"All her paintings, especially the most recent ones, sit on the cusp of paradoxes. They are lonely but crowded, too loud to be intimate, too ridiculous (“cats!”) to be sincere, too synthetic to be earnest, yet with jokes, artifice, and illusion, they signal a body earnestly vexed, beset by difficulties...Owens’ work alienates the body and plays tricks on the eye with impossible vanishing points and absurd repetitions...her surfaces loom over us or splay out sideways or laterally and backward, and in doing so carry out painting’s primary demand."
Amy Sillman, "Laura Owens," Artforum, April 2018, n.p.