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 solo exhibitions include 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; A Table, with things on, Taymour Grahne Projects, London (online), 2021; By day, but then again by night, Cooke Latham Gallery, London, 2020.