Laura Owens
Sunday, 15 June 2014
Work from her oeuvre.
“Laura Owens has worked in a dizzying array of styles—from crisp abstraction to moody landscape—delving enthusiastically into genre painting, vernacular pattern, and a kind of japonisme that is all the more potent in an age when decoration is often met with critical suspicion. Untitled shows Owens in full possession of her skills at a moment when her earlier tendencies toward abstraction were beginning to give way to a more figurative and illusionistic sense of space. Simultaneously faux-naïve and stylized, her handling renders the traditional landscape scene with a buzzy organic materiality. The viewer falls easily into the picture’s airy depths, but is constantly reminded that she is viewing an image built stroke by stroke from paint.” – MOCA, Los Angeles