Stuart Pearson Wright is widely considered one of the most gifted portraitists of his generation with twenty-seven paintings in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery .

But Wright refers to his own paintings as 'pseudo portraits' presenting as they do a subject's 'inner state' rather than just an accurate record of their outward appearance. Wright’s powers of observation as a reluctant portraitist circumnavigate familiar stereotypes and settings to create genuinely moving and perceptive portraits of real individuals. Everything happens in The Blue Room: a self-contained 'delivery' room within the exhibition specially constructed by the artist. An old man expires with his son at his bedside, the two of them cramped in a compressed space. In another painting a couple make love, on the same dingy bed, and in another one, in the blue delivery room, a child is born.

In 'Alas, Poor Yorick' (self-portrait) SPW is cast in a parody of Shakespeare’s Hamlet during his 'Alas, Poor Yorick' speech.

Role-play and self-parody are a continuing theme in SPW’s work and this painting brings to mind the series of self-portraits-as-cowboys and posed, artificial smiles which peppered his previous exhibition. This a view of humanity filtered through Samuel Beckett and Richard Dawkins, paintings unashamedly dark and some equally unashamedly celebratory of friendship and love.

Monday 7 October - Saturday 16 November 2013