Laura owens on horse

And personal history within a larger cultural matrix and provides a comprehensive overview of the life and work of this influential and continually evolving artist Laura OwensThis retrospective was my first exposure to Owens s work I ll confess that I struggled to appreciate it a bit at first but by the end of the show I felt that I had been exposed to an original and important painter I would offer a slight criticism of the curators in that this retrospective strikes me as perhaps a tad too career spanning The opening gallery features some of Owens s art school homework and some of these works are.

A richly illustrated expansive mid career survey of the stand out American artist s pioneering and influential work Since the early 1990s Laura Owens b 1970 has challenged traditional assumptions about figuration and abstraction in her pioneering and at times controversial approach to painting This inventive mid career survey of Owens s work takes the form of an expansive seven hundred page book interweaving writing on the artist s work with excerpts from a wide variety of texts Including an essay by Scott Rothkopf this richly illustrated volume presents Owens s paintings within a rich trove of archival imagery that includes exhibition announcements installation photographs personal correspondence and source material most of which has never before been published Reflections by fellow artists collaborators assistants dealers family and friends contribute an array of perspectives on Owens s working practice and her numerous achievements Touching on topics that range from the history of embroidery to pop music and computer software to maverick artists such as Elizabeth Murray Joe Zucker and Charles M Schulz this book situates Owens s output diverse interests to be blunt tired examples of late minimalism Someone such as myself experiencing Owens s oeuvre for the first time might not get the best vibe In fact she started to find her style quickly Her first major works were large scale quasi representational paintings of a very spacial and geometric character that were also unapologetically decorative Owens s work is consistently for lack of an artsier term pretty with bright warm colors As her painting started to become directly representational sometimes featuring cute animals it started to remind me a bit of that of Henri Rousseau Owens work willfully challenges the elitist distinction between hight and decorative art Without the artist ever being overt about it I sensed in her work a critique of a patriarchal art culture in which the decorative associated with the domestic is seen as feminine and therefor less significant A striking room features a collaboration between Owens and a sculptor whose name has escaped me who presents his hand made interior furnishings as sculpture with Owens paintings decorating the walls After Owens started a family her work became emotional Human forms generally in a vulnerably intimate state make their first appearances in the paintings Their are allusions to family and rituals between the artist and her children Domesticity overcomes its trivialization by patriarchy Owens work was from the beginning highly spacial But in her later work she starts to head into whole new realms of painterly space Through a combination of digital and handcraft which was explained in the notes but not comprehended by me Owens creates multidimensional paintings of which one cannot tell where one plane ends and another begins Sometimes one plane ends unexpectedly revealing a deeper one or a subterranean plane breaks through a surface one Still only 47 years old Owens is clearly a major talent with many years of her creative prime ahead of her 9780300229295