Rearview mirror

Prats Nogueras Blanchard is delighted to present the third solo exhibition at the gallery by Richard Wentworth.

Richard Wentworth’s work has reshaped the traditional definitions of sculpture and photography since the late 1970s, establishing the artist as a key figure in the New British Sculpture. Wentworth speaks about the way materials and objects migrate, their meanings merge, separate and reconvene. By transforming and manipulating objects, Wentworth pays attention to their form and function, their materiality and etymology, broadening our understanding of them by breaking the conventional system of classification. This exhibition presents a compendium of fundamental gestures within Wentworth's practice.

Richard Wentworth’s London studio houses the layers of 40 years of vocabularies, where the elisions of form and function are manifested—what Wentworth humorously refers to as a kind of “brain scan”.

“London is a city which is always mending itself, really an accident of being a port at the bottom corner of the pocket shaped land known as Britain.

My studio for 40 years is not far from the River Thames, at exactly the point where the River Fleet once flowed. In the middle of the 19th Century, they put the river in a pipe and invented an ‘underground railway’ called The Metropolitan Line. This is what gave the name ‘Metro’ to the world.

My studio overlooks the tube as it came to be known a reminder of the complexities of history and urbanisation every time I look out of the window.

Precisely how anything comes together in any work of art is febrile, and my own ‘method’ is largely a mixture of the haptic and the wanderings of a mature mind.

There is no easy way to explain how I work, but of course I work amongst all the ghosts - the materials, the images, the form, the content and all those artists who I have conversations with across time”.

-Richard Wentworth

Richard Wentworth was born in Samoa in 1947, he lives and works in London.

Recent solo exhibitions have been held at SWG3, with Victoria Miguel, Glasgow International, Glasgow (2018); Galerie Azzedine Alaïa, Paris, France (2017); Peckham, London (2015); 52nd Venice Biennale (2009); Tate Liverpool (2005); Artangel, London (2002); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany (1998); Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (1998); Stedelijk Museum, Hertogenbosch (1994); and Serpentine Gallery, London (1993).

He has also been part of group exhibitions, among the most recent ones: Redcar Contemporary Art Gallery, Redcar (2024); Beano: The Art of Breaking the Rules, Somerset House, London (2021); Found , Foundling Museum, London (2016); Double Act: Art and Comedy , MAC Belfast, Belfast (2016); History is Now, Hayward Gallery, London (2015); Somewhat Abstract, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham (2014).