Artist of the day: Artist of the day, December 20: Robert Owen, Australian painter, sculptor and photographer

Thursday, December 20, 2018

Artist of the day, December 20: Robert Owen, Australian painter, sculptor and photographer

Robert Owen (1937) is an Australian painter, sculptor and photographer. He studied sculpture at the National Art School, Sydney under Lyndon Dadswell. Owen is one of Australia’s most eminent artists, with continued relevance to the forefront of contemporary art practice since the late 1960s. He has played a formative role in the development of some of Australia’s major arts education and institutional structures, and has received several of the nation’s highest honours in the visual arts.

Owen’s art practice includes sculpture, installation, painting, photography and major public commissions. His work is linked through a poetic and intuitive sensitivity to the expressive potential of space, light, colour, context and materials. Throughout his career Owen has ‘steered a path between science, metaphysics and abstraction as a way of investigating the representational sublime.'

After graduating from art school in 1962, Owen lived on the Greek isle of Hydra from 1963 to 1966 and became part of an expatriate community that included George Johnston, Charmian Clift, William Lederer, Leonard Cohen. From 1966 – 1975 Owen lived in London where he worked as a studio assistant to John Ernest, Anthony Hill and other British Constructionists, and also as a conservator for Victor Pasmore and Ben Nicholson. During this time Owen developed constructionist works and exhibited with Malborough Gallery in both London and New York.

In 1975 Owen returned to Australia and became actively involved in the Sydney art culture, both as an artist, representing Australia at the 38th Venice Biennale in 1978; and as a Founding Member of Artspace and Member of The Biennale of Sydney. Upon his return to Australia, Owen’s art practice shifted focus to Site-specific and Installation art concerned with concept and expanded sense experience, adding layers of metaphysical and symbolic narrative to cultural history (1975-1992).

In 1987 Owen moved to Melbourne as Artist in Resident at the Victorian College of the Arts. From 1989 to 2001 Owen was Associate Professor and Head of Sculpture at RMIT University, where he implemented a graduate and postgraduate exchange programme with Utrecht School of the Arts and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam. In 1992 he was a research fellow in Virtual Environments for free Form Design in the Invited Artists program of Advanced Computer Graphics Centre, CITRI, RMIT University.

Since the early 1990s he has returned to the topographical abstraction of colour, space and light through painting and sculpture. Owen's experience as a curator of contemporary art includes Sound Works for the 1982 Biennale of Sydney and the exhibition Inland for the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne in 1990. Since the early 2000s, Owen has also undertaken Public Art commissions that have extended his installation practice in a broader social context. Owen received the Australian Council Visual Arts/Crafts Emeritus Award in 2003.

Robert Owen is currently member of Artery Co-operative Ltd, Melbourne Australia. In 2016 Owen was appointed the City of Melbourne’s Public Art Curatorial Advisor for redevelopment of Carlton’s University Square.

© 2018. All images are copyrighted © by Robert Owen. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained.