(c) Stuart Pearson Wright

Stuart Pearson Wright: Halfboy

Fri 2 November 2018 - Wed 6 February 2019

The Heong Gallery

About Halfboy
Even as The Children Act 1975 gave adopted children the right to their birth records upon maturity, the National Health Service was providing assisted conception services using anonymous donor sperm. Conceived in a South London NHS facility in 1975, artist Stuart Pearson Wright will never have access to his paternal heritage, a loss that has evolved from childhood confusion to the remorse of a father of two young children. Halfboy came about as a result of a chance encounter with a box of childhood photographs, a rare find as most such mementos were lost due to the peripatetic lifestyle imposed by the artist’s mother in the 1980s. Reconstructed from photographs and personal memories, the paintings that make up Halfboy are imbued with a portraitist’s eye for detail, bringing to life the minutiae of time and place. Humour and pathos jostle for attention in this autobiographical series, which will be supplemented by works made in the aftermath of a personal tragedy that unfolded upon his move to Suffolk.

About Stuart Pearson Wright
Stuart Pearson Wright (b. 1975) trained at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, during which time he won the BP Portrait Awards Travel Award (1998) awarded by the National Portrait Gallery (NPG). The subsequent exhibition at the NPG opened to rave reviews and Wright was heralded ‘a Hogarth for our times’ by Godfrey Barker of the Evening Standard. In 2000, he won the BP Portrait Award for Gallus Gallus with Still Life and Presidents and was awarded a commission to paint J. K. Rowling for the collection of NPG. In 2006, Wright’s exhibition Most people are other people, a collection of forty portrait drawings of British and Irish actors was exhibited at the NPG and National Theatre, London. Recent exhibitions of Wright’s work were held at Riflemaker, London, in 2010, 2012 and 2013 and his works are in public collections including The British Museum, Government Art Collection, Ashmolean Museum, Fitzwilliam Museum and many others.

The Heong Gallery at Downing College
The Heong Gallery at Downing College opened in February 2016 as a new gallery for exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. The Gallery was designed by Caruso St John Architects (winners of RIBA Stirling Prize 2016) and so named in gratitude for the generous benefaction of Alwyn Heong. It won a RIBA East Award 2017.

Previous Exhibitions:
Generation Painting 1955–65: British Art from the Collection of Sir Alan Bowness Ai Weiwei: Cubes and Trees Portraits of Place: Works from Kettle’s Yard & Richard Long When the Heavens Meet the Earth: Selected Works from Robert Devereux’s Sina Jina Collection The Best of All Possible Worlds: Quentin Blake and The Folio Society Dame Elisabeth Frink: Larger than Life Stephen Chambers: The Court of Redonda Do I Have To Draw You A Picture?

Cost: Free