Resonance is a new solo exhibition by artist Richard Owen, opening at The Art Cabin, London, on 11 April. The show will include some of Owen’s most structurally focused pieces and will explore the work of an artist concerned primarily not with pictorial content, but with the construction and composition of a work.

Having studied painting at UAL: Central St Martins following a break from a career in finance, Richard Owen’s working methods have evolved in such a way that now excludes specific content. This move away from realism allows Owen to work towards a more abstract expressionism, introducing elements of randomness and chaos into his practice.

Owen’s canvases brood with an intensity that belies the careful structuring and almost architectural movements of his palette knife. Working mainly in oil paint, Richard Owen flattens and rounds, sharpens and severs the paint on his canvas to create at once both the sense of ordered design and an undercurrent of anarchic confusion. The effect is one of carefully crafted chaos, of poetic disarray.

It is this identification of duality in art, of the conflict between control and anarchy within the process of creation and in the boundary between reality and abstraction that lies at Resonance.

Resonance, Richard Owen, 11-30 April, The Art Cabin, 11 Brookwood Road, London SW18 5BL. For more information visit www.theartcabin.co.uk.

Credits
1. Image courtesy of Richard Owen.