Barry Finan
‘WRRIGHHTINNGSERRSS’
24 October to 12 December 2025
Moon Grove is proud to present ‘WRRIGHHTINNGSERRSS’, Manchester-based artist Barry Finan’s debut solo exhibition that contains new and recent work, following his receipt of a prestigious Paul Hamlyn Award for artists in late-2024. Finan’s practice is rooted in text and the physical presence of words. Working across ceramics, drawings, scrolls and large-scale wall pieces, he has developed his own visual language, which includes repetitions, consonance and invented phrases that push the boundaries of writing and sculpture. His work is both deeply personal and culturally resonant, communicating a sense of rhythm and urgency as well as humour connected to a northern English working-class dialect. Raised near Maine Road on the borders of Moss Side and Rusholme, the texts in his work form location-specific narratives developed during his time working in the Manchester-based supported studio Venture Arts.
Personal desires connected to the artist’s fantasy of appearing and performing on television figure in various works, including a ceramic hung above the gallery’s living room mantelpiece titled JUMMPING ONN TELEVISSIONN, (2018). Cast from a small portable set familiar to Finan as he grew up in the 1960s, it contains a script that proposes various forms of camera trickery. This subject of chicanery and glamour continues in two epic scrolls titled YESS LAD (both 2018). Placed back-to-back, they hang from Moon Grove’s first floor ceiling and pass down through the staircase’s bannisters to the carpet on the gallery’s ground floor to provide a chance for visitors to read Finan’s entire account.
If Finan’s texts make constant reference to him and his works as ‘tricksters’, they also throw a nod to the fact that his journal-like works take the reader into unexpected imaginative and fantastic places. Celebrities such as Sally Dynevor, who plays Sally Whittaker in the long running British soap opera Coronation Street, Eileen Atkins (EILLEENN ANNTTRINNG) and other British musical and televisual icons are acknowledged alongside the artist’s friends and colleagues. Recent writings on paper, such as YESS LLAD ILL BE BRILLANNT TO YOU (2025), also point to the intimate and generous side of Finan’s practice, works that present an open field of intellectual and emotional transparency for the viewer to interact with.
If, during the 1960s, when what we now know as ‘conceptual art’ was starting to develop – a point in history where language moved from talking about art to becoming part of art itself (in part, this was art’s revenge on philosophy’s critical completion of art, by including that critical completion within art itself) – we might say that what artists such as Joseph Kosuth and Art & Language initially developed has now become predictable, habitual and somewhat mundane. What remains interesting however, are disruptive instances of language-based art, such as, again, Finan’s incorporation of an informal northern English vernacular inherent to British counterparts such as Terry Atkinson (a former member of Art & Language) that resist authoritarian art historical forms. In terms of work by learning-disabled artists such as Finan, we might also claim that their format and different foundational narratives translate conceptual art’s political dimension into new form of institutional critique: in many ways, these works upend rote critical traditions, resist normative apparatus and problematise academic art historical structures. In addition, the forms of art and language that Finan and others work with asks interesting questions around who art serves, and in which institutional contexts they are relevant.
For this exhibition, Moon Grove has partnered with Venture Arts, an Arts Council England NPO and supported studio located in south Manchester, which is part of an important global movement of organisations that includes Creative Growth, Creativity Explored and NIAD in California’s Bay Area, London’s Action Space, as well as Studio A and Arts Project Australia, respectively in St Leonards and Melbourne, Australia.
As a venue, Moon Grove feels particularly relevant for Barry Finan’s first full solo exhibition; this is effectively a homecoming to where the artist was born and raised. All are welcome to attend the opening party on Thursday 24 October from 6pm onwards, where Finan will continue to work on one of his large scrolls in the gallery’s dining room.
Barry Anthony Finan (b. 1958, Manchester, UK) defines himself as an artist, writer and an actor. He produces bold, text-based works called ‘WRRIGHHTINNGSERRSS’, in which he uses repetitive letters to elongate words that become scripts, personal messages and hopes for the future. Finan is supported to develop his work by Venture Arts, an award-winning visual arts organisation working with learning disabled artists. He has been showing nationally since 2014. Recent group exhibitions and projects include: ‘The Hand That Makes the Sound’, ‘Tate Late’, Tate Liverpool, 2023; ‘Festival of Making’, Blackburn, 2023; TJ Boulting, London, 2022; and the ‘British Ceramics Biennial’, 2019.