Edinburgh-based contemporary artist Jonathan Owen is known for his subtractive material transformations of antique marble statues and found photographs from books.
Read MoreOwen was born in Liverpool and studied at the Edinburgh College of Art, where he graduated with an MFA in 2000. In the same year, he won the John Watson Prize from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art for his work I Don't Usually Do This (2000), a blue line drawing of a series of hands making suggestive gestures.
Jonathan Owen's practice is concentrated in processes of reduction, erasure, reconstruction, and manipulation. Through labour-intensive techniques, including marble carving and delicate erasure with a standard rubber eraser, Owen transforms readymades and reactivates their materiality.
Owen's early practice examined ideas around masculinity through collage, painting, and drawing. Referencing found materials such as car manuals, martial arts guides, pornography, and men's magazines, the artist manipulated images associated with male identity and culture in provocative subversions of gendered tropes.
The artist is known for his ongoing 'Eraser Drawings' series, produced from as early as 2009. For these works, the artist uses an eraser to carefully alter found monochromatic photographs from old books, erasing specific elements and reshaping pigments to subtly restore the backgrounds in different configurations. The resulting 'drawings' bear subtle traces of their transformation, with their partial erasure not always immediately apparent. Reminiscent of Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), in which the American artist near-completely erased a drawing by his contemporary Willem de Kooning, Owen's 'Eraser Drawings' similarly question ideas around authorship through enigmatic conceptual gestures.
In Eraser Drawing (Backstage) (2018), a ghostly trace of a figure can be spotted on a stage setting, while in Eraser Drawing (Michael Caine) (2020), the faint impression of hands presumably belonging to the actor Caine are just visible within a cluttered shop interior. Speaking to transience, absence, and memory, Owen's analogue erasures complicate renewed readings of their images through selective decisions on what is revealed or obscured.
Though a similarly subtractive process, Owen reworks antique marble busts and statues, typically from the 18th or 19th century, carving out elements of the sculptures to reveal new abstracted forms and voids. He describes his manipulation of existing sculptures as a means 'to subvert and puncture this familiar rhetoric, and so to reactivate the object through transformation rather than destruction, to make a new proposition.'
Mercury (2012) is a 19th-century marble statue of the Roman god, whose torso has been partially carved out by the artist into an abstract geometric form. For the 2016 Edinburgh Art Festival, Owen presented Untitled (2016), a simiarly reworked 19th-century life-sized statue of a nymph in white marble, for which the artist carved away parts of the nymph's torso to reveal numerous interlocking chains.
Owen typically withholds information on the statues' original artists and titles, conflating concepts such as appropriation and anachronism, while simultaneously destabilising the perceived permanence and grandiosity of historic sculptures.
Owen has exhibited across the United Kingdom and internationally since the early 2000s. He has presented in major events including the NGV Triennial (2017), Edinburgh Art Festival (2016), the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kerala (2016), and Glasgow International (2014).
Solo exhibitions include Jonathan Owen, Ingleby, Edinburgh (2021) and Jonathan Owen, doggerfisher, Edinburgh (2009).
Group exhibitions include Drawing Out, DE LEÓN, Bath (2021); Mark-making: Perspectives on Drawing, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (2019); The Unseen Masterpiece, Ingleby (2020); Twenty, Ingleby (2018); Looking Good: The Male Gaze From Van Dyck to Lucian Freud, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh (2017); Between Poles and Tides: New Acquisitions from the University of Edinburgh Art Collection, Edinburgh (2016); The Scottish Endarkenment, Dovecot, Edinburgh (2016); Head to Head, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh (2015).
Owen's work is held in public collections across Australia, the U.K., and the U.S.A, including at the National Gallery of Victoria; University of Edinburgh Art Collection; Henry Moore Foundation; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; City Art Centre, Edinburgh; Aberdeen Art Gallery; Paisley Museum and Art Galleries; and Rhode Island School of Design.
Misong Kim | Ocula | 2021
