Beschreibung:

Laura Owens Untitled 1998 Mixed media on canvas in 2 parts. Each: 289.6 x 127 cm (114 x 50 in). Signed, titled and dated ‘L Owens 1998 Untitled’ on the reverse.
Provenance ACME, Los Angeles Exhibited Greenboro, North Carolina, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Hot Spots, April – October 1999; Los Angeles, Blum & Poe, Think Blue, 16 July – 20 August, 2005; Laura Owens Kunsthalle Zurich, 12 June – 13 August 2006; London, Camden Arts Centre, 29 September – 26 November 2006; Münster, Ausstellungshalle zeitgenössiche Kunst, 2007; Maastricht, Bonnefantenmuseum, 29 May – 19 August 2007 Literature B. Ruf, ed., Laura Owens Zurich, pp. 67, 183 and 206 no.74 (illustrated on each page) Catalogue Essay Laura Owens’ idiosyncratic approach to image-making resists conventional classification. Owens’ canvases are often large in scale, sparse in composition and light in palette – a playful fusion of abstract and representational elements. As seen in the current lot, the huge expanse of empty space is part of Owens’ distinctive visual vocabulary that recalls traditional Chinese landscapes, graphic visuals taken from popular culture, and the expansive scale of Abstract Expressionist paintings. The diptych reveals the artist’s search for a reconciliation between the serious and the humorous, the sublime and the trivial, as well as the high aspiration of painting and its lowly influences. “Clichés abound in Laura’s paintings; allusion to the traditions and archetypes of Modernist abstraction, landscape, figuration, assemblage, the romantic, the maritime, and the postmodern, all figure in. The work seems to want to see how deeply the tropes of painting, and of looking at paintings, have been culturally absorbed; how well travelled the path is from original to standard to generic. Laura’s work stirs the idea of art that perches like a gargoyle in the collective unconscious.” (Mungo Thomson ‘From My Junkyard to Yours’, Parkett 65, 2002, p. 83) Read More