SHARON LOUDEN

_‘Sharon, and everybody who has met her will probably agree, is quite a character. Bursting with positive energy and compassion when we met through common friends in New York, it was the person I liked before I got to love the art. Her works though, as often is the case, can be minimal and quiet. Her drawings are concentrated gestures, confident and affirmative. Sharon is in her true element though when she is challenged by greater projects like her recent book publications or her larger installations, which are usually sculptural and museum scale, executed with a team over weeks. The results are mind boggling, in innovation, size, creative and poetic impact’ - _Patrick Heide

Sharon Louden can’t easily be pinned down to one medium. She works with painting, drawing, animation, sculpture and installation. However, there is one element that forms the basis of her practice and unites all her works, which is the line, or linear abstractions and their implied or actual movement. From lines that merge to rectangles in her colourful oil, watercolour and acrylic works on paper series entitles Windows to sculptures made out of television antenna wires, string and pins on to her large-scale installations of reflective and coloured aluminium stripes.

Despite using so many various means of expression Louden’s works have a strong recognition value. Her abstracted shapes also appear as blue LED neon flex on brick walls in public art installations or as choreographed and animated colour projections in what she likes to describe as her drawings in space. Louden seeks the dialogue between art and architecture. As many of her public installations are commissioned works, she generally responds to the particularities of the different spaces and arranges her interventions site-specifically.

The materials Louden applies demand a response and active participation on the part of the viewer: reflective and shiny silvery elements overgrowing the space or colourful light interventions, which create a positive atmosphere and connect to the energy and rhythm of the bodies moving through space. Louden’s drawings and paintings are evenly sensual and despite referencing an abstract visual vocabulary using simple lines and gestures the drawings have nothing geometrical. On the contrary, they express human-like characteristics that evoke both imagination and conversation in their simplest form by giving priority to intuition and experience.

Louden’s work is held in major public and private collections throughout the United States, Asia and Europe including the National Gallery in Washington D.C, Neuberger Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Arkansas Arts Center and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.