Synopses & Reviews
Walead Beshty is a Los Angeles-based photographer represented by Regen Projects. Trinie Dalton is an author, editor, and curator. Mark Godfrey is a curator at the Tate Modern, London. Suzanne Hudson is assistant professor of art history at the University of Southern California. Rachel Kushner is the author of The Flamethrowers and Telex from Cuba. Linda Norden is a writer and independent curator.
Synopsis
Since first coming into prominence in the '90s and early 2000s, Laura Owens's work has offered a set of wholly new and critical ideas about painting. Propelled by the conviction that her work should prompt difficult questions about the nature of painting, Owens distinguishes her work by refusing to commit to one artistic identity.
From a consideration of the Owens's varied use of line (Suzanne Hudson), the artist's brilliant redefinition of painterly gesture (Walead Beshty), or her mining of visual contradictions (Trinie Dalton), Owens's formal and conceptual inventiveness is reviewed from multiple perspectives. Owens's use of language--as a graphic element, as words to be read, or more broadly as a system of signification that she explores and ultimately upends--is attended to by Rachel Kushner and Linda Norden. Mark Godfrey traces the recent developments in the scope of Owens's work from 2012 to now. And wonderfully pithy texts by Gavin Brown and Wendy Yao (as well as a section of Norden's essay) bookend the volume with personally inflected musings on the artist's gallery/studio space in Los Angeles, 356 S. Mission Road.
LAURA OWENS surveys the many facets of the artist's work that have been responsible for her influential career, and it is the first title to critically assess the Owens's most recent work.
About the Author
The most comprehensive volume on Laura Owens to date surveys the contemporary artists career from richly varied literary and curatorial perspectives. Among the most inventive contemporary artists working today, Laura Owenss work is revered by critics and fellow artists alike. Informed by art history, her work possesses the rare ability to reference familiar styles without their stultifying weight, crafting compositions at once playful and rigorous. This volume surveys Owenss entire career, featuring a comprehensive selection of the artists celebrated work, including her most recent series, much heralded since its debut over the last year in several shows across the world. These new paintings—stretched, screen-printed, impastoed with thick daubs of paint and volcanic rock—bear her familiar colors and free swirls but depart in their abstract form. Essays by artists, writers, and art historians provide multiple perspectives on an artist creating new directions in her medium.