Friendly Place-Holders
A Conversation with Laura Owens
At first sight, Laura Owens’ fantastic, fairy-tale paintings often have a
childish, playful quality. Yet beneath the apparently naive surface lies a
profound reflection on the medium. The paintings of the Los Angeles-based
artist are complex color compositions that arise in a dialogue with
painting history and Modernist tradition. The imaginary worlds give birth
to clearly conceived compositions that protest against painterly cliche.
Cheryl Kaplan spoke with Owens about friendly animals, knights, and
nighttime tours through famous collections.
Laura Owens, Untitled, 2004
Courtesy
of Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York
At
first glance,
Laura Owens’ paintings and drawings have the whimsy of a happy,
fanciful world. Unlike outsider artist
Henry Darger, whose work is far more naive in appearance and far darker,
Owens uses her delicate sting to weave the viewer through a universe
that’s always precarious. A fox or dog may be perched on a branch standing
guard, but look again as this decoy signals a larger entrance to the
painting.
Both: Laura Owens, Untitled, 2004 (detail)
Courtesy of Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York
Owens activates her canvas with such precise and intuitive skill that she
quickly unsettles everything that appears calm and organized. Her work,
always untitled, appears to reference classic Japanese printmaking,
Florine Stettheimer’s paintings, a pioneer of American Modernism
that was rediscovered in the nineties,
Matisse,
color field painters, and the contemporary abstract work of
Mary Heilman, but they’re always firmly her own and always quirky. Her
paintings and drawings have also incorporated extracts of textiles, a
momentary detail of a complex design that might be seen at the
Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Here, intimate portraits of couples
embracing or just lying in bed have a lingering tense quality quite unlike
the focus of most of her paintings.
In 2002, Owens created an
artist-driven exhibition at the Santa
Monica Museum of Art called: Cavepainting:
Peter Doig, Chris
Ofili, and Laura Owens. She has also been featured at the
Whitney Biennial and shows regularly in New York at
Gavin Brown as well as at major US and international museums. I talked
with Laura Owens from her home in Los Angeles, where she lives and works.
She’s just given birth to a baby boy (who has a name).
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Laura Owens, Untitled, 2004
Courtesy of Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York
Cheryl Kaplan: In your painting series
Untitled from 2004 there’s a menagerie of forest animals that would do
justice to any fairy tale book, or even
Disney’s
Bambi. Does animation play into the work? The way you see a tree or branch
or fox becomes extremely playful.
Laura Owens: I’m
really thinking about the space: foreground, middle ground, background,
and deep space. The animals are place-holders to move through. I’m
interested in the animals because you empathize with them.
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Laura Owens, Untitled, 2004 (detail)
Courtesy of Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York
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Laura Owens, Untitled, 2004
Courtesy of Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York
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They’re friendly, but neutral. The space they inhabit
feels akin to a garden during the times of courtly love. A world that
breeds private romance. Your paintings are very fanciful.
I can see how that’s there. The paintings are thought of mathematically, to
keep the viewer moving without resting. None of the animals dominate or
become the protagonist in the story. They equal out.
You’re
talking about a non-hierarchical world, like in classical Japanese
woodcuts. Where did you first come across
Hokusai ?
I bought a book. I probably got there through
looking at Impressionist art and their interest in those Japanese prints.
Artists like
Van Gogh and other Post-Impressionists. I’m interested in
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the Matisse paintings in the
Barnes Collections. There’s a triptych of three women, three times three.
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