Victor Seaward (b.1988 Kuala Lumpur) is a London based Painting graduate from the Royal College of Art. Seaward is interested in the agency of things, their material history, and how our visual cultures interact. Mining a broad spectrum of our material cultures to create composite works. Seaward juxtaposes raw, functional materials, such as concrete, with high-tech industrial materials and objects of a historical significance to expose how social and cultural groups create meaning within the material world. The quantum tangle emitted a knot of structure sufficiently complex to reflect, not just the universe outside, but its own inner state.

Drawing on influences from antiquities, old masters, Chinese, Japanese, silver, and even furniture - All these ancient things have such beautiful patination, with an authenticity only attained from centuries of aging. There is a certain sense of mystery you feel when handling these objects – they feel different, charged and almost alien.

Seaward’s work has been strongly connected to materiality and process, and these investigations have manifested themselves over the years in the form of concrete paintings. Concrete is something that permeates the urban environment: it shelters us, protects us, and allows for transformative infrastructure. Yet despite its inherent utilitarianism, it retains a very alluring materiality, a cold muteness that I try and exploit.

Recent concrete works have focused on inlaying material and terrazzo elements in order to fully exploit the mechanical properties of concrete. Another facet of the artist practice centres around the agency of objects and modes of display. He often arranges objects from disparate socio-historic conditions as a way of investigating authorship, commodity, materiality, and production. Technological reproducibility in the form of 3D printing is a key aspect to these arrangements, as he finds it a particularly seductive form of making – with the prints almost acting as three-dimensional facsimiles of art historical tropes.

Recent solo and group exhibitions include: “Nebelmeer”, Recent Activity, Birmingham (2019); “Isabelline and Other Colours”, Lily Brooke, London (2019). Recent group shows include: “Outlines Roughly the Size of a Suit”, Union Gallery, London(2019); “To The Core”, White Crypt, London (2018); “The Metallurgical Ouroboros”, Gossamer Fog, London (2018); “Arc. “ curated by Kris Day, Herrick Gallery, London (2018); “Les Mains Dans Les Poches”, Pierre Poumet, Bordeaux, France (2018); “Spring Syllabus”, J Hammond Projects, London (2018).Victor was a recipient of the Valerie Beston grant at the Royal College of Art.

selected works