Our March Spin event will be a discussion of Jonathan Owen’s new solo exhibition at the Ingleby Gallery. We will be joined by Jonathan Owen and Ingleby staff to discuss this new work.
Owen’s work, in both two- and three-dimensions, involves reducing and rethinking existing objects and images. In this exhibition he has employed a kind of elegant vandalism to reconstruct and reinvent his ‘material’, transforming something found into something new. His sculptures begin as relics of another time: 19th-century marble statues that he re-carves into disjointed, re-invigorated versions of their original selves.
Similarly, the ‘drawings’ begin as photographs found in the pages of books. Working very slowly, Owen erases layers of ink, gently removing elements of the original to leave a ghostly trace of what was there before and creating a new narrative within the pre-existing image.
Owen was born in Liverpool in 1973 and graduated from Edinburgh College of Art MFA in 2000. He currently lives and works in Edinburgh. His work will be presented at The Briggait as part of GI: Glasgow International in April 2014 and at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in the summer of 2014 as part of the nationwide exhibition GENERATION.
