May 17, 2017

Laura Owens (1970) is a Los Angeles artist, and her art has been recognized with a number of prizes. For example in 2001 the The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her the $5,000 Willard L. Metcalf Award, and and was a Guna S. Mundheim Visual Arts Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in the spring of 2007. These are just examples.  A
work of hers, sold for $50,000 at the 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, May 17, 2017.

A recent assessment of the career of Laura Owens, on the occasion of her Whitney retrospective, (2018) gives us a bigger picture:

'The Los Angeles artist Laura Owens brings a light touch and a tough mind to a new kind of synthetic painting. Her exuberant, bracing midcareer survey at the Whitney beams a positive, can-do energy. As a stylist and culture critic, Owens is neither a stone-cold killer nor a gleeful nihilist, traits embraced by some of her peers. She’s an art lover, an enthusiast who approaches the problem of what to paint, and how to paint it, with an open, pragmatic mind. Her style can appear to be all over the place, but we always recognize the work as hers. Her principal theme may be her own aesthetic malleability....

'.... In a recent New Yorker profile, Owens thoughtfully implies that the time for gestalts is over, that collage—i.e., something made out of parts or layers—is simply a feature of the life we all lead. Indeed, a big part of our culture is involved with putting things together, with little distinction made between the invented and the found, and even less between the past and the present. ....We are all collage artists now...

'[Her paintings are] like illustrations in a children’s book. They feel liberated, unafraid to be garish. Saturated color and loose, agitated brushwork. Images that kids find appealing: animals in the forest, princesses, wild-haired children—fairy-tale stuff. The spirit of Magritte hovers over these paintings—his vache paintings from the late 1940s, the ones that nobody wanted....

'Sometimes the paintings are so casual-looking they can trip you up. In 2013, Owens showed twelve large (roughly twelve-by-ten-foot) paintings of this new postmodern composite type in the gallery space that occupies the ground floor of her Los Angeles studio, and people have been talking about them ever since. Paintings that leave the impression they could be, or do, just about anything. Perhaps their most salient quality is confidence. The digital enhancement of a sketch or doodle enlarged to twelve feet gives a vertiginous, Alice-in-Wonderland feeling to some of the paintings.... The paintings don’t so much violate notions of good taste as ignore them.....

'One of Owens’s many strengths is her use of scale—the big painting and the internal relationship of shapes to the whole. She’s at ease with the large New York School canvas. Even though a lot has happened since, and no matter how anachronistic it may seem, our yardstick for serious painting is still shadowed by the achievements of the New York School.....

'Another of her works from 2013 is an almost twelve-foot-tall painting with line drawings of cats playing with balls of yarn dispersed over its white ground..... Some drawings are carefully executed and others more slapdash; some are in plaid, others in the grid patterns that Owens is so fond of. Here and there are touches of spray paint in raspberry, yellow, and blue. It’s like a motif that one might find on a young girl’s flannel pajamas, something a sophisticated seven-year-old would find amusing and a bit arch. This is a painting that says: You want all-over? OK, how about this? This is the way to be ambitious now. You don’t always have to throw your Sunday punch.

'The installation at the Whitney, overseen by Owens and Scott Rothkopf, the museum’s chief curator and deputy director for programs, restages exhibitions from Owens’s principal galleries in Los Angeles, New York, London, and Cologne. Walls were built, hanging plans copied—and the result resembles a Laura Owens theme park instead of a traditional retrospective
....
'The 663-page catalog that accompanies the exhibition is generous and full of anecdotes. Many voices are heard: the artist’s mother, her fellow artists, dealers, novelists, curators, and critics all contribute their shadings to Owens’s rise. The book is a hybrid literary form, a bildungsroman with pictures: the story of an earnest young woman from the provinces with an appealing, straightforward manner who, through luck and pluck and the benevolent intervention of some well-placed patrons, grows up to see her dream of being an artist realized.

'A blizzard of faxes, letters, clippings, photographs, and invoices to and from Owens and her dealers and peers shines a light on the world of professional art schools and the international network of galleries and alternative spaces that are the mechanisms of generational renewal. Owens approaches art-making with a democratic spirit, in the naturally collegial way that comes easily when you’re young. The catalog represents a welcome acknowledgment that any career of real substance is also a group project. That Owens so readily embraces that reality may be a gender thing; her male counterparts still cling for the most part to the “prickliest cactus in the desert” mode, tiresome though it has become.
.....
'Probably many people can identify with the trajectory of Owens’s life. I know I can. Midwestern and middle-class, Owens as a teenager looked at paintings, noting which ones held her attention and why. She developed her skills at summer art camp, going off to college at RISD, and on to CalArts for grad school. This is how artists today are made: from avid teenaged drawer and painter to RISD adept who then finds herself questioned by the hard-liners for whom painting was a lost cause. It’s a great recipe when combined with talent and drive. By the time Owens got to grad school, she had sufficient self-confidence to survive the ritual hazing known as the group critique. Although Owens put in her time at CalArts, that hotbed of conceptualism with the arch-enforcer Michael Asher, it doesn’t seem to have done her any harm, possibly because she was so clear about her vocation from an early age.
.....
'Owens takes the world of design, especially children’s books and child-friendly graphics, and teases out the forms that can be recast as art. Put another way, she has an instinct for choosing the right thing and knowing what to do with it. Her work has no anxiety about being nerdy, or not much anxiety period. This is art that’s comfortable wearing fuzzy slippers.

'Owens’s work is the apotheosis of painting in the digital age. The defining feature of digital art—of digital information generally—is its weightlessness. Images, colors, marks, text, are essentially decals in a nondimensional electronic space. They exist, but only up to a point. They can excite the mind, but you can’t touch them. An air of weightlessness remains even when they are transferred to the physical surface of a painting. If these images were to fall, nothing would catch them. They’re like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff, just before he realizes he’s churning air.
....
'Owens, whether using embroidery, the computer, painted forms, or screen printing, stumbled on a hidden truth that has been more or less obscured since the late 1980s: the relationship between form, visual logic, and emotional catharsis is itself ambiguous.
....
'I can’t fully explain why, but walking through the show I had the feeling, as I rounded a corner, of a dream of falling, one that was deprived of its conclusive ending when you hit the floor and wake. Pictorial free-fall—it’s thrilling, and quite unnerving...'

Here is a thumbnail of a canvas discussed in our excerpts above.