'The Cut'
An exhibition of paintings by Owen Normand
Monday 21st October – Saturday 14th December 2019
Open: Monday - Friday, 9am - 4.30pm
Private View: Friday 25th October 2019, 5pm – 8pm
About the Exhibition:
In ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, the cut is highly symbolic. By cutting the flower from its roots and initiating its death, one is bringing its fragile and fleeting nature to the fore and celebrating its essence.
‘The Cut’ also refers to Owen Normand's minimal style of still life painting, where anything superfluous to the meaning of the painting is cut away. Owen is very interested in the Japanese term kire-tsuzuki (cut – continuity), which refers to a cut’s dual nature: how it creates a threshold and can be a joining device as well as one of separation. For instance, the cut is used to simultaneously join and separate scenes in a film.
Owen is inspired by connections between the ideas of fragility and transience in vanitas and momento mori paintings in Western art history and similar ideas in Japanese aesthetics.
This exhibition brings together paintings from the last few years. They were all painted from life, either en plein air in Italy or in Owen's studio in Edinburgh.
About the Artist:
Owen Normand is a contemporary figurative painter who studied at Edinburgh College of Art. He was winner of the prestigious BP Portrait Young Artist Award in 2013 and was named as one of 15 emerging artists of great promise by Rebecca Wilson, Saatchi Art's Chief Curator in 2014. He has had solo exhibitions in Berlin and Lisbon, and has exhibited in group shows in London, New York, Berlin, Edinburgh and Glasgow. His work is held in private collections in the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, The Netherlands, USA, Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Australia and Hong Kong.
Owen teaches at Leith School of Art, leading both the Monday morning Beginners Drawing & Painting Short Course, and the Year-long One Day Painting Course.