User Account
Andy Owen
Interview
What is your favourite film of all time?
The first Matrix film, despite being ten years old it is slick and visually stunning. Through the narrative of a digitally generated dream world, it poses questions about our society, questions touched on by my own practice.
What music are you currently listening to and why?
I listen to a wide variety of music depending on my frame of mind. Currently on the studio play-list are Mark Ronson, Duffy, DJ Shadow, and Orbital.
Which living artists do you most admire and why?
Ian Davenport: His work is very simple but very effective and he’s not afraid to take risks with it. David Reed: intense colours, dramatic contrasts in tone and temperature, sublime paintings. Fiona Rae: stylistically always moving forward with a relentless aesthetic, constantly re-inventing itself.
Which deceased artist do you most admire and why?
JMW Turner: He was a risk taker for his time; pre-empting the Impressionists he is often credited with being the father of modern art. The way he uses light is fantastic, some paintings literally appear to glow.
Which exhibition that you have visited made the greatest impact on you and why?
Bernard Frize at The Hague in 2002: It opened a world of potential ideas and got me thinking about all the possibilities for abstraction using paint and brushes.
What is the question you get asked most frequently about your work and how do you answer it?
How is it made? - It’s a long journey beginning with an idea, moving through a complex series of processes before applying the paint and building up the surface over a period of months.
What / who inspired you to be an artist?
It’s something that’s always been in me; I was always scribbling and doodling right from when I could first hold a pencil. My mum tells me she could never find enough paper to keep me going. I worked full-time for five years after my foundation, then I went to university and rekindled the passion, I’ve never looked back since.
Can you tell us about where you make your art and what if any the significance of this location is?
I have a studio overlooking the Olympic development. Three floors up with a south west facing window it has great views of the city and the sunset.
What do you like most about being an artist?
Being able to do something I love and make a living from it, what could be better than that?
What is your greatest achievement as an artist to date?
Being able to do something I love and having others believe in it, what could be better than that?
What are your plans for the coming year?
To promote my practice internationally.
Latest artwork - View all by this artist
Artist's statement
The urban environment that we inhabit today is flooded with artificial colour and light, carrying an abundance of information to our fingertips. The luminous glow of the digital screen is ever present, at home, at work and on the mobile phone in our pocket. Meanwhile we find ourselves in the midst of a whirlwind of paper ephemera; bringing us the news and the latest celebrity gossip on our daily commute.
Andy’s work investigates how we experience events through these media and how they in turn have the power to shape and even distort our perception of the wider world.
The artist feeds his artistic practice on this plethora of disposable visual information, culling imagery from the press and the Internet. Photographs of catastrophic events, earthquakes and uprisings in far-flung places are thrown into the mix with the celebrity snaps from closer to home. Using digital manipulation, Andy de-constructs these images, breaking them down to their most basic pictorial elements: line, form, colour and space. They are combined and rebuilt into something new, stripped of all recognition and divorced from the original source material.
The newly constructed imagery makes the leap from cyber-space and back into the physical world, continuing to evolve into a painterly dreamscape as he translates it onto canvas. The result is gestural forms that trace their way through hallucinatory landscapes of blurry hues, before melting into the illusionary depths of the flat surface. The source material has been democratised, the monumental levelled with the banal, like yesterday’s news their meanings lost and forgotten, wiped clear to be re-cycled as a simultaneous aesthetic event.
Exhibitions
- 2011 - Surface Tension, Group show, Sarah Wiseman Gallery & The North Wall Arts Centre
- 2010 - Metorama, Solo Show, DegreeArt.com Gallery, London
- 2009- Affordable Art Fair, DegreeArt.com, Battersea, London
- 2008- ‘in/ex/ternal’ solo show, DegreeArt.com, Vyner Street, London
- 2008- ‘Collect4’, DegreeArt.com, Vyner Street, London
- 2007- ‘Virtual Viscera’, Solo Show, DegreeArt.com, Vyner Street, London
- 2007- ‘Quixotic’, Rich Mix, DegreeArt.com, Bethnal Green, London
- 2007- ‘Space Curators’ Installation at Hammerson plc Grosvenor Street, Mayfair, London
- 2006- ‘Eidos’ VINEspace, Bethnal Green, London
- 2006- ‘21st Century Graduate Show’, Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery
- 2006- ‘Cupola 15th Anniversary Open’, Cupola Gallery Hillsborough, Sheffield
- 2006-08- ‘Space Curators Installation’ at Exchange Tower Harbour, Exchange Square, London
- 2006- ‘Summer Open’ Exposure Gallery, Swansea
- 2006- ‘Art @ E3’, DegreeArt.com, Bow, London
- 2006- ‘HIGHLY COMMENDED Nationwide Mercury Art Prize’ The Hospital, Covent Garden, London
- 2006- ‘Post-Graduate Direction’ Lethaby Gallery, Holborn, London
- 2006- ‘Small Kingsgate Gallery’ West Hampstead, London
- 2006- ‘17 Principles of Co-Existence’, Lauderdale House, Archway, London
- 2005- Daler-Rowney Prize for Excellence in Painting
- 2005- Nationwide Mercury Art & Music Exhibition, Air Gallery, Dover Street, London
- 2004- ‘New Horizons’, RBSA Gallery, Brook Street, Birmingham
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2004- Hans Brinker Budget Trophy Hotel Hans Brinker Kerk Straat Amsterdam NL














