Born in Liège (Belgium) in 1987, Owen Munisamy learnt to draw with a local artist Véronique Boseret. He finished his secondary level studies in Fine Arts at the St. Luc Institute in Liège (Belgium).
In 2006, he went to study Great Britain, his father’s country, where he did a Foundation Course at the Somerset College of Arts and Technology in Taunton, part of the University of Plymouth.
He got accepted in the Fine Arts at the prestigious Winchester School of Arts, the Faculty of Arts of the University of Southampton from where, in 2011, he obtained a BA (Hons) in Fine Art.
He exhibited his works at the Winchester School graduate show and at the reprise in July 2011 at the Barge House (OXO Tower) in London.
Since 2011, O.Munisamy signed up at the school spetialising in weapon engraving at the school of l'ecole d'Armurie Léon Mignon in Liège (Belgium) and obtained the certificate in 2013.
From a family of professional musicians, he was naturally inspired by sound but also by biomorphism and surrealism. He was attracted by the mechanisms of wind instruments. (He himself learnt the piano, his mother was a violinist and his father a french horn player).
As Giorgio de Chirico said, “In spite of a dream being a strange phenomenon and an inexplicable mystery, even more inexplicable is the mystery that our thoughts confer on certain objects and aspects of life.” Francis Bacon compared the images in his head to an uncontrollable dream. This is exactly what Owen Munisamy unconsciously paints: inanimate musical instruments which he transforms into living biomorphic forms in an enigmatic world. A musical world which invites the spectator to enter.
By the ensemble of lines and irregular shapes, Owen Munisamy’s work could be described as metaphysical where curve and abstraction are omnipresent.
Artists such as Aldo Pomodoro and Anish Papoor inspire him, the first by his spheres with their great complexity of detail which reflect another world, the second by his hollow spaces which draw the spectator inside.
Owen Munisamy does not only paint in oil but also in watercolour. To begin with, watercolour was for him, only a technique for taking notes, sketches preparatory to painting in oil. Since his encounter with Marcel Lucas the watercolourist and his work, he has considered watercolour as an art in its own right. Since then he is a member of of the A.I.B (member of the Watercolour Institute of Belgium) and A.F.B (French speaking aquarellists of Belgium).
