Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Laura Owens, the next exhibition in his galleries at 522 and 526 West 22nd Street. Owens’s first exhibition in New York in eight years is an immersive environment of new work in painting, sculpture, and hand-made books.
Laura Owens began exhibiting her work in the mid-1990s and quickly became known for her innovative approach to painting. Her work synthesizes traditional methods with unconventional ones, including printmaking and digital manipulation, to create destabilizing illusions of depth, extending her paintings beyond the confines of the canvas into three-dimensional space. Her paintings are often self-referential and draw extensively from art history, decorative arts, and craft traditions, as well as mass media and personal anecdotes.
The exhibition demonstrates Owens’s both meticulous and experimental approach to artmaking. Each element is hand-made in the artist’s studio through labor-intensive processes pioneered by Owens. A single panel may have over one hundred fifty layers of hand-printed silkscreen, on top of which Owens then paints further. The exhibition also includes kinetic elements, moving pieces within the artworks that continually point to their spatial and temporal contexts. “Though Owens is a master of composition, and the dynamism of her works has much to do with her sophisticated resolution of the problems that occur within the picture plane, it is at the edges, relations to external aspects such as architecture, interior space, landscape, time, geography, subject matter, style, and discipline, that their restlessness is found,” Kirsty Bell has written. “There is always more room to be surprised.”
Laura Owens (b. 1970) was born in Euclid, Ohio, and lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work has been the subject of numerous one-person museum exhibitions, including the Cleveland Museum of Art (2021), the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles, France (2021), the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco (2016), the Secession in Vienna (2015), the Kunstmuseum Bonn (2011), the Kunsthalle Zürich (2006), and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (2003). In 2017, a mid-career retrospective of her work was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Dallas Museum of Art.
Laura Owens will be on view at 522 & 526 West 22nd Street from February 14 through April 19, 2025, Tuesday through Saturday, from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.
For additional information please call 212-243-0200 or email [email protected].