“I think about two-dimensional flat surfaces – how I receive them in the world, what their currency is, and the many ways of interpreting an illusion. I go to the library, the movies and museums. I watch a lot of television every day and use a computer almost every day. All of this enriches and tests my literacy in two dimensional visual culture. I don’t take ideas directly from any particular place. I want to make paintings that are simply about looking at a painting, so fundamentally, that is where I start though other stuff floats in and out”
E xecuted in 2016, Laura Owens’ Untitled presents the viewer with a triptych that underscores the artist’s unique ability to fuse diverse source material into highly engaging compositions, which has defined her groundbreaking practice since the late 1990s. Owens is most known for working with varied sources like cartoons, advertisements, and imagined landscapes which she combines to create spacial juxtapositions and inventive tensions in her paintings. In creating the present work, Owens first utilizes Photoshop to create the composition which she then translates onto the canvas by adding collage and painted elements. The result is a highly contemporary take on abstraction, that combines shocking pink pixelated grids, screen printed images of vitamin bottles, cartoon-like renderings of raining lemons, and swathes of blue and yellow paint. An exciting mix of the figurative and abstract, Owens cleverly challenges the pre-existing frameworks of painting, executed in her undeniable aura of playful cool.
Through fusing high and low visual cannons, Owens creates abstracted compositions that feel refreshing and captivating that are highly dynamic. The three canvases, although different in coloration and composition, are held together by common threads like the raining lemons and abstracted blobs-like figures. Printed with graphic flatness and cartoonish black outlines, the lemons recall the childish illustrations of candy wrappers, and is one of Owens’s recurring motifs, found in many of her other paintings. Owens also presents the viewer with a silkscreened collage of advertisements for vitamins and other medications, which is a nod to her Pop art predecessors like Andy Warhol. Through observing the individual elements included in the paintings – the screen printed graphics, abstract painterly gestures, the grids, and the lemons – we understand the artist does not intend for there to be an intentional fit or overall meaning of the composition. Instead, the viewer is challenged to observe this combination of forms as a new mode of painting, one that encourages a fresh perspective to the art of abstraction. Intimately scaled and entirely fresh to market, Untitled serves as an exercise of painterly inventiveness that has distinguished Owens as one of the most influential and noteworthy artists of her generation.
