Laura Owens: Untitled

On June 25, Los Angeles-based painter and 2000 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Artist-in-Residence Laura Owens unveiled her new work, Untitled, as the next installation featured on the Gardner Museum’s Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade. Untitled will be on view through January 14, 2020.

Known for her evolving approach to painting, Owens draws upon multiple sources—from personal symbols to newsprint and computer manipulations—in order to challenge and dismantle traditional assumptions surrounding abstraction and figuration. In developing Untitled, Owens excised the composition from a recent ceiling painting created in Rome, transforming a fragment from this work through enlargement and relocation into a self-contained and monumental whole. The resulting design features a combination of gestural, graphic and grid-like motifs.

Owens gained a critical following in the late 1990s for paintings in which she playfully combined modernist abstractions with figurative elements and historical references. Since that time, she has repeatedly proven her versatility as a painter by creating ever-more complex compositions. Since the late 2000s, Owens has moved away from more figurative works to create large, abstract, layered canvases in bold colors and patterns.

In 2000, Owens spent a month living and working at the Gardner Museum as an Artist-in-Residence where she had the opportunity to closely examine works in the collection. She was particularly drawn to the Museum’s collection of Japanese screens and textiles. These included several examples of cut velvet fabrics, embroideries, and a 19th-century Japanese silk kimono with a painting of a badger looking at the moon. Owens incorporated this scene into a large painting that was later shown in her 2001 exhibition Laura Owens: New Work. 

Her work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including a mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art (traveling subsequently to Dallas Museum of Art and MOCA Los Angeles). Owens’s work has also been shown at the Centre Georges Pompidou; Carnegie Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Walker Art Center; CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco; Secession, Vienna; the Kunsthalle Basel; Tate Modern; and Inverleith House, Edinburgh.

The Gardner Museum’s Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade has previously featured works by artists including Joan Jonas, Elaine Reichek, Steve Locke, Rachel Perry, and Nari Ward.