Object Lessons: Celebrating four decades of acclaimed sculptor Jeff Lowe

Studying at Saint Martin’s School of Art under the esteemed tutelage of William Tucker, Phillip King and Anthony Caro in the 1970s, this exhibition – entitled Object Lessons – aims to explore Lowe’s prolific and experimental output over the past four decades and its enduring integrity.

Born in Lancashire in 1952, he came to prominence at the age of 21, whilst still a student and through his first solo exhibition at the prestigious Leicester Galleries in London’s Cork Street in 1974. He then went on to represent Britain at the Paris Biennale, and his work featured in a number of important group shows at the Hayward Gallery, Arts Council, British Council, Serpentine Gallery and Ikon Gallery throughout the latter half of the 1970s.

In the '80s Lowe’s works marked a departure in steel sculpture, eschewing the previous methods of welding cast bars of steel or creating assemblages of found objects he instead bought mis-cast pieces of steel that had distorted in the casting process, welding them into abstract configurations before cutting these large steel bundles into different parts.

His subsequent monumental sculpture of the 1990s more clearly reveals the artist’s interest in the architectural. Initially weighty works, impactful in their mass, Lowe’s more recent sculpture has shed its bulk to reveal its armature. These large-scale works do not imply a narrative, neither fictional or mythological, nor are they rooted in a contemporaneous commentary: they are constructions and at their core remain architectural in spirit.

All images courtesy of Pangolin London | Main image credit: Breathing Squares, 2015, Zinc & coated steel, Unique, 250 x 188 x 99 cm, POA