“Every painting is about how you try to make a painting... I am always trying to reinvent the whole idea every t.mes ."
Among the most radical and innovative painters of her generation, Laura Owens challenges the boundaries of abstraction and figuration with a practice which is equal parts whimsical and cunning, referential and defiant of the history of painting. Drawing upon a variety of sources, from American folk art, Pop, gestural abstraction, embroidery, clip-art, and digital technologies, Owens layers her exploratory compositions with an ever-evolving visual lexicon. A pivotal and unique painting within Owens’ oeuvre, the present work is a direct citation of Édouard Vuillard’s Octagonal Self Portrait from 1890 and considered Owens’ most overt example of self-representation in painting. For an artist whose visual discourse is predicated on post-modern distancing from her output, the present work is an extraordinary departure. Executed in vibrant yet nuanced strokes of unconstrained color, the work captures Owens in a resolute posture, materializing from a kind of dreamscape. Further test.mes nt to the significance of the present work, Untitled was featured prominently in the artist’s mid-career retrospective, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and traveling to the Dallas Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles from 2017-2019. Acquired directly from Owens’ solo exhibition at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York, the present work has remained in the same collects ion for nearly two decades.
When Owens emerged from her graduate program at CalArts in the mid-1990s, traditional painting was out of fashion and the academic and critical discourse of Contemporary Art propounded conceptual art. Undeterred, Owens pursued abstraction, producing bold, brightly colored compositions exploring the artifice of illusion and space through unbridled color, line and pattern. Untethered to any one specific artistic modality, Owens investigates the language of space and representation through a kaleidoscopic repertoire of expression and form. Peter Schjedahl writes of her work: “She never imitates a style or, really, has one of her own. Rather, she has adopted craft techniques and teased out iconographic and formal ideas from whole fields and genres of the pictorial… Slam-bang visual impact co-occurs with whispering subtlety. Owens’s art imparts a sense, from first to last, of being in the middle of a process that doesn’t evolve but that spreads, deltalike, from a mysterious headwater.” (Peter Schejdahl, “The radical paintings of Laura Owens,” The New Yorker, 23 October 2017 (online)) Owens interrogates and participates in the history of painting and its principles, unsettling expectations and calling attention to the deceit of illusionism.
Executed on an intimate scale, the present work is among the most personal of Owens’ paintings, drawing in the viewer at eye level with the sitter. Directly referential to Vuillard’s Octagonal Self Portrait, the present work also harkens back to centuries of self-portraiture—from those of Rembrandt and Vincent van Gogh, to Pablo Picasso, Lucian Freud, Andy Warhol and David Hockney, each of which bears the unmistakable hand of the artist but contributes to a collects ive genre. Furthermore, the composition evokes Henri Matisse’s Woman with a Hat from 1905, through its Fauvist palette of green, pink, yellow, and blue. Like Matisse’s sitter, Owens renders herself head turned, with an unwavering gaze towards the viewer. Though Owens’ painting recalls these canonical examples, her work challenges their formal systems, through a visual lexicon informed by abstraction. In the context of a practice so deeply rooted in abstraction, the present work holds a distinct importance and relevance as representative of Owens’ engagement with art history and the critical point of change as she enters the mature part of her career.
“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. To push myself.”
From the mid-1990s through the early 2000s, Owens was broadly devoted to abstraction and in 2003, was honored as the youngest artist to receive a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2006, the Los Angeles-based artist took a one-year hiatus from the West Coast, returning to her childhood home in Ohio. There, she embarked on a new stage of her career—she recalls: “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. To push myself.” (Peter Schejdahl, “The radical paintings of Laura Owens,” The New Yorker, 23 October 2017 (online)). The works of this year represent a marked shift in Owens’ oeuvre, representative of a self-reflective reckoning with her own upbringing. In these works, Owens contends with her own artmaking up to that point, “doing away with the notion of untraversable boundaries between the professional life of an artist and the personal stuff that surrounds it, in allowing both to intermingle and play out on the field of the canvas.” (Kristy Bell, “On Laura Owens’s Idea of Edges” in: Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art (and traveling), Laura Owens, 2017-19, p. 418) Owens’ t.mes in Ohio reflect an exploration of the boundaries of her practice in content and form. In the present work, Owens renders a tondo within the rectilinear canvas, creating a discrete pictorial space within the work—as if the viewer peers at Owens through a window.
Owens’ works are as spellbinding as they are familiar; they inspire curiosity and intrigue, and yet resonate closely with what is already known. In her 2017 interview with critic Peter Schejdahl, Owens explains that “All art now is collage,” and further elaborates, “Now art is all about being constructed out of relationships between parts.” (Peter Schejdahl, “The radical paintings of Laura Owens,” The New Yorker, 23 October 2017 (online)) In a post-modern approach, Owens contends with the arbitrary boundaries of painting and representation, investigating the pictorial space of the composition. She borrows from canonical art historical precedents and visual conventions, but continuously innovates, generating works which reflect on the work of a painter and, in the present work, the work of an artist to represent themselves.
