Born in 1957 in London, Roger Wagner won an open scholarship to read English Literature at Lincoln College, Oxford in 1975.
From 1978 to 1981 he studied at The Royal Academy Schools under Peter Greenham, and subsequently returned to Oxford where he now lives and works.
This was the year of his retrospective exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, whose attendance figures broke all records.
[1] In 2004 the Ashmolean had a second exhibition of his work to celebrate the acquisition of his large painting Menorah which now hangs on permanent loan in St Giles Church.
[6] Thus Rowan Williams has described Wagner’s ‘fusion of Jewish and Christian symbols with the cooling towers of Didcot power station – Jewish victims of the Shoah wandering in the neighbourhood of a distantly seen, conventionally depicted crucifixion, the background dominated by the immense towers arranged in the pattern of the ceremonial candlestick, the menorah that gives this 1993 painting its title.’, as this is ‘very dense imagining indeed, but it manages a representation of the creatively and theologically uncanny that is haunting’.