Patrick Lowry (b.1949) is an artist based in Cornwall, working across large-scale installation, painting and photography. Lowry’s original profession as an industrial designer continues to resonate and inform an artistic practice that interrogates the trappings of commercialism and the destructive powers of capitalist systems. Using processes of meticulous replication and jarring displacement, he aims to highlight fundamental inequalities entrenched in economic, political and cultural hierarchies.

Works include the full-scale replication of the façade of a 1950’s modern home and garden in American Dream (2013); a detailed rendering of a looming Heidelberg printer, accompanied by boxes of counterfeit bank notes in Quantitative Easing (2014) and a full-scale model of a MQ1 predator drone, breaking out of the confines of the gallery space in Surveillance (2016).

For The Manchester Contemporary, Lowry presents works on paper and canvas. His occasional turn to painting is purposely less direct than his formidable installations, creating subtle suggestions of context through ambiguous renderings of place – finding a hint of the familiar in a far-away place or seeking out the unusual in the everyday. Leaving Waterloo (2020) presents us with a transitory moment captured from a train leaving the city at dusk – slipping past the layered lives of the city, the artist’s own reflection just visible, at once specific and timeless, the optimism or the melancholy of the journey held in paint. Korean Rain (2025) depicts a blurry landscape; squinting through the mist, the artist seeks to understand something of the societal contexts of an unfamiliar city, the romantic British troupe of the black umbrella seeming in disquiet juxtaposition to the hi-vis attire of authority.

• Leaving Waterloo, oil on linen board, 122 x 81cm, 2020 – £1000
• Flamm x AH Print: Korean Rain, 29.7 x 42 cm, 2025 (limited edition of 25) – £75 (unframed)