In We will endure, Nick Owehand presents a series of oldand new works that suggest areas of contemplation on the passing of time and the stalling of it. Animal specimens are depicted through a range of dichotomies: from the disciplinary gesture of a pointing figure towards a donkey to the process of decomposition of a deep sea squid, to the soft care of one's hands offering an almost abject warmth to another's rodent counterpart.

These forms appear within ephemeral brushwork on wood and canvas, building an image of a round table with all the seats occupied by our gathered guests. It is a sort of coming together—not a family reunion, but a late-night dinner where the ghosts of the past, long absent, collect themselves and hold jury. Unaware of their fading presence, they remain eternally present. In this way, the works inhabit a space between a time frame that seeks to locate itself between a future yet to arrive and a past that has long since departed.

Centuries of scientific inquiry into humanity's relationship with animals find themselves reflected in these works. Our generic gaze towards such subjects is detected, turned back upon us, and compelled into an acknowledgement of our increasing detachment from a once-shared reality between these two forces. What was once integral to our understanding of the world has contracted into itself, only to re-emerge beneath the microscope.

Animals are not reduced to specimens, nor to the objects of an anthropological gaze or the dominion of their human counterparts. Instead, they are shown in close proximity to ambiguous contexts of stewardship and care, never fully resolving into a singular meaning. These works question how one might approach an animal without reducing it to a symbol or representation of humanist intent. In such paintings, animals are not guardians of a lost world, but witnesses to other ways of existing and relating. Their presence unsettles familiar distinctions between nature and culture, knowledge and mystery, self and other.

The works invite viewers to remain with these uncertainties and to consider forms of coexistence that do not begin with an attempt at complete understanding. Instead, they ask us to recognise and contend with the possibility that something will always remain beyond our concepts.

Nick Owehand's works inhabit a threshold between remembrance and anticipation, disappearance and persistence, human and animal. The exhibition holds open a space in which relation remains possible precisely because it can never be complete.



Documentation by Kateryna Lymar