Louisa Owen
Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to present Spires, Louisa Owen’s first solo exhibition in New York. Owen’s sculpture and drawing embrace materials that carry their own histories, shaping forms where strength feels provisional, and vulnerability becomes a force. Creating architectures that reach toward pinnacles and drawn landscapes where memory and myth converge, she makes works that feel at once intimate and monumental, evoking both sanctuary and longing.
Constructed from antique paper and the thorns of wild roses, Owen’s sculptures suggest fortresses, reliquaries, and dreamlike towers. Their tapering forms strain upward, yet their surfaces are creased, stitched, and scarred, holding a quiet gravity. In Owen’s hands, stability feels precarious, and foundations seem half-remembered, the scarred surfaces of her forms suggesting both skin and structure. Hidden recesses suggest stories of touch, damage, and sacred encounter.
This interplay between structure and atmosphere extends into her drawings, where architecture dissolves into air and landscape becomes liminal. Forests, ruins, and moonlit skies emerge in stains of ink, pastel, and light. Here, illumination drifts through each scene as both echo and companion, shaping spaces where the familiar slips toward the otherworldly.
By channeling the psychological charge of Surrealism and the restraint of Minimalism, Owen creates forms that feel acutely of this moment. These structures suggest a longing for refuge while quietly acknowledging that permanence and safety are illusions. In an era defined by distrust (of institutions, intimacy, and even memory itself) these works register as both elegies for what has been lost and delicate propositions for what might still endure.
Within this quiet theater of forms, Owen positions vulnerability not as a flaw but as a conceptual strategy, using modest materials to explore architectures of longing and belief. In their quiet tension, these works reveal how fragile materials can hold entire worlds – histories, losses, and imagined futures embedded in their surfaces.