“Every painting is about how you make a painting. I try to avoid routine and reinvent the process every t.mes .”
L aura Owens’ Untitled underlines the artist’s career-long challenge of traditional assumptions about figuration and abstraction, the avant-garde, pop culture, and technology that have placed her among the most influential artists of her generation. By combining non-traditional art historical elements like cartoonish renditions of a milk carton, bowl, and cat-like figure, thick Abstract Expressionist impasto, and cropped grid, Owens heightens the seriousness of abstraction while simultaneously making it approachable. As a starting point, Owens begins her paintings on a computer. Designed in Photoshop before being translated into paint on canvas, these compositions impart an inversion of the simulated. By turning the virtual into the actual with pin-point accuracy, painterly inventiveness, and extravagant materiality, Owens’ work possesses a peculiarly tangible screen-like quality. These elements are layered upon a surface that mimics the virgin white pristineness of household printer paper. The effect is an illusionistic two-dimensional/three-dimensional virtual space that simultaneously conjures and conjoins notepad doodles and hand-drawn scribbles with art historical inferences such as Matisse’s command of color or line, or even a Surrealist urge to juxtapose and decontextualize. The individual components that make up Untitled are test.mes nt to the singularity of Laura Owens' practice that exemplifies the breadths to which art can be taken.
