27 April - 27 May 2006
Robots in the garden, lions, hunters, romance and war are some of the images in Laura Owens’ new work created for this exhibition. Owens’ influences are wide, ranging from DADA performance to hindu relief, which inspired the figures to the right. Elsewhere she has broken away from the fine arts to delve into wallpapers and textiles. In his catalogue essay for Owens’ exhibition at LAMOCA in 2003, Paul Schimmel observed, “Unlike many postmodern artists, whose works are characterized by the seamless appropriation or cut-and-paste of various pre-existing elements, Owens makes no effort to cover up her inspirations or to couch them in irony - nor does she limit herself to borrowing from others.”
Beyond the straightforward beauty of Owens’ paintings and drawings is a constant questioning of her chosen media. She has rejected naturalism in favour of depictions, representations. Her magpie-like approach to resources is echoed in her application of paint and the arrival of foreign elements in her collages. Evident too is an unashamed pleasure in ornamentation, a delight in pictorial elegance, which affords decoration a new dignity. Owens combines abstract elements with representational elements to create a highly personal vocabulary: a vocabulary which translates into an elaborate, elegant and quietly exuberant whole.
This is Laura Owens’ third show at Sadie Coles HQ. Owens has had solo exhibitions at Inverleith House, Royal Botanical Garden, Edinburgh (2000),Isabella Gardner Museum, Boston (2001) and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (2003), which travelled to three further North American institutions. Owens’ paintings have been included in many key international exhibitions including the 2004 Whitney Biennial.
The current exhibition will travel to the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin. In the summer, Laura Owens will also have a solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zurich, touring to the Camden Arts Centre, London.
Paul Schimmel, Laura Owens (Los Angeles (CA): The Museum of Contemporary Art), page 29
28 October - 30 November 1999
Laura Owens, for her second exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, will show a site-specific presentation of a large-scale diptych painting to hang on opposite walls of the square gallery. Laura Owens’ large scale canvases use landscape, plants or architectural interiors as a starting point. Her work is epic in scale, but modest in subject, and playful and whimsical in visual result. Owens, purposely, does not take up the task to position her work in relation to the big schools of painting. Her work, not abstract and not representational chooses to create a space for painting free of historical baggage. As she says, ultimately you really want to make the painting that you wan to be with. Not one that is constantly telling you everything it knows.
22 October - 22 November 1997: Paintings
Viewing the paintings of Laura Owens is a happily engulfing experience. You are gently asked to consider, and re-consider, all possible angles in our wider periphery vision: inside/outside, upside down, open/closed, near/far. Her cool and detached constructions, where noisy questions about perspective, spatial definition, and representation ricochet across quiet canvases, have fun with our logical desire for a more scientific scrutiny.
One of the paintings in this exhibition is a view through the receding doorways of the central gallery of a museum. The physical space is economically mapped out in large, flat areas of colour with minimal detail. In each room, edges of paintings can be glimpsed (the jewels in this composition being where the eye would naturally concentrate), and only here is the paint intensively worked.
Zooming in and out of view is our relationship within and comprehension of the 2-D visual plane. Owens is unafraid to keep one eye on Barnett Newman and the other on David Hockney as she streers us on a well thought-out route through the contradictions of our visual readings.
Laura Owens lives and works in Los Angeles. She has had solo exhibitions at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York and Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Santa Monica. This is her first exhibition in the UK.