Austin Wright
'Sensor'
1987 Aluminium on wooden base
23.3 x 54 x 54 cm
Austin Wright (1911-1997)
Austin Wright was born in Chester a hundred years ago. He spent his early life in Wales before graduating in Modern Languages at Oxford and taking up teaching. He moved to Upper Poppleton near York in 1946 where he lived with his wife Sue. By 1954 he had given up teaching and devoted himself to drawing and sculpture until illness in his last years made this impossible.
Wrights early success was fairly rapid. After exhibiting in “Modern Art in Yorkshire” in 1955 alongside Paolozzi, Armitage and Frink he was invited by The British Council to show in “Younger British Sculptors”, an exhibition that toured Sweden in 1956. This exhibition included Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, William Turnbull and Geoffrey Clarke but it was of Wright that the Guardian art critic, Charles Sewter, wrote: “It would not be outrageous to claim that Wright is the most gifted sculptor working in Britain today”.
In 1957 Wright was awarded the purchase prize at the Sao Paulo Biennale This was the same year that Ben Nicholson won the painting prize.
Within the next few years Wright exhibited in London at Roland, Browse and Delbanco, The Leicester Galleries and the New Art Centre. In 1961 he was awarded a Gregory Fellowship in sculpture at Leeds University, previous recipients had been Reg Butler, Kenneth Armitage, and Hubert Dalwood. This award enabled Wright to some extent to withdraw from the capital and work quietly in Upper Poppleton.
As Timothy Rogers wrote in Wright’s obituary in the Guardian:
“Diffident, modest, as quick to discount praise as to make light of disappointment,
deeply rooted in his adopted Yorkshire, he was no more willing to court favours
from the metropolis than were London critics to travel north.” Michael
Lyons wrote in “Sculpture” in 1997 that “… it
was also true that he could have been better known and many people were aware
of this. It was not in his nature to seek the limelight, and I think he needed
the peace and quiet which allowed him to produce the wonderful, sensitive and ‘innocent’ works
which he did. Over exposure would have destroyed his talent and I think he
knew it”
This exhibition is not the major museum retrospective that one day will surely happen but an opportunity to see some of the drawings that have never been exhibited before. For many years these works have been in a chest in a bedroom in Upper Poppleton and they will be a revelation to many who don’t know the work of Austin Wright as well as a delight to his many loyal and admiring collectors. The exhibition also includes a small selection of some of Wright’s sculptures so that the drawings can be put in context.
Wright wrote of drawing:
“A batch of drawing occurs spontaneously – there is a sudden exciting
find. I am recording ways of travelling across new territory and the result
has to look after itself. There is a quirkiness about the actual object which
is beyond anything I could invent and I feel there’s a potential of great
subtlety and riches. Also the experience of seeing for the first time is unique.
Some drawings belong to precise times and can’t be repeated. No sculpture
may result for some time, if at all. In the meantime there is another phase
when ideas are turned over, in small line drawings, playing with proportions
and structure, hardening the forms. This may go on obsessively, spasmodically,
for years.”
It is comforting to know, in an era where clamouring for celebrity is an accepted behaviour, that Austin Wright’s quiet and long years of dedication, skill and vision have produced works of lasting and true value.
John Hart