Enchanting and lyrical, Untitled belongs to a pivotal series of works created by Laura Owens shortly before her first exhibition in Europe. Held at the Kunsthalle Zürich in 2006, the retrospective presented some of the best works from the artist’s oeuvre created from 1994 onwards. Within the same year the exhibition travelled to the Camden Arts Centre in London, where the present work was displayed prominently in the central room, showing off its truly impressive scale. Rendered in deep blue, creamy beige and burnt sienna, the present airy composition offers a scene featuring a fairy-tale-like chariot lead by white horses. Epitomising Owens’ early poetical motifs, the chariot carries a group of uniformed men playing instruments, a lion ridden by a cherub and a fairy character whose gaze meets the viewer. The highly decorative carriage seems to be ploughing through the night sky as little white clouds, evocative of Chinese landscape painting, are formed behind the chariot’s wheels. The composition is enclosed by a misty view of the moon and little colourful stars scattered around the main scene.

Deliberately mixing techniques and traditions, the work presents a unique array of motifs, creating a truly contemporary composition which transgresses boundaries between Western and Eastern painting conventions but also those between fine and folk art. Fabled creatures of every imaginable cultural origin characterise Owens’ early works such as the present painting. In particular, the series created around the mid-2000s incorporate elements which are “tellingly borrowed from Hindu traditions of representation, a culture that thinks in terms of a common purpose of humanity and nature. Owens’ quirky pastorals have a characteristic legerity and a seemingly inadvertent disrespect for evolutionary logic, but their diverting quaintness is actually fuelled by a very serious interest in principles of deregulation and of insubordination” (Rod Mengham, ‘Agitpop’, Laura Owens, Zurich 2006, p. 25). Such co-existence of styles, techniques and motifs is the focal point in Owens’ acclaimed early oeuvre which channels collective creativity and serves as an artistic basis for the painterly transformation in her later works.

Drawing the viewer’s attention to the many layers of its thrilling landscape, the present composition offers a complex and delightfully ambiguous narrative. Through the rejection of a single focus, as well as the decision to leave the work untitled, the painter allows the viewer to fully experience the work at their own pace offering both aspects of the familiar world and a glimpse of a universe that is entirely unpredictable and imaginative.

Owens is one of the most innovative and significant artists of her generation. She first came to prominence in the mid-nineties following the acclaim of her early series of canvases incorporating personal allusions, doodles and common craft materials. Throughout her career the artist has demonstrated keen interest in the way in which her works interact within a given space and has often incorporated illusionistic techniques to integrate her paintings with their surroundings. Challenging the conventions of figurative and abstract painting, her works showcase the complex relationships between fine art, pop culture and technology, which remains the central focus of her work.