Background
Gary Wragg was born in 1946 in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom.
Gary Wragg was born in 1946 in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom.
Gary Wragg first attended the High Wycombe School of Art before moving to London. There he studied at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, where he won a Rotary Travelling Prize to Florence and Rome as well as the Lord Carron Prize awarded by Bryan Robertson. He continued post-graduate painting at the Slade School of Fine Art and won a Boise Travelling Scholarship to USA and Mexico, which he took in 1972. He also received an Arts Council grant in 1975 and a London Arts Association grant in 1978.
Gary Wragg’s trips to America, first to New York and Provincetown to visit Jack Tworkov, between 1971 and 1974, and the time he spent in Springs, East Hampton with Willem de Kooning in 1985, were highly significant in his artistic development and can be regarded as the start of his artistic formation.
His first one-man exhibition was held at Acme Gallery in London in 1976, with a subsequent successful show in 1979. Gary Wragg exhibited regularly at the Nicola Jacobs Gallery in London between 1980 and 1989 and held a series of important solo and group exhibitions at Flowers East in London between 1996 and 2010. In his work Gary Wragg explores from what he calls his ‘treasure chest’, a traditional lineage of Poussin, Titian, Rubens, Goya, Delacroix, Cézanne, Bonnard, Matisse, Pollock and de Kooning.
Since the late seventies, Gary Wragg’s love for painting has integrated with his passion for the Chinese martial art of Tai Chi Chuan. Wragg has found that the gestures and controlled movements of the discipline have formed a parallel in the painting and his work has subsequently evolved from the vocabulary and legacy of Abstract Expressionism to his investigation of energy painting. Wragg currently lives and works in London.
Gary Wragg adhered to the artistic traditions of Abstract Expressionism and New Casualism. His ongoing explorations and contributions to the painting of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries wrestle with the dynamics of bodily energy in relation to abstraction and figuration. Stemming from the vocabulary of European, American and Oriental painting, Wragg’s art is active in reinventing the life of mark-making tactility, color, and the optical/physical presence. In the remote and temporal imagery of the Internet age, he puts emphasis on the feeling and passion of the ‘here and now’ of the painting regardless of trends rife in art.
Quotations: "One of the problems people have when they look at painting is that they are full up to the brim with notions of what painting is and what it should be, and meaning, and so on, and so on."
Gary Wragg is a genuine improviser.
