Cindy Wright
(Herentals,
1972 )
Cindy Wright studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the National Higher Institute in Antwerp, the city where she lives and works to this day. Initially, she used an impasto style when she interpreted her model or an element from her surroundings into a painterly image. But she soon evolved towards a photorealistic style, which nevertheless differs from the American Hyperrealism of the 1970s. Wright always puts the pictorial at the centre: the touch of her brush and the texture of the paint are recognisable. She starts from photographs of compositions in her studio or outdoor shots, which she then manipulates – in search of the desired atmosphere – and enlarges. Wright creates portraits, still lifes and other large-format paintings that depict fragility and transience in an almost sterile manner. By approaching her subjects purely painterly, she curiously questions, without shocking or moralising, the extent to which objective imaging is possible and whether what is called ugly or repulsive can also be perceived as beauty.
