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Lot Essay
‘I wanted to emphatically try to inhabit the gesture. The gesture is simultaneously the mark inside the painting, the act of painting’ (Laura Owens)
A vibrant pixelated border and passages of gestural figuration illuminated by flashes of viridian, cyan, and blushing pink animate this jubilant canvas by Laura Owens. Suggestions of disparate motifs—a flower, a cloud, a watering can, a landscape—are subsumed into a picture of perpetual motion, as colour and form leap and tumble across the surface with a colouring-book sense of abandon and delight. Working with oil and Flashe, an intense, matte vinyl paint, Owens revels in the possibilities of her medium: colour is by turns fluid, graphic, diaphanous and resolutely opaque, constantly shifting into something new. Handmade and digital mark-making clash and coalesce, picturing a postmodern, post-Internet concatenation of styles. Executed in 2016, the present work dates to a period of widespread critical acclaim for the artist. That year, Owens was nominated for the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. At the same time, she was preparing for her acclaimed mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, which opened the following year.
Emerging on the Los Angeles art scene in the mid-1990s, Owens’ oeuvre has unfolded in a maelstrom of references to art history, mass media and her own personal archive. She draws from Japanese landscapes, American folk art, advertisements, colour field painting, Pop, and comic strips. In the gestural freedom of the doodle Owens finds a precursor in the work of Cy Twombly, while her deconstructed imagery reveals a Post-Impressionist sensibility—she has cited Henri Matisse and Paul Cezanne as early influences. Checkerboard passages, as seen in the present work, evoke the colour charts of Gerhard Richter or highly decorative Secessionist surfaces. The Technicolour surround here might equally be born of a computer screen, and contrasts vividly with the almost pastoral brushwork within. ‘All art now is collage,’ Owens reflected in 2017; ‘art is all about being constructed out of relationships between parts’ (L. Owens quoted in P. Schjeldahl, ‘The Radical Paintings of Laura Owens’, The New Yorker, 30 October 2017).
Owens has described her work as ‘porous’, and often uses trompe-l’oeil effects to test the boundaries between a canvas and its surrounding environment. The present work’s dazzling border acts like a glitch in the surface of the picture plane, drawing the eye into the drama of the scene while simultaneously drawing attention to its artificial edges. The painting is a symphony of contradictions. Where some elements are mechanically precise, Owens’ lush brushwork also offers an exuberant revelation of the artist’s hand. Embracing a dazzling array of visual languages, the work is a celebration of the dynamic, endless possibilities of form and colour arranged upon a surface.
A vibrant pixelated border and passages of gestural figuration illuminated by flashes of viridian, cyan, and blushing pink animate this jubilant canvas by Laura Owens. Suggestions of disparate motifs—a flower, a cloud, a watering can, a landscape—are subsumed into a picture of perpetual motion, as colour and form leap and tumble across the surface with a colouring-book sense of abandon and delight. Working with oil and Flashe, an intense, matte vinyl paint, Owens revels in the possibilities of her medium: colour is by turns fluid, graphic, diaphanous and resolutely opaque, constantly shifting into something new. Handmade and digital mark-making clash and coalesce, picturing a postmodern, post-Internet concatenation of styles. Executed in 2016, the present work dates to a period of widespread critical acclaim for the artist. That year, Owens was nominated for the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. At the same time, she was preparing for her acclaimed mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, which opened the following year.
Emerging on the Los Angeles art scene in the mid-1990s, Owens’ oeuvre has unfolded in a maelstrom of references to art history, mass media and her own personal archive. She draws from Japanese landscapes, American folk art, advertisements, colour field painting, Pop, and comic strips. In the gestural freedom of the doodle Owens finds a precursor in the work of Cy Twombly, while her deconstructed imagery reveals a Post-Impressionist sensibility—she has cited Henri Matisse and Paul Cezanne as early influences. Checkerboard passages, as seen in the present work, evoke the colour charts of Gerhard Richter or highly decorative Secessionist surfaces. The Technicolour surround here might equally be born of a computer screen, and contrasts vividly with the almost pastoral brushwork within. ‘All art now is collage,’ Owens reflected in 2017; ‘art is all about being constructed out of relationships between parts’ (L. Owens quoted in P. Schjeldahl, ‘The Radical Paintings of Laura Owens’, The New Yorker, 30 October 2017).
Owens has described her work as ‘porous’, and often uses trompe-l’oeil effects to test the boundaries between a canvas and its surrounding environment. The present work’s dazzling border acts like a glitch in the surface of the picture plane, drawing the eye into the drama of the scene while simultaneously drawing attention to its artificial edges. The painting is a symphony of contradictions. Where some elements are mechanically precise, Owens’ lush brushwork also offers an exuberant revelation of the artist’s hand. Embracing a dazzling array of visual languages, the work is a celebration of the dynamic, endless possibilities of form and colour arranged upon a surface.