Nathaniel Rackowe
b. 1975, United Kingdom
Nathaniel Rackowe lives and works in London. His often large-scale urban referenced structures, and light sculptures are designed to recreate the experience of navigating the city around us. His works are abstracted impressions of today’s metropolitan experience evoked through the vicissitudes of light as it fluctuates throughout the city. Influenced by Modernism, film and video games, Rackowe uses the mass manufactured derivative products of the modernist era – glass, corrugated plastics, concrete, scaffolding, breeze blocks and strip lights – to recreate the collective experience and visual sensations of urban contemporary life, while incorporating a deeply personal emotional response to flowing through built space.
Rackowe uses light to structure space by emulating the way it delineates buildings, city blocks and streets. In this way Rackowe departs from the aesthetics of the use of light of American minimalists such as Flavin and Judd. By decoding these experiences his works capture the chromatic sensations of desolate streets at dawn, the atmosphere as daylight fades into night and the shadows created by obtrusive cranes, scaffolding and skeletal buildings. The resulting sculptures – striking geometric shapes and dramatic shafts of light – combine vivid beauty with the grimness of industrialisation, perhaps offering a true representation of the disparities of contemporary life.
Rackowe’s art practice spans public art, installation, sculpture, photography and painting, and in the last 5 years an increasing focus on performance, collaborating with choreographer Angela Woodhouse.