Page 121 - Art Review

Laura Owens

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 10 November – 4 February

If you are strategic or lucky enough to time your gether different alchemy: they are testaments her increasingly ambitious compositions with
arrival at the Whitney’s west-facing gallery to the transformational potential of paint. a reserve matching her ample wit.
to sunset, you will see Laura Owens’s paintings The Pavement Karaoke series marks Owens’s One of Owens’s savviest formal innovations
catch fire. The works in this room are from euphoric reembrace of abstraction at the start is her subversion of the ‘build up’ – wherein
the artist’s luminescent Day-Glo Pavement of this past decade. The works are positioned a composition is initiated via a rudimentary
Karaoke series (2012). They’ve been reproduced immediately following a windowless room underpainting and accrues detail and complexity
numerous times, on magazine covers and in devoted, salon-style, to 23 figurative works, as it’s worked up. Instead, her works from the
catalogues, where they tend to register as coy which the artist made between 2003 and 2011 early 2000s onwards are presented on complex
archetypes of the self-reflexive turn in painting and whose subjects are rendered via loose grounds with layers that intersect in elaborate
during the 1990s and early 2000s, in which the paintwork that’s alternately reminiscent choreographies, only to be overlaid with
canvases themselves seem to ponder their reason of Elizabeth Peyton and faux-naïve painter increasingly crude interventions, including
˙
for existence, as well as frontrunners of the Auste. If this formal shift between the contents the application of gobs of paint and pumice
increasing use of image-editing software by of one gallery and the next at first feels abrupt, (culminating, in Untitled, 2013, and Untitled,
painters. In person, however, the works engulf it’s helpful to remember that Owens has been 2014, with the addition of actual bicycle wheels).
and embrace without a flicker of reflexive pursuing a line of inquiry into images – how But this is one invention among many. Indeed,
distance. These five untitled 2.7-by-2m canvases we look at them and the diverse effects of various the generosity of these paintings stems from
invite you in, to observe how their scintillating representational and abstract strategies – for the rigour with which they address the many
graphic forms are built up from layer upon layer nearly 30 years. While the earliest paintings possibilities of paint itself, without hiding from
of flat screenprinted and painted shapes; how in this show, made during the mid-1990s, reveal the viewer the effort behind all this exploration.
several of the matrices that course their massive a self-conscious desire to imbue her work with If the earlier works perhaps protest too much,
frames are made from swaths of pasted gingham. ‘content’ – ‘This is a painting about paintings these masterful, raucous final canvases
Sitting with the paintings at twilight, I was in a room!’ one imagines Untitled (1997), an appear blithely unbothered by the question
reminded of looking at Dan Flavin’s glowing interior featuring miniature reproductions of the medium’s relevance as they show
neon sculptures at a similar hour at Dia Beacon. of nearby Owens paintings, exclaiming – by the us, supremely convincingly, the astonishing
Yet Owens’s virtuosic works display an alto- end of the last decade we find the artist tackling things paint can do. Cat Kron

Untitled, 1997, acrylic and oil on canvas, 198 × 213 cm.
© and courtesy the artist

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