Mimi Owen’s paintings explore the dialogue between abstraction and figuration and resist the impulse to define the body in fixed terms. Colour plays a vital role in this disruption: warmer temperatures evoke the softness of flesh, while cooler passages complicate the surface of the body by emphasising tension and pressure. The paintings reinforce their own materiality through visible brushwork. Passages of folded flesh break the rhythm while heightened transitions of colour replace conventional markers of identity.

Owen’s compositions invite slower looking, where anatomy gradually unfolds itself upon this sustained attention. The artist’s own body serves as source material. What initially reads as multiple figures in contact is, in fact, a single body compressed and reoriented through cropping. By encouraging the viewer to engage closely without providing immediate clarity, Owen opens a space for considering one’s own relationship to the body, what it is like to inhabit one, and the urge to contain it.