We are pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibition with Jonathan Owen. To accompany the show, we have made a short film with the artist and a comprehensive viewing room of the works in the exhibition
Jonathan Owen is best known for his interventions into ‘found’ antique sculptures, a process of re-carving and reinventing defunct marble statuary in an attempt - as he puts it - “to subvert and puncture this familiar rhetoric, and so to reactivate the object through transformation rather than destruction, to make a new proposition.”
This approach offers a way of working that seems especially relevant at the present moment (as the conversation around public monuments is so vigorously reconsidered and rephrased) questioning ideas of permanence and power, attributes so often associated with the original sculptures that are his favoured raw material.
The exhibition includes dramatically re-worked busts of once powerful men, but at its centre there is a major new sculpture based on a life-size, allegorical figure of Navigation, a figure that formerly stood proud as a symbol of empire and exploration - sextant and rudder at the ready - reduced to a pile of interlinking chains snaking across its plinth on the gallery floor.
"I take something that’s valued for its implied material and cultural stability and make it unstable and precarious. This is done by reshaping the statue’s body into moveable, interconnected marble links, causing it to collapse but remain intact. I’m re-starting and applying the same process that was used to make the original object; further carving it into a more chaotic version of its former self." (JO)
Alongside this group of new sculptures Owen presents new 'eraser drawings' - also made by a reductive process, a kind of two-dimensional carving of old book pages - working backwards through layers of ink from blacks through greys to white, gradually removing tone from the surface of the page to delete the foreground subject, and subtly re-form the background.
The first of these, made some years ago, concentrated on removing statues from their plinths, but his most recent series has focussed on images from the history of cinema, erasing the foreground figures of Hollywood stars, and reshaping them into the inanimate details of the scenes they once inhabited.

mpefm UNITED KINGDOM art press release

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