Lawrie Shabibi is pleased to open the September 2022 Art Season with Fractured Landscapes a solo exhibition by London artist Nathaniel Rackowe, his third exhibition at the gallery. Rackowe’s practice spans public art, installation, sculpture, contemporary dance and painting; investigating form and materiality through his observations of light and the effect its vicissitudes have on our experiences of urban spaces. Whereas in previous exhibitions Rackowe worked with light as a source (embedding neon tubes into his sculptures) in this exhibition he considers the notion of light (artificial and natural) as a reflector - these works explore how light bounces across objects to guide our sensation of space, material and colour.

The title of the exhibition is inspired by a passage in “Klara and the Sun” by acclaimed writer Kazuo Ishiguro. Klara, the Artificial Friend protagonist of the novel, understands her environment in moments of intense focus by fracturing the visual information she receives.There is a beautiful description of this happening in the setting sun across a rural landscape, and this moment brings Klara great clarity and an ability to step back and see things from different angles simultaneously. Rackowe read the book during a period of reevaluating his own spatial surroundings, exploring London in a different way during lockdown, and reassessing his life after surviving cancer. The intersection of the rural and built environments in London became increasingly significant, and he found his work shifting to focus on natural light, reflection, horizon, and fractured undulating surfaces that seemed to layer the natural and built. In Fractured Landscapes Rackowe seeks to capture and fix something of transcendental moments of clarity that he, like Klara, found in moments alone in the landscape.