Victor Seaward

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 material cultures to create composite works, he juxtaposes raw, functional materials, such as concrete, with high-tech industrial materials and objects of 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 and Japanese art, silver, and even furniture, Seaward notes: “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 is strongly connected to materiality and process, which has manifested in his concrete paintings. Concrete permeates the urban environment: it shelters, protects, and enables transformative infrastructure. Despite its utilitarian nature, it retains an alluring materiality and cold muteness that he seeks to exploit.

Recent concrete works focus on inlaying material and terrazzo elements to fully exploit the mechanical properties of concrete. Another facet of his practice centers around the agency of objects and modes of display. He often arranges objects from disparate socio-historic contexts to investigate authorship, commodity, materiality, and production. Technological reproducibility, particularly in the form of 3D printing, is a key aspect of these arrangements, with prints acting as three-dimensional facsimiles of art historical tropes.