Lisa Contucci and Clifton Wright: Time Spaghetti

29 Jul 2025-11 Jan 2026

Overview

Time Spaghetti brings together bold new works by artists Lisa Contucci and Clifton Wright, with additional pieces by Stanley Galton displayed alongside works in our Collection. Created in response to our historic paintings and architecture, this will be the artists’ first major presentation in a public UK institution.

Expect colour, movement, and playful twists on tradition as the artists explore their personal connections to art history. Inspired by travels to Venice and Rome, and by time spent with the Gallery’s Collection, their works dance across centuries, drawing unexpected lines between past and present.

Contucci, Wright and Galton are members of the Peckham-based collective, Intoart, which celebrates its 25-year anniversary in 2025. A pioneering multidisciplinary art, design and craft studio, Intoart champions the equity and visibility of learning disabled and autistic artists.

Meet the artists:

Lisa Contucci
Contucci starts her process with photography, building an archive comprising various snapshots of details - which are later translated into her paintings. Her abstract works draw attention to the materials shown in the historic paintings from the costumes depicted to the fabric of the walls and furniture. For example, Contucci’s Moving Heads (2024) echoes the palette of the vibrant clothing seen in Poussin’s The Triumph of David (c.1631-3), while we see the theatrical scene Sébastien Bourdon’s A Brawl in the Guard Room (c.1640s) of referenced in the chaos and movement present in Beat and Bite (2024).

Playing with perspective, Contucci frequently moves her works as she applies paint, displacing the ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ of the canvas, working and reworking them. Experimenting with different materials from acrylic paint to marble dust, she brushes bright blotches of colour into intriguing patterns and etches experimental pencil marks onto the surface.

Clifton Wright
In his large-scale drawings, Wright considers the relationship between the human figure and buildings. His oil and soft pastel drawings reimagine anatomy, accentuating the scale of limbs, eyes and mouths. Wright is especially drawn to the way that French seventeenth-century painter Nicolas Poussin worked from architectural models. Wright merges past and the present, weaving in contemporary pop culture references ranging from Ghostbusters to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

When asked about his response to the historic paintings at the Gallery, Clifton Wright, said: "I was looking at these images and I was thinking about the multiverse and timelines…and [the word] spaghetti fitted perfectly with that… I have free rein to draw what I want to draw. I’m copying [the works in the Dulwich Picture Gallery Collection] but at the same time I’m trying to elevate them.”

Stanley Galton
Stanley Galton's playful drawings will be presented directly alongside the historic paintings that inspired them. Galton’s bold retelling of these well-known stories draws viewers into his vivid imagination.

Time Spaghetti part of Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Unlocking Paintings series: thought-provoking displays that present new perspectives on the Gallery’s Collection.

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