We are pleased to present The Air is Thick with Love, Sikelela Owen's second solo show with Taymour Grahne Projects. The exhibition opens at our 1 Lonsdale Road space on October 7 between 5 - 7pm. Accompanying the exhibition is a text by British art historian Professor Dorothy Price FBA.

Paradise Found, by Dorothy Price

Taped to the wall in Sikelela Owen’s studio, dotted amongst a number of her smaller paintings - some finished, others in progress - are several A4-sized colour reproductions of various historic artworks: Edgar Degas’ vibrantly coloured Combing the Hair (c.1896), Paula Modersohn-Becker’s radically intimate Baby Breastfeeding (1904), Käthe Kollwitz’s devastating Woman with Dead Child (1903), Hurvin Anderson’s poignant Beaver Lake (1998) and the dreamy, ethereal The Siesta (1911) by Spanish artist Joaquín Sorolla. Although individually very different works, collectively they offer subtle prompts for Owen’s own beguiling practice in which selfhood, self-possession, familial intimacy and separateness are hazily imagined and reimagined in a colour palette of predominantly greens, ochres, browns, white and occasional accents of red or pink.

Owen’s palette suggests a certain seriality, the connective tissue in otherwise different explorations of memory, solitude, intimacy and the human condition, across canvases both large and small. She works from a combination of photographs, found images and life, painting straight onto the canvas in thinly applied layers of oil paint. Each layer demands patience as it drips and dries and suggests how she should proceed in building her surfaces and piecing together past memories and future Edens. Outside spaces rendered in lush and vibrant greens are frequently the settings for Owen’s figures – members of her friends and family shown in quiet contemplation or luxuriating in the completeness of familial bonds of love.

The large canvas, At the Edge of the Garden depicts the artists’ family - her husband David at rest, reclining with her two-year old son Eli and ten-month-old baby Ethan. A sensitive study of Black masculinity created from a position of love, the family group seems to hover in a liminal space of possibilities - neither fully outdoors nor quite inside either. The specificity of the family’s London garden is deliberately removed, to produce instead an evocation of an imagined space of rest, lapped by nature, unincumbered by expectations or stereotypes.

The large green spaces amongst which the languid figures in Sorolla’s The Siesta rest (hinting as they do at the Spanish artist’s not quite fulfilled move towards painterly abstraction), is reprised in Owen’s work, especially through her deliberate excising of any extraneous details. Her focus on the timeless aspects of human relationships is a sustained endeavor in Baudelaire’s terms, ‘to distill the eternal from the transitory.’ Baudelaire’s celebrated essay, The Painter of Modern Life (1859-60) is widely understood to be a thinly disguised account of one of Owen’s other painterly precedents, Edouard Manet (1832 -1883) whose many beautiful portraits of his extended family in lush French gardens of the nineteenth century, offer an evocative comparison.

In At the Edge of the Garden, specificities of time and place are deliberately disavowed by Owen in favour of a focus on the emotional connections and familial bonds between a father and his young sons, or, as in its companion piece, Mummy and Ethan, between a mother and her new baby. The artist has spoken of the ways in which outdoor spaces evoke a sense of freedom for her, stemming from her diasporic experiences as child at school in Alabama and from visiting her grandmother in Zimbabwe, where being outdoors signalled a freedom that her city life as a child in London could not. Such freedoms, borne from both a relationship with nature and a sense of the power of intimacy in all its different forms, suffuse Owen’s pictorial world. As the title of this exhibition confirms of her practice - in a phrase borrowed from US based curator, Helen Molesworth - “the air is thick with love and all its affiliate intimacy and obligation.”

Sikelela Owen (b.1984, UK) lives and works in London. She holds a postgraduate diploma in Fine Art from the Royal Academy and a BA Fine Art in Painting from Chelsea College of Art and Design. Recent solo exhibitions include at James Freeman Gallery (London), HSBC Canada Place (London) and LDM gallery (Florence). Her first solo show with Taymour Grahne Projects took place in November 2021. Selected group shows include at Walker Art gallery (Liverpool), Beers Gallery (London), Gesso Arts Space (Vienna), British school at Rome (Rome), The Mall Gallery (London) and Charlie Smith (London). Awards and residencies include Abbey Award Scholar Rome, Spaces Studio Award, Elephant Lab, Dover Streets Arts club award, Richard Ford Award (Prado Museum travel and drawing award, Madrid) and Nichol Young Foundation Award.

All images are courtesy of the artist and Taymour Grahne Projects

Image credit: Rocio Chacon