Laura Owens: Ten Paintings

“Pick your battles” is usually sound advice.

When it comes to painting, there are many battles to choose from: flatness versus depth, materiality versus illusion, abstraction versus representation, the epic versus the everyday, the grid versus the gesture.

Laura Owens picks them all, and she plays both sides. She makes paintings that look like paintings. She forces painting to perform tasks other than painting. She feeds painting its own tail so that it ties itself up in knots.

This is an exhibition of new work. There are some paintings and books and sounds. There is also an immersive installation of silkscreened, flocked, painted, and hand-printed wallpaper.

Laura Owens (b. 1970, Euclid, Ohio) lives and works in Los Angeles.

Laura Owens is curated by Anthony Huberman and is made possible thanks to the generous support of Komal Shah and Gaurav Garg, and Gavin Brown’s enterprise.

The CCA Wattis Institute program is generously supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Grants for the Arts / San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, and the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation; by CCA Director’s Fund contributors Patricia W. Fitzpatrick, Judy and Bill Timken, Chara Schreyer and Gordon Freund, Catherine and Matt Paige, Ruth and Alan Stein, Robin Wright and Ian Reeves, Laura Brugger and Ross Sappenfield, Lauren and Jamie Ford, John Morace and Thomas Kennedy, and the Rotasa Foundation; and by CCA’s Curator’s Forum. Phyllis C. Wattis was the generous founding patron.

About the CCA Wattis Institute
Based in San Francisco, CCA Wattis Institute is a nonprofit exhibition venue and research institute dedicated to contemporary art. It supports the creation of new work by artists from around the world, proposes new models of attention, and hopes to complicate the meanings of art and culture today.