Cooke Latham Gallery is pleased to present a solo booth of new paintings by Johnny Izatt-Lowry for Miart, Milan 4-6 April.
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 flowers, pencils, cups, cigarettes and reproductions of artworks, his works are filmic in their quiet intensity, and self-consciously aware of the history of painting.
Izatt-Lowry's paintings are laboriously compiled through the layered application of colour on linen. 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. The paintings feel inevitable, their generic roots speaking to a collective understanding of objecthood. The painting is no longer an accessible still life so much as an absurdist essay on the act of viewing.
