Laura Owens - Hardcover

Mengham, Rod; Ruf, Beatrix

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3905770113 ISBN 13: 9783905770117

Publisher: JRP|Ringier, 2007

Synopsis

Laura Owens once said of more doctrinaire painters that "the weight of art history is what gets you that crusty, stodgy feeling, when you look at a work of art and you feel that the person hasn't stepped outside, hasn't looked in other wings of the Met, hasn't gone to a natural history museum." There is no danger of that in her own good-natured and elegant works, which seem to emulate Rousseau, Grandma Moses and the aesthetics of the 1960s and of vintage decorative arts at once. Robots in the garden, lions, hunters, romance and war are some of the subjects parading through, under passing influences as wide ranging as Dada performance, Japanese prints and Hindu beliefs. Birds grow larger than the trees they perch on, cats sniff at a pair of skulls and monkeys exchange wary glances. Elsewhere, Owens has broken away from the fine arts to move into wallpaper and textiles. Beyond all this straightforward beauty is constant inquiry into her chosen media. She has rejected naturalism in favor of depiction, representation and an unashamed pleasure in ornamentation, which, with her delight in pictorial grace, affords decoration a new dignity. She combines the abstract with the representational in a highly personal vocabulary, from which she creates an elaborate, elegant and quietly exuberant whole. Laura Owens collects the artist's complete works to date.

About this title

Book Description

This expansive overview of Laura Owens’s career offers unique insights into the influences and sources behind the pioneering and unconventional work of one of today’s most influential artists. 
 

About the Author

Laura Owens was born in Ohio in 1970. Since her first solo exhibitions in the mid-90s at Gavin Brown's Enterprise in New York and the Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Santa Monica, she has exhibited widely and in 2001 she had her first solo museum exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. She has participated in many major group shows over the past several years and is represented in public collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Musem of Modern Art; the Guggenheim, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and others.

Edition details

• Publisher: JRP|Ringier
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3905770113
• ISBN 13: 9783905770117
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 228
• Editor: Ruf Beatrix