拍品专文
Untitled is a lively and spirited example of Laura Owens’ singular vision. Across a panoramic expanse, azure, turquoise, and lavender brushwork creates a complex, imaginative skyscape against which clouds sway and birds flutter. The surface is expressive and engrossing, a blue realm open to wonder and possibility. Seemingly flat yet wholly tactile, the painting’s romanticism obscures Owen’s exacting methods; her canvases, which effortlessly shift between figuration and abstraction, possess an acute sensitivity to color, form, and geometry. Painted in 2016, just prior to her acclaimed solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Untitled is exhilaration incarnate.
"I feel like there’s a space of personal freedom for me where my art-making happens".
Laura Owens
In exhibitions at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles, Owens has repeatedly defied the expected. Following studies at the Rhode Island School of Design, Owens attended the California Institute of the Arts and then permanently relocated to Los Angeles. Her paintings transpose and rearrange references and narratives, from cartoons and folk art to Peruvian textiles and French modernism. It may be that she draws inspiration from an entire scene or the smallest mark. “Her eclecticism,” notes curator Paul Schimmel, “might have been taken as a symptom of indecision—the product of a wandering mind or a lack of discipline—had it not evolved into a profound ideological expression” (P. Schimmel, “Plays Well With Others”, in Laura Owens, exh. cat. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 2003, p. 33).
“All art is collage,” the artist claimed in 2017, shortly after finishing the present work. “Heterogeneous in form. Against the different paradigm of the Gestalt object, like a Jackson Pollock painting—a single image that jolts you. Now art is all about being constructed out of relationships between parts” (quoted in op. cit., 2017). Indeed, Untitled evokes Constable’s skies refracted through the buoyancy of Disney and adorned with Miró’s birds. Although the painting conveys a sense of lightness and may read as spontaneous, the images are always pre-planned. Owens works from sketches and tests and before committing paint to canvas, she knows mostly what the outcome should be.
Presence is important to Owens’s art and one of the defining elements of her paintings. As a child growing up in Ohio, Owens remembers the impact a canvas by the Color Field artist Morris Louis made during her first visit to The Cleveland Museum of Art. As she walked closer to it, “the painting got bigger and bigger,” and Owens felt “smaller and smaller” (quoted in P. Schjeldahl, “The Radical Paintings of Laura Owens”, The New Yorker, 2 October 2017, online). Owens began her career as a devotee of abstraction but by the early 2000s had embraced more figurative imagery. “I decided I needed to bring in the human figure, because it was something that I was leaving out, and to break the habit of working for sites,” she has said. “To push myself” (quoted in ibid.). Despite turning towards the representative, Owens’ paintings retained their ability to convey a palpable presence, a sense evident in Untitled wherein the sky almost expands to encircle the viewer.
"I feel like there’s a space of personal freedom for me where my art-making happens".
Laura Owens
In exhibitions at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles, Owens has repeatedly defied the expected. Following studies at the Rhode Island School of Design, Owens attended the California Institute of the Arts and then permanently relocated to Los Angeles. Her paintings transpose and rearrange references and narratives, from cartoons and folk art to Peruvian textiles and French modernism. It may be that she draws inspiration from an entire scene or the smallest mark. “Her eclecticism,” notes curator Paul Schimmel, “might have been taken as a symptom of indecision—the product of a wandering mind or a lack of discipline—had it not evolved into a profound ideological expression” (P. Schimmel, “Plays Well With Others”, in Laura Owens, exh. cat. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 2003, p. 33).
“All art is collage,” the artist claimed in 2017, shortly after finishing the present work. “Heterogeneous in form. Against the different paradigm of the Gestalt object, like a Jackson Pollock painting—a single image that jolts you. Now art is all about being constructed out of relationships between parts” (quoted in op. cit., 2017). Indeed, Untitled evokes Constable’s skies refracted through the buoyancy of Disney and adorned with Miró’s birds. Although the painting conveys a sense of lightness and may read as spontaneous, the images are always pre-planned. Owens works from sketches and tests and before committing paint to canvas, she knows mostly what the outcome should be.
Presence is important to Owens’s art and one of the defining elements of her paintings. As a child growing up in Ohio, Owens remembers the impact a canvas by the Color Field artist Morris Louis made during her first visit to The Cleveland Museum of Art. As she walked closer to it, “the painting got bigger and bigger,” and Owens felt “smaller and smaller” (quoted in P. Schjeldahl, “The Radical Paintings of Laura Owens”, The New Yorker, 2 October 2017, online). Owens began her career as a devotee of abstraction but by the early 2000s had embraced more figurative imagery. “I decided I needed to bring in the human figure, because it was something that I was leaving out, and to break the habit of working for sites,” she has said. “To push myself” (quoted in ibid.). Despite turning towards the representative, Owens’ paintings retained their ability to convey a palpable presence, a sense evident in Untitled wherein the sky almost expands to encircle the viewer.