William Lowry

William Lowry makes drawings, prints, sculptures and installations that explore masculinity, memory and myth through the symbolic language of architecture. Figures – soldiers, athletes, workers, lovers, boys – appear caught between performance and vulnerability. They inhabit spaces suspended between the contemporary and the ancient, the intimate and the monumental: city edges, watchtowers, domes, arches and floodlights. These settings borrow from visionary and monumental architecture, from Boullée’s impossible gravity to Sant’Elia’s Futurist infrastructures, to stage the body inside larger fantasies of progress, power and ruin. He is interested in how images become carriers of internal mythologies, and how private feeling gets organised into public iconography. Alongside drawing and printmaking, he uses materials such as aluminium, plywood, resin, acetate, perspex and light, as well as processes including 3D printing, projection and sound. He is drawn to devotional objects, reliquaries and apocalyptic image traditions, where illumination and catastrophe sit side by side. His awards include the Bartolomeu dos Santos Memorial Award, awarded by the Slade School of Fine Art, the Max Werner Drawing Prize, the Euan Uglow Scholarship, the Hermione Hammond Drawing Award, the Vivien Leigh Prize, the Emery Prize and the Peter Kirk Travel Scholarship.

ENQUIRE