Untitled, 2011 is a celebration of Laura Owens’ iconic and idiosyncratic painterly style, a diptych pairing an easeful portrait of a woman with an abstract composition of playful, arching lines. A painter with a voracious visual appetite, Owens engages with the fine arts and the everyday in equal measure, from Cubist masterpieces to newspaper classifieds, folk art, and comic book kitsch. Her chameleonic visual lexicon troubles critics, as she does not fit in easily with the Postmodern appropriationists, nor is her painting style distinct in a self-aggrandizing, individualist sense. Rather, as longtime New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl put it, Owens’ works are “not appropriations, but vicarious embodiments,” which slip between various visual languages at will.i
“I want to make paintings that are simply about looking at a painting, so fundamentally, that is where I start, though other stuff floats in and out…”
—Laura OwensIn the case of Untitled, Laura Owens speaks through Pablo Picasso, with the features of the woman’s face—with eyes askew, and long hair tangling into abstraction—reminiscent of that artist’s finest portraits of Marie-Thérèse Walter. Daubs of sunshine yellow and overlapping acute angles around a white central space recall the dynamic linearity of the Italian Futurists, and the bright arcs of Sonia Delaunay’s work find a pastiche in the blue and red semicircle at the lower edge. Owens’ working method, which combines traditional draftsmanship and digital tools like Photoshop, introduces an element of translation, a transliteration of older artistic styles into the 21st century. “In this respect,” as curator Stephan Berg writes in the catalogue for Owens’ first solo exhibition in Germany, in 2011 (the same year as Untitled’s creation), “each painting in Laura Owens’ oeuvre can be understood as an act of collaboration.”ii
And collaboration, indeed, is one of Owens’ greatest strengths as an artist. The majority of her exhibition history is site-specific, like Ten Paintings, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, 2016, where the paintings formed meaning through their transient application to the architectural space. Owens spent years running 356 Mission, an exhibition space in Los Angeles, with Gavin Brown and Wendy Yao, and her first exhibition in her birthplace of Northeast Ohio, Laura Owens: Rerun, Cleveland Museum of Art, 2021, was a collaborative installation made in concert with local teenagers. Untitled is one point in a career’s worth of dialogue with the history of art, a dialogue of ever-shifting painterly language and visual vocabulary.
i Peter Schjeldahl, “The Radical Paintings of Laura Owens,” The New Yorker, Oct. 23, 2017, online.
iiStephan Berg, “Dialogues within the Mirrored Halls of Painting,” in Berg et al., Laura Owens, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum, Bonn, 2011, p. 13.
Provenance
Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2011
signed, titled, inscribed and dated "Left L Owens Untitled 2011 LO441 - 1/2" on the overlap of the left canvas; titled, inscribed and dated "Untitled 2011 Right LO441 2/2" on the overlap of the right canvas oil, Flashe and charcoal on canvas, diptych each 28 x 22 in. (71.1 x 55.9 cm) Executed in 2011.