LONDON.- Commuter time, the lights up, lights down, hour of day - a city stirring beneath the surface. Mundane lives and rituals glimpsed behind curtains. Familiar objects made unfamiliar through glass. The curious aspect of one’s own life when viewed glancingly from the outside. In Something else, somewhere else, in somebody else’s house Johnny Izatt-Lowry’s third solo exhibition at Cooke Latham the artist interrogates the act of looking, probing the porous division between private and public space.
Formally the works are dense with historical reference. The muted tones and flattened planes of the early Renaissance, of a Giotto fresco or a Cimabue altarpiece, can be traced in the curious palette and eerie stillness of Izatt-Lowry’s compositions. Likewise the tongue in cheek energy of Georges Braque’s cubist still lives can be mapped in his playful grouping of objects. This obsession with the foreword and postscript to an era of perspectival accomplishment establishes the quiet stage upon which Izatt-Lowry works. The paintings ask questions as to what was lost with the gain of mathematically rendered space.
In ‘A window’ the viewer surveys a human silhouette and still life through curtains. There is an act of voyeurism at play contingent with the way we digest composed vignettes of stranger’s homes via social media. Izatt-Lowry’s paintings acknowledge this digital proliferation and consumption and offer a visual antidote. Painstakingly made, infinitely dense in layered pigment, his paintings have a stillness and subtlety that requires a lacuna of viewing time; a pause in which to visually digest.
Johnny Izatt-Lowry (b. 1995, Durham) lives and works in London. He holds a BFA in Fine Art at Ruskin School of Art and MFA Fine Art from Slade School of Art.
Johnny Izatt-Lowry's practice deals with memory and the ways in which we collectively process imagery in a digital age. His paintings originate in stock images sourced online that the artist collects, edits and finally paints from memory. Largely depicting still life quotidian objects like shoes, flowers, jeans, pencils, cigarettes and reproductions of artworks, his works are filmic in their quiet intensity, and self-consciously aware of the history of painting.
The paintings feel inevitable, their generic roots speaking to a collective understanding of objecthood. It is in their very familiarity however that they disarm the viewer. A Matisse painting, as a postcard, folded on a table, becomes translated by Izatt-Lowry into a painting; an illustration of an illustration of an artwork that holds its own references. The painting is no longer an accessible still life so much as an absurdist essay on the act of viewing.
Izatt-Lowry's paintings are laboriously compiled through the layered application of colour on crepe. Inherently anti-gestural the images are built rather than drawn, there are no outlines to the objects depicted, rather they assume a saturated solidity; they are both objects incarnate and somehow no longer relate to the 'original' at all. Initially easy to read the paintings deny classification; questioning instead what an image is and how it exists in our collective consciousness.
Izatt Lowry's work is in the collection of the X Museum, China as well as numerous renowned private collections. Recent exhibitions include Miart Milan with Cooke Latham Gallery, 2025; in and just outside of, Galerie Fabian Lang, Zurich 2024; Creatures and Masks, Galerie Fabian Lang, Zurich 2024; Marking Time, Cooke Latham Gallery, London2024; At some point, the other day, M+B, Los Angeles, 2023; And the smoke from a cigarette, Cooke Latham Gallery 2023; Around dusk, or thereabouts, Galerie Fabian Lang, Zurich, 2022; GNOMONICS, AN ORANGE AND OTHER DRAWINGS, Galerie Fabian Lang, Zurich, CH, 2022; A Table, with things on, Taymour Grahne Projects, London (online), 2021; Reigen, Galerie Fabian Lang, Fabian Lang, Zurich; 2021; ONE, San Mei Gallery, London, UK 2021; An absolute reality, Tuesday to Friday, Valencia, ES, 2021; Interludes, Workplace Gallery, London, UK, 2021; Contemporary Domesticity, Taymour Grahne Projects, London, UK, 2021; By day, but then again by night, Cooke Latham Gallery, London, 2020.
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