Robert OWEN

born 1937, Wagga Wagga, New South Wales
lives and works Melbourne,Victoria

Robert Owen engages with the invisible wonder of sensual perception via an intuitive investigation of space, form and materials. Owen is known for his ongoing multi-sensory recordings of colour, geometry and phenomenology. He has gravitated from documenting the rhythm of light to simulating light as a colour rhythm.

His most recent series, Music for the Eyes, 2005-06 is a passionate response to a select range of music including Arvo Part’s Alina and George Gurdjieff’s extraordinary chants, hymns and dances. Owen creates an emotive translation from the music sound into visible notations of rhythm and colour that aim to represent music for the eyes.

The continual stimulus for Owen is the possibility of whether emotion can be recorded and sensual experience understood via an alternate means. Owen is allowing the viewer to, at the very least experience the sensation of what music perception would look like if it were tangible. The process is, technically speaking, unscientific yet controlled. Owen paints from a structure that is essentially void of mathematical formula and colour is ultimately selected at random.

Witness-Facing East demonstrates Owen’s acuteness and accuracy of colour relationships. The flow of bends, pauses and blocks of colour create a whole form within the parts. The colour becomes the rigid structure and the force inverts back into itself, dynamically changing yet remaining constant.

Owen has continued to explore his iconic ultramarine blue throughout this piece, reinstalling the relationship between the colour blue and the idea of blue as a mystical force, relating to tones of the cello. The rhythmic motion is traveling in an upward direction and the thickened black lines appear as a static melancholy state, with the scattered colour blocks measuring contradictory emotions. The gaps appear just as pertinent as the coloured beats, as all the elements in the painting – line, contour and colour – form a continuous relationship to each other.

Witness - Facing East (Chant from a Holy Book)
Robert Owen
2007 | synthetic polymer on linen | 122 x 732cm | accession # 783
purchased by the Art Board 2007 - Murdoch University Art Collection

Other selected artwork acquisitions