Re-Vision, 2025
Arc One Gallery, Melbourne
Photography: Andrew Curtis and Joanna Buckley
This exhibition takes its title from a complex, multifaceted work, Re-Vision (Melancolia) by Robert Owen devised in 1987. Revisiting it today, it is comprised of eighty-one painted acrylic canvas boards, each panel devoted to a colour representing a planet in our solar system. Earthy orange-red tones in the spirit of the planet Mars command the east and south edges, while the remaining hues drift, pulse, and play across the surface of the work’s universe.
Striking thin black tape, carefully layered across this world, becomes a spatial tool and conceptual anchor where Owen plays with dimension and depth. “I then played with stereoscopic effects by floating two cubes above each other and seeing them snap into 3D, with the implication of solid and transparent 4D hypercubes,” he observes. These visual devices are carried throughout Owen’s practice once appearing and reappearing with infinite potential.
Much like the Albrecht Dürer’s allegorical engraving Melencolia I, which acts as a direct reference to Owen’s Re-Vision (Melancolia) it is also symbolic of his own universe. Owen reveals to us the expressive potential of space, light, colour, context and materials as vessels for philosophical inquiry and perceptual wonder.
Owen has long believed in the transformative potential of art—a belief echoed in a quote he often returns to. For Owen, as Richard Kamler wrote, “Art is our one true global language… It speaks to our need to reveal, heal, and transform. It transcends our ordinary lives and lets us imagine what is possible.”
In Re-Vision, Owen presents an exhibition of sculpture, painting, drawing and installation that draws the past and present into relationship. Large-scale tape wall-drawings, approaching the scale of architecture, create an immersive spatial experience where scientific and technological structures converge with the intuitive and poetic. Deep night hues in the Lake Mungo paintings evoke an intimate yet expansive sense of nature, alongside luminous sculptures and drawings, as if in a constellation. Through these works, Owen reimagines new ways of knowing and feeling, inviting contemplation on the nature of consciousness over time.
With thanks to Joanna Buckley, Stewart Russell, Danica Miller, Carlier Makigawa, Dae Hoon Kang, Robert Hook, Linear Metal Polishing and Tom Ellis for their contribution to the work. Robert Owen acknowledges the Kulin Nations as sovereign custodians of the land on which he lives and works and extends his respects to ancestors and Elders; past, present and emerging.