Laura Owens

Laura Owens is known for her innovative and evolving approach to the medium of painting. Her works encompass multiple sources, from personal symbols to newsprint and computer manipulations, in order to challenge and dismantle traditional assumptions surrounding abstraction and figuration. Her work for the Façade reflects this process through its combination of gestural, graphic and grid-like motifs. Familiar concepts of spatial depth and Modernist flatness are overturned by means of an intricate layering of forms and colors—variously representational, geometric, textual and digital. The purple and gold color scheme, mediated through a swarm of pixels, invites numerous readings. An ambiguous mood—benign, irreverent, trolling—is signaled moreover by the emoji symbol (eyes closed, tongue stuck out) that anchors the composition at the bottom right. Like many of the artist’s works, this one is self-referential as much as site-specific: Owens excised the composition from a recent ceiling painting created in Rome, transforming the fragment (through enlargement and relocation) into a self-contained and monumental work.

Laura Owens (Artist-in-Residence, 2000) is known for her innovative and evolving approach to the medium of painting. Her works encompass multiple sources, from personal symbols to newsprint and computer manipulations, in order to challenge and dismantle traditional assumptions surrounding abstraction and figuration.