Purple Column

Heirs & Graces, 2013, oil and emulsion on board, 59 x 42 cm, courtesy of the artist

introducing Laurence Owen
artist / London

text by XERXES COOK
portrait by BELLA HOWARD

 

In 2009, after selling out a solo exhibition of distorted portraits of dictators at the cult London gallery 20 Hoxton Square to one of Britain’s most influential collectors, 24-year-old Laurence Owen took the money and ran. That would be the sensationalist way of putting it. More accurately, Owen invested his earnings in a small townhouse in Southwest England’s bucolic Devon, where he spent the next year or so detached from big-city mingling and worked in isolation.

There, his paintings took a turn away from the narrative focus of his previous works, which had explored sociopolitical themes of paradises lost and powers abused, and instead headed down the rabbit hole of abstraction. Removed from the…