‘‘Each time I approach a new show, I usually start with some word or idea, or it could be an appropriated image… I do a site visit, or I’ll work with the idea of what the location has as a context or something that motivates me that I then take as a starting point. Because every time I’m starting a new work, I’m taking it as an opportunity to start over.’’
—Laura Owens
Laura Owens produced five large-scale works for the 2014 group exhibition Wake up Early, Fear Death curated by Philipp Kaiser in Vienna. Untitled was the centrepiece of this gestalt series. The artist approaches each new body of work and exhibition conceptually to produce site-specific work; this series took popular Viennese imagery as its starting point. In the present work, Owens silk-screened and overlaid a photograph with thick swooping lines of matte black paint, intermittently splattered with fluorescent blues, pinks, reds and greys. Untitled is exemplary of Laura Owens’ heterogeneous painterly approach to painting. The artist’s revitalisation of the medium and eclectic style earned her a mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2017. New York Times art critic Roberta Smith describes the artist’s approach as ‘a rare combination of sincerity and irony. Distinguished by a sly, comedic beauty, her work has a playful, knowing, almost-Rococo lightness of being in which pleasure, humor, intelligence, and a seductive sense of usually high color mingle freely.’i
Laura Owens’ artistic practice relies upon an amalgamation of technical processes – Adobe Photoshop and silkscreen printing – and unconventional experiments with paint. The artist plays on the historical trope of the trompe l’oeil in the present work. Owens has edited the source image in Photoshop to fashion drop shadows within the crisp white letters of the text and underneath the sweeping lines of impasto. This effect conveys the impression of a faux relief which creates tension between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional space and the actual and depicted image. Further to this, Owens refers to the thick paint as ‘goop’, which is made from a mixture of safflower oil, aluminium stearate, vinyl and oil paint.ii This dull and coarse compound contrasts with the garish turquoise and the pristine smoothness of the silk-screened canvas.
‘‘All art is now collage’’
—Laura Owens
Laura Owens stated that ‘art is all about being constructed out of relationships between parts’ – a rebuttal to the ‘total’ image prized by historic artists like Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock – and that the surface, texture and paint should be heterogeneous in form.iii The artist satirises the post-war tradition of Pop Art, Color Field and Action painting by juxtaposing their archetypal features. Two planes of saturated turquoise and black-and-white silkscreen oppose one another and the unknown ‘consumer’ item – the Greek menu – is not part of the everyday cultural lexicon. The overlaid black swirls are unabashedly material; they are brazen and gestural in their apparent spontaneity and mockery of Action painting – the reality is that the impasto is carefully applied. For Owens, there is neither low nor high culture: leaflets, advertisements, greeting cards, drawings from children’s books and other digital images appear sporadically in her work. For example, in Untitled, she has taken the front cover of a menu for a Greek restaurant Elias Ouveri, originally small in size, stylising and changing it into a monumental image within a fine art context. In this way, Untitled becomes a tapestry to 21st-century modes of making, being and seeing.