PARIS.- Terence Gower (b 1965) is a Canadian artist working in New York, Mexico City, and France. Gower works in many media including video, sculpture, drawing, installation, sound, and full-scale architectural constructions. Working on a number of bodies of work concurrently, each in research and production for several years, even decades, his installations are often reconfigured each time they are exhibited. As a result of his research, Gower often appropriates period photography, narrative and documentary film, archival material, and historical artifacts. Interested in how abstract forms represent abstract ideas, including ideological concepts, much of his work is spent studying and collecting forms, mostly from the realms of architecture and art.

This exhibition brings together three projects that each demonstrate a different process of form generation, in several different media, including sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and installation.

Human Industry (Escalator), 2025 is a suite of sculptures and works on paper based on the truncated form of a common escalator, an artefact of public and commercial sites that feature dense collections of humans on the move, such as train stations and shopping centres. The series emerged from observations during a day hike in Lower Austria in the summer of 2023, related in a short narrative that is shown adjacent to the works in the installation.

“Near the end of the hike I passed a small warehouse surrounded by a scrub-filled yard. At the end of this yard the colossal hulk of a stainless steel escalator lay abandoned among the wild grasses, like a beached whale. This stark signifier of our human habitat was like the grand finale at the end of the day, and the powerful form soon found its way into this series of sculptures and drawings rendered in materials that relate back to the objects and their context.” - Terence Gower

Gruen in Tehran (2018 – ongoing) is a wall drawing and print series that employs woodblock, aquatint, silkscreen, letterpress, and digital techniques. The project is based on research in the Victor Gruen papers at the Library of Congress (Washington, DC), and tells the story of Gruen’s invitation by the Shah of Iran to conceive a new urbanism scheme for Iran’s capital in the early 1960s. Gruen’s professional history—from Austrian Jewish exile shop designer in 1930s New York, to his invention of the shopping centre typology in 1950s California, to global city planner in the 1960s—is detailed in a short, historical essay than runs through the twelve prints in the series. The work foregrounds the performative mark-making of Gruen the 1960s urbanist, who drew his schemes onto aerial photographs, resulting in geometrical compositions that were designed to actually shape the way we urban dwellers live in the cities we inhabit. These compelling geometric forms, interlacing in the wall mural like a complex Islamic ceramic composition, are all rendered using inks and paints that contain pigments sourced at the Tehran Bazaar.

Free Association (2010 – ongoing) presents the viewer with a cloud of suspended, fragmentary shapes, laser-cut from 6 mm aluminum and coated with a variety of coloured enamels. This work is based on the eponymous psychoanalytic technique, in which phrases, images, and memories are excavated from a patient’s unconscious. The shapes that make up the sculpture were likewise drawn from Gower’s unconscious, seemingly randomly, using automatic drawing, and those pen-and-gouache drawings were then used as templates for the mobile’s suspended forms.

Terence Gower’s most recent projects include the survey exhibition Terence Gower: Embassy at Power Plant, Toronto in 2024, presented in tandem with his installation Public Spirit at the National Gallery of Canada. In 2023, Gower was invited to create interventions at two iconic architectural sites; Phillip Johnson’s Glass House (New Canaan, CT), and Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, both using installation and musical performance to examine the social and acoustical characteristics of each site. His public commissions include the monumental concrete sculpture group Six Formes for Region Rhône-Alpes, France, Noguchi Galaxy for the New York School Construction Authority, the temporary outdoor pavilion SuperPuesto for the Bronx Museum of Art, as well as the large-scale permanent works Workshop Pavilion for MUSAC, León (Spain), Bicycle Pavilion for Museo Jumex, Mexico City, and two context-specific architectural interventions in Oaxaca, Mexico and Bali, Indonesia.

Recent solo shows have taken place at Americas Society New York; The Block Museum of Art, Evanston, IL; Galería Labor and El Eco, Mexico City; Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver; Neubauer Collegium, Chicago, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Gävle Konstcentrum; and Yvon Lambert, Paris. Recent group exhibitions include the XIII Bienal de la Habana, Cuba; 12th Gwangju Biennale, Korea; Pacific Standard Time, LA; as well as group shows at Galerie Lelong, New Museum, and MoMA PS1, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Witte de With, Rotterdam; MACBA, CCCB, and Centro de Arte Santa Mónica, Barcelona; Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; Museo Jumex and Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; CAPC, Bordeaux; Institut d'art contemporain Villeurbanne, Lyon.

Gower has been granted research fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, Smithsonian Institution, Canada Council for the Arts, Graham Foundation, Gothenburg University, and New York State Council on the Arts. In addition to many articles and interviews, four monographs have been published on Gower’s work: Terence Gower: El Marge; Havana Case Study; Display Architecture: Terence Gower Pavilions; Ciudad Moderna: Terence Gower Videos; and two are forthcoming: Embassy; and Form, Model, Syntax, Display.