Stuart Pearson Wright

A Hug From The Art World is thrilled to present Nothing to Worry About, Stuart Pearson Wright's first New York solo exhibition, and his first exhibition anywhere in the United States. This mid-career survey brings together paintings and drawings from the mid-1990s to present day.

Stuart Pearson Wright's arresting images have stayed etched in my visual memory since I first encountered them in the late 1990s. I remember my father coming home from London after visiting Stuart's studio and announcing that he had found the next Lucian Freud. Anyone who is familiar with my father knows that his enthusiasm is insatiable and contagious. In many ways, that enthusiasm is why we are here today.

Like the early work of Lucian Freud, Stuart Pearson Wright's paintings pair a hyper-detailed style with a sense of psychological unease. I have long been drawn to the art of the early twentieth century, and I see in Stuart's work the same psychology of the uncanny that runs through Egon Schiele's haunting, skeletal works of 1907 to 1918. Schiele was a major influence on Freud of course. He brought an unflinching, raw approach to the human body, with angular lines, contorted forms, and a relentless focus on aging and physical imperfection. Above all, he brought psychological vulnerability and an intense, confrontational self-examination. Schiele’s lineage extends and reaches into the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) of 1920s Germany, exemplified by Otto Dix's Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden. It then crosses the Atlantic to Grant Wood's American Gothic and the American Regionalists. Stuart's paintings belong in this company.

Stuart's paintings speak to something deep inside both my father and me. We respond to art viscerally: when something reaches our core, we are physically moved. I believe that response comes from a kind of generational trauma. It isn't self-pity. It is quite the opposite. It is what happens when a sorrow that can't be explained finds a visual form, and our feelings, both joyful and painful, are understood without words, it’s sentient. That recognition is powerful, and Stuart's work offers it again and again.

About fifteen years ago, before I had a gallery of my own, Stuart visited Los Angeles. I set up meetings with a number of galleries, hoping they would see his genius as I did. To thank me for the introductions, he offered to paint my son, Jack, who was then six months old. That painting was later given to my father for his 70th birthday (he is now 83), and I kept the preparatory drawing also a gift. Stuart's generosity knows no bounds.

Patience is a virtue, and better late than never. But more than anything, this exhibition proves another old saying: if you want a thing done well, do it yourself. So that is what I am doing.

Nothing To Worry About includes many works on loan from private collections, among them my father's Frank Cohen Collection and Stuart's own collection. Additional works are presented in collaboration with Flowers Gallery, which represents the artist.

It feels right to bookend my time at 515 West 19th Street with this deeply personal exhibition. Nearly three decades after I first saw his work, I could not be prouder to host Stuart Pearson Wright work in New York.

“In 1998 I was visiting New York and drew a sketch of a twelfth century carving of the Madonna and Child at the Met Museum. I’d been thinking a lot about the way medieval artists made the baby Jesus look like a middle-aged man. I found that fascinating. It seemed to reference a reality where time wasn’t linear, where the adult was present in the child and vice versa. I decided to paint a picture of a mother and baby and explore these ideas. Around that time, I was travelling around Britain as part of a travel award given to me by the National Portrait Gallery and came upon a family in the rather bleak Northern town of Middlesbrough. I took photos of them and sketched them. It was the confluence of these two sources that gave rise to the painting Middlesbrough. I painted it whilst a student at the Slade in London, mostly from my head. Initially, however, the Madonna looked very much like me and somehow that didn’t work.

Then I found myself travelling on the tube opposite a young woman who had the perfect face for the picture. I asked to paint her and persuaded her to come tho the Slade for a sitting. She was an American student. I never saw her again and sadly never got to show her the painting. It seems very fitting that this painting should now find itself in New York, the place of its genesis.”

—Stuart Pearson Wright

Stuart Pearson Wright is an artist living and working in Norfolk, England.

Born in 1975 in Northampton, Stuart drew with enthusiasm from an early age and after considering becoming an actor, finally opted for art school. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.

During his time at the Slade, Stuart won a travel award from the National Portrait Gallery as part of its 1998 BP Portrait Awards. He drove around Britain in a van, producing sketches and paintings as he went. The resulting exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery was called From Eastbourne to Edinburgh: A Painter's Odyssey. Godfrey Barker in the Evening Standard labelled Stuart "A Hogarth for our Times" and Brian Sewell was to describe the paintings as "images of such eccentricity and even madness that they fit perfectly the English tradition of the odd man out: the Blake, Spencer, Cecil Collins line, and the largest of them should at once have been bought by the Tate".

In 2000, a chance encounter with the actor John Hurt in Old Compton Street led to a small portrait on oak, which was subsequently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery for their collection. This was to be the first of many of Stuart’s portrait acquisitions by the NPG, to include the film director Mike Leigh and actors Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall and Daniel Radcliffe.

Earlier that year Stuart's career had taken an unexpected turn when he won the first prize in the BP Portrait Awards for his controversial group portrait Gallus gallus with Still Life and Presidents.

Stuart made the headlines in 2004 with the release of a portrait of the Duke of Edinburgh. The painting featured a bare-chested Prince with a bluebottle on one shoulder. The portrait, which had been commissioned by the Royal Society of Arts, was refused by them. Later that year Stuart curated an exhibition at the Jerwood Space in London called Being Present featuring the work of eight painters.

Another commission which made the headlines was a portrait of the children's author J.K. Rowling. Commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery. This portrait took Stuart nearly a year to complete and saw his work moving in a new direction. The portrait was conceived in the manner of a regency toy theatre, with the figure painted onto a flat cut- out, mounted in a three-dimensional space.

Stuart's interest in the theatre, and the concept of artifice led to his next exhibition in 2006, called Most People are Other People: a collection of forty portrait drawings of British and Irish actors. The work was exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery and the National Theatre in London.

In 2009, Stuart co-ran a project space on Vyner Street called Five Hundred Dollars. He curated a number of exhibitions including a group drawing exhibition called Kunskog which featured the work of Gillian Wearing, Michael Landy, Paul Noble and Ged Quinn, amongst others.

Between 2010 and 2013, Stuart had three exhibitions at Riflemaker in Soho, London: I Remember You, Together in Electric Dreams and Love and Death. During that period Stuart’s work expanded beyond painting to include film, sculpture and music. He made a film installation with the actress Keira Knightley called Maze and recorded a vinyl album of country and western classics which featured as the backdrop to I Remember You.

In 2018, Stuart mounted a solo exhibition, Halfboy, at The Heong Gallery in Cambridge. Humour and pathos jostled for attention in this autobiographical series which had been four years in the making. Reconstructed from photographs and personal memories, the paintings that make up Halfboy explored Stuart’s grief at not knowing his father’s identity. Stuart had been conceived through artificial insemination. Stuart was not to know it at the time, but in due course he would identify his father through a DNA test and would go on to meet both his father and his extended paternal family and be welcomed by them all.

Halfboy travelled to Snape Maltings in Aldeburgh and the School of Art Gallery in Aberystwyth in 2019 and two paintings from the exhibition were shown in the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition in the same year.

Since 2020, Stuart has been represented by Flowers Gallery and he has had two solo exhibitions with them: Miscellanalects in London in 2023 and Roadkill in Hong Kong in 2025.

During the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee in 2022, Stuart received a private commission from the collected Royal Staff at Buckingham Palace to produce portraits of the Queen’s corgis.

He has also founded a folk festival in his local town in Suffolk which is based on a local werewolf legend concerning a mythical beast called Black Shuck.

Stuart’s work is featured in a number of national and international museum collections, including The British Museum, British Government Art Collection, The Royal Collection, the Collection of the late Queen Elizabeth, The Rhode Island School of Design Museum, National Gallery of Ireland, Royal Society of Arts, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Ashmolean Museum, British Academy, and the Aberdeen Art Gallery.