Pierre Von-Ow

Born in 1992, in France.

Pierre Von-Ow is an art history researcher and exhibition curator, with degrees from Yale University, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, and Columbia University. His research focuses on the intersections between the arts and scholarship in the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly in England and the British Empire. He currently teaches in the Department of Art History at the University of St Andrews.

Pierre is working on an exhibition project that seeks to demonstrate that, throughout history, individuals have wanted to touch light. More importantly, they have hoped to be touched by light. The works brought together in the exhibition testify to the power of images to represent this intangible phenomenon that surrounds us. Through forms, signs and metaphors, artists, philosophers, scientists, educators and writers have attempted to give light arms or a face, to give it texture, to spatialise it, to inhabit it. The works presented in the exhibition offer an anthropology of light, like a diverted archaeology of photography, far from the eyes and closer to the body.

This exhibition is an extension of the project Pierre presented at the Villa Medici residents’ exhibition (Cambiare la prosa del mondo, 2025). This installation took as its starting point the lecture on rainbows given each year at Cambridge University by the blind mathematician Nicholas Saunderson (1682–1739). Never published, its content survives only in the handwritten notes taken by his students between 1711 and 1739. Entitled Touching Rainbows, Pierre’s installation consisted of tactile relief boards reproducing the rainbow diagrams drawn by six of them, accompanied by a recording and transcription of Saunderson’s lecture. These documents and the exhibition he is planning invite us to reconsider what escapes our gaze in our perception and imagination of space and colour.