Robert Owen: Axiom

CASSANDRA BIRD is proud to present Axiom, the gallery’s first solo exhibition by Robert Owen, one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists. For more than five decades, Owen’s pioneering practice has expanded the possibilities of abstraction through an ongoing investigation of light, colour, geometry, perception and the natural world.

Since the late 1960s, Owen has developed a distinctive visual language that has positioned him at the forefront of Australian contemporary art. His participation in major international exhibitions, including representing Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1978; together with major presentations at leading museums and institutions worldwide, has secured his place as a defining figure in the history of Australian art.

Axiom brings together art works that explore the fundamental conditions of perception through colour, light, sound, line and form. At its core is a sustained enquiry into the elemental structures through which experience emerges. An axiom is a proposition accepted as self-evident; a first principle from which other understandings unfold. Simple components give rise to infinitely complex relationships. Throughout Owen’s practice, these foundational systems are approached not as abstract concepts, but as lived phenomena encountered through attentive observation of the everyday.

Central to Axiom is a series of new paintings titled The Text of Light. These paintings depict fragments of light seemingly separated into their component colours, forming infinitely variable compositions. Like the words and letters of language, light is articulated as a vivid spectrum of colour. What initially appears as a rigorous formal vocabulary gradually reveals itself as richly sensory; shifting fields of colour that oscillate between precision and atmosphere, structure and intuition. The works invite sustained looking, allowing perception itself to become the subject.

Presented across the gallery’s upper and lower levels are earlier works spanning sculpture and drawing, offering insight into the evolution of Owen’s practice. His drawings trace the movement of line through space, extending into sculptural and architectural forms that activate their surrounding environment. Long informed by music, particularly the improvisational structures and rhythms of Sydney’s jazz history; Owen’s works, including the paintings, Phaze Zone Drift (from The Necks Aquatic Album) and the Blue Note studies, become compositions of colour, rhythm and responsive exchange. Across these diverse bodies of work, recurring concerns emerge: systems that generate freedom, disciplined structures that remain open to chance, and the continual interplay between order and improvisation.

Owen is represented in major national and international collections, including the British Museum, London; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Olympic Sculpture Park, Seoul; the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo; the National Gallery of Australia; the Art Gallery of New South Wales; the National Gallery of Victoria; the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, among many others. This exhibition has been realised with the support of Joanna Buckley, Associate Artist & Studio Director.