Austin Wright
Stalk and Stem,
Aluminium
Austin Wright, when exhibiting alongside Kenneth Armitage and Reg Butler in the fifties was described by Charles Sewter in the Guardian as ‘The most gifted sculptor working in Britain today’
Wright lived in Upper Poppleton near York for almost half a century, working undisturbed by the social art scene in London.
His work was widely distributed across the north of England through sales to private collectors and museums but was rarely seen in the south.
“They are highly expressive gestural works characterising particular activities like leaning into the wind, walking, talking and reading. There is a clear, distinctive quality about these works, a good sense of scale and passionate eloquence which brought Wright critical success and recognition.
These early sculptures mapped out important features which became the key to larger, more abstract work, for example, relationships of separate forms, a growing concern for negative spaces, pressure points, stretching and the forming of strength through thinness”
Charlotte Mullins writing in Art Review, June 2000
In 1994 James Hamilton produced a monograph on Austin Wright, published by Lund Humphries and the Henry Moore Foundation. Hamilton ends this outstanding tribute to the artist with the following comment . . .
‘that younger artists found sculptural excitement in plant forms and utensils in the 1980s gives no particular credit to Wright; but what it does indicate is that Austin Wright has been treading these same long paths for quite some time already”