 July 2008

Wrights choice for this exhibition was Samuel Beckett's minimalist masterpiece 'Quad II', which was screened as a continual, large-scale projection. 'Quad II' was made by Beckett as an experimental play for television in the 80s in which 4 anonymous, white-gowned and hooded figures process in repetitive, shuffling loops - only ever turning left - in their perfectly choreographed progress around a white quadrangle.

 

Richard Wright (b. 1960, lives and works in Glasgow) is celebrated for his exquisitely ephemeral wall drawings, conceived and executed according to the architecture of the place in which he is working and often existing only for the duration of their exhibition. Employing a highly developed and refined lexicon of colours, motifs and patterns, Wright uses great technical skill to render intensely complex and beautiful configurations which can be both vast in scale, or tiny, incidental interventions. The work for this exhibition was made over a week within the shelves of the front gallery's Georgian wall press, a shimmering arrangement of myriad individual marks rendered in fragile gold leaf.

 

In the work of both artists there exists a dialectic between random pattern and deliberate progress, but in placing the two together, one can see this articulated by very different means.