Laura Owens: Paintings (in: Ringer Annual Report 2013)

Every year, the Swiss media company Ringier publishes an annual report conceived by an artist. This year, Los Angeles artist Laura Owens (born 1970) has created the publication, deploying resources and methods drawn from art history and traditional printing craftsmanship. She took as inspiration Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler's legendary art magazine View, published in the 1940s, when printing presses were still the pulse of every newspaper and publishing organization. Owens has created a very haptic cover in typographic print, as well as drawings to be reproduced using silkscreen. Allowing the inclusion of up to nine colors, this methodology implies a realization by printing experts who still master the old book and screenprinting methods--a technical challenge made visual delight. This slim, staple-bound volume is published in a limited edition of 300 copies.

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.