Invites: Laurence Owen

Zabludowicz Collection is delighted to present Gerund, an exhibition of new works by Laurence Owen. These wall-based, multi-media sculptures incorporate a vast range of materials including ceramic, Jesmonite, oil paint, wood and copper. Operating as enigmatic and mysterious objects these compositions allude to fragmented details of human anatomy, mechanical systems and forms that recur throughout nature.

In his work Owen often focuses on ideas of fluidity in relation to time, matter, borders and territories. Through the merger of aesthetic and material elements sourced from various domains Owen playfully subverts and reorganises identifiable aspects of architecture, craft, and carpentry, all of which have socially prescribed characteristics and functions. Assertions of flux and transcendence are amplified by this hybridized approach. Owen uses this process as a metaphor to convey broader notions of fixed frameworks that organise our rigid understanding of the normative. Here, hierarchies retain the potential to move, shift and evolve.

Gerund is an exhibition across two venues, Zabludowicz Collection and Lychee One, E8 3QA.

*Gerunds are words that are formed with verbs but act as nouns. Every gerund is a verb with ing tacked to its tail. Swimming; asking; dancing; telling; gardening. The action when applying one area of language and combining it with another to make an experiential definition, required at its origin a hybridisation between verb/noun/adverb. These territories flood into each other, redefining themselves and one another, and in turn become their own things.

Laurence Owen (b. Gloucester 1984, lives and works in London) completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art at Royal Academy Schools, London in 2015, and holds a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Falmouth College of Art, Cornwall. Recent solo exhibitions include LOOT, Galerie PCP, Paris (2018) and Channel Synthesis, Evelyn Yard Gallery, London (2016). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Mushrooms: The art, design and future of fungi, Somerset House, London (upcoming 2020), Drawing Biennial, The Drawing Rooms, London (2019), Moly Sabata, Art O Rama, Marseille, FR (2018), Something Else, Triumph Gallery, Moscow, RU (2018), Absent Bodies, OSL Contemporary, Oslo, NOR (2017) and John Moores Painting Prize, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK (2016).