Spotlight: Laura Owens

OCTOBER 6-NOVEMBER 18, 2023

The Spotlight exhibition series includes a new or never-before-exhibited artwork accompanied by a commissioned piece of writing. It is the hope of this series to create focused and thoughtful dialogues between the visual arts and critics, poets, scholars, etc. In this iteration, the Spotlight features Laura Owens’s Untitled, 2023, with a text by curator and art historian Mark Godfrey.

Ode to Flora
By Mark Godfrey

Let’s start by describing what is in front of us. There is a tall thin object on the wall, its face measuring around 88 by 34 inches, and it is slathered with paint. The top right corner is evenly coated with a blue ground. At the bottom left, paint has been applied thinly with a series of quick diagonal broad brush strokes. A similarly broad brush has been used in the top left corner to partially cover the dark blue ground with a much lighter, transparent layer of turquoise. In the centre of the left side of the panel, there are serpentine trails of green paint that run up a black form, perhaps calling to mind ivy winding around a branch; these green trails have been painted with a thin brush. The most prominent painted parts of the surface are dollops of paint laid on with spatulas. Flashe paint, whipped up like the crests of meringues, rises from the canvas, at places an inch high. One dollop, top right, overspills the edge of the panel. Some of these spatula-applied dollops are small dots and dashes; others are very large ‘c’ or ‘s’ or ‘j’ shape curves, strikingly big in relation to the scale of the whole panel, sometimes occupying almost a quarter of its width.

Clearly the thing in front of us is a painting, because its painted-ness is unmistakable. And yet as we look more closely, it is also evident that this object is not a painting on canvas. Or to expand this: it’s not on canvas, and it’s not all painted. The medium line tells us that the support is “extruded polystyrene foam with wood fiber veneers.” This also allows us to discern that the floral imagery–outlines of bluebells or fritillaria, leaves, branches–is printed, “screen-printing ink on clay-coated wallpaper.” If we look to the side of this object, we will notice something else that’s important: the frame, which is made from “powder-coated aluminium,” is highly designed, with a series of evenly spaced ‘S’ shaped extrusions and outlines, forms that echo some of the curves on the face of the work. The frame is evidently part of the work.

Knowing nothing else about how this object came to be made, we can already glean quite a lot about Laura Owens’s thinking for this specific painting and for her art in general. She chose not to make a painting on a pure blank canvas, and instead used a printed wallpaper surface. This speaks to Owens’s firmly held conviction that painting cannot be conceived as a practice or discourse elevated over or separated from other traditions or objects. While other artists and art critics have regarded painting as more important than wallpaper design, embroidery, tapestry, poster-making, and so on–often because these fields have been looked down on as decorative, or feminine, or popular–Owens refuses these hierarchies and believes that painting as a practice, or discourse, can only be credible if it intertwines itself with such traditions. In earlier works, she painted a section of the Bayeux Tapestry, stitched the letters of the alphabet onto canvases, silkscreened images of her grandmother’s embroideries onto dyed linen, and created an environmental painting on wallpaper to serve as an accompaniment for a display of canvases by Vincent van Gogh. Here, she paints a modestly scaled panel on a printed wallpaper surface with a floral design.

The framing also tells us about her thinking. Owens inherited maps of the United States from her grandfather and was struck by their decorative borders; the S-shaped extrusions are based on these graphic patterns. Her use of these patterns shows more about how she connects painting to other traditions of decoration and design, and it also tells us more broadly about her approach to frames and frames and framing. While Owens has only recently made actual ceramic or metal frames for her work like the powder-coated aluminium structure in this work, she has always considered the way art is framed. The frames for painting include the architecture in which it is displayed, the institutions in which it is promoted and consumed, the economic structures which help determine how paintings are produced and how they circulate. Owens has brought the frames of painting into her practice for almost thirty years, whether by painting a wall of a museum with pictures on it, by acknowledging the architectural structures of a particular room and including them within her canvases (as when she painted the band that a column at Sadie Coles’s Heddon Street gallery would cast onto her canvas), or by acknowledging and refusing the desires of hungry collectors as when she hid paintings in the walls of the CCA Wattis in San Francisco at a moment when her work was becoming the object of considerable speculation.

When we take note of Owens’s interest in the relationship of painting to other traditions like wallpaper design, and in the frames of painting, we begin to understand why hers is now considered such a crucial voice in contemporary art. I particularly admire the way Owens presents something so pretty that it risks being dismissed by many as light, confident nonetheless that this object can also reveal her incredibly critical thinking. Standing in front of this painting, we start by looking at some swirly paint marks over a floral field, but slowly take in her refusal of hierarchies, and her acknowledgment of the conditions of artmaking today.

These concerns are unusual but maybe unsurprising given Owens’s immersion in the intellectual life of the art schools of Los Angeles, where, as a student at CalArts, she was confronted with the thinking of Charles Gaines, Michael Asher, and others. Earlier CalArts students like Mike Kelley and Christopher Williams were teaching at Art Center in Pasadena around this time, and Owens now teaches there in a faculty among artists and theorists, developing her own seminars and syllabi for successive cohorts of MFA students. 

Owens’s engagement with post-conceptual art and theory deepens with time, yet it has not diminished her equal love for painting’s long histories, and Untitled reveals this. At the risk of sounding too lyrical, the panel, its various greens, blacks, and purples notwithstanding, is a symphony of blues, and its visual power derives from the play of ultramarines with teals and turquoise. The chromatic character of this painting reveals Owens’s interest in Giotto and Fra Angelico, their way of depicting the heavenly firmament using the most expensive pigments, ground from lapis lazuli, brought to Italy from beyond the seas, hence ‘ultra-marine’. In particular, Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel of 1320 and Fra Angelico’s Annunciation from a century later. And indeed this 2023 work of Owens’s derives from a previous ceiling installation of hers from 2019 in Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, a deconsecrated church in Rome, programmed by her old friend and one-time gallerist Gavin Brown. For the work, Owens quoted elements from the Scrovegni Chapel, and instead of centering Christ and his disciples, as Giotto did, Owens populated the blue heavens with female saints and ancient goddesses including Artemis and Ceres. This is where she first used the wallpaper design that we see in this work. Artemis and Ceres are absent from the 2023 panel, but perhaps we should understand the bluebells and leaves as a stand in for another Roman goddess: Flora.

About: 

Laura Owens (b. 1970, Euclid, OH) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, CA. Owens earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, in 1992. She earned her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, in 1994. Recent solo exhibitions include Laura Owens, Valerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, Germany (2022); Laura Owens: Rerun, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio (2021); Laura Owens & Vincent van Gogh, Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles, France (2021); Laura Owens, House of Gaga, Mexico City, Mexico (2020); and Books and Tables, Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2019). Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX (2023); Together in Time: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Capturing the Moment, Tate Modern, London, UK (2023); Christian Sveaas Art Foundation: The Travel Bureau, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2022); Repeater, Sadie Coles HQ, London, UK (2022); Courage before Expectation, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2022); and Drawing Together: 201 Exquisite Corpses, Museum Im Ballpark, Kriens, Switzerland (2022). Owens forms a part of numerous public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; among others. 

Mark Godfrey (b. 1973) is a curator and art historian living and working in London, United Kingdom. Godfrey was a Lecturer in History and Theory of Art at the Slade School of Fine Art (London) from 2002–2007 before joining Tate Modern (London) as Senior Curator from 2007-2021. There, he organized several major exhibitions, including Olafur Eliasson: In real life (2019–20); Soul of a Nation (2017); Gerhard Richter: Panorama (2011–12); and Roni Horn AKA Roni Horn (2009). Godfrey has independently curated exhibitions by Nicole Eisenman, David Hammons, Jacqueline Humphries, Laura Owens, R.H. Quaytman, Christopher Williams, among others. His writing has been featured widely in contemporary art publications, catalogues, and journals; he recently co-edited The Soul of a Nation Reader (Gregory R. Miller & Co, 2021). Godfrey, alongside Kerryn Greenberg, former head of international collection exhibitions at Tate, and Rudi Minto de Wijs, who worked in the institution’s marketing department and served as co-chair of its Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) network, founded New Curators, a paid one-year curatorial training program hosted by South London Gallery for individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

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