The artist’s latest exhibition at Matthew Marks in New York fills bespoke rooms with a visual overload of pattern, colour and trompe-l’œil gags
There are details to discover at every turn in Laura Owens’s self-titled exhibition at Matthew Marks, a show of artists books, kinetic objects, sound and video pieces and, above all, paintings. Most notable among the works on display (all untitled) are two bespoke rooms – one in each of the gallery’s 22nd Street locations – whose walls are outfitted with monumental, pattern-packed aluminium panels. Filling the walls from ceiling to floor, these hand-brushed and silkscreened inserts look almost like murals. Pinkish hues and a warm peachy glow dominate the smaller of the room installations, metallic pigments sparkle as you walk along and a subtle blue and magenta haze creates an undulating texture reminiscent of watercolour settling unevenly in pools; trap doors open to reveal even more imagery. With this show, Owens creates a magnum opus that is simultaneously accessible and uncontainable – and virtuosically fills the galleries with the spirit of boundless curiosity and productive rigour.
Owens’s visual vocabulary is characterised by elaborate, intricate layers and juxtapositions of thick and thin paint, as well as a continually shifting register of techniques and affects. As has been the case for well over a decade, her paintings here are full of fissures. She uses masking techniques that cause motifs to rupture the spatial logic of their neighbours: In a corner of the larger room installation, thick strokes of green and bluish-grey paint form the chunky leaves of two plump trees, whose trunks are hemmed in by a perforated golden fence. Splotches of a botanical wallpaper pattern surround and add spatial dynamism to this frenzy. When Owens manages to create a coherent image – call it elegant chaos – out of visually heterogeneous parts, the result is thrilling.
At times, however, Owens’s efforts land with the cold thud of postmodern pastiche: a bounty of quotations – from Greco-Roman snippets to trompe-l’œil drop shadows – whose relationship to each other feels more complicated than compelling. Both the ‘murals’ and her paintings on canvas – five of which hang in the gallery outside the larger room installation – appear to be the products of an arms race of graphic complexity by an artist with a well-resourced studio (the press release mentions that certain works utilise 150 layers of silkscreen). It therefore feels refreshing to leaf through the casual drawings, notes and ephemera that fill the artists books which sit in decorated boxes in one of the galleries, as well as to watch a delightfully amateurish single-channel video projected on a wall behind a hidden door in the larger room installation. In the video, two badly taxidermised crows perched on a branch discuss such varied topics as gender roles in Sparta (the older-sounding crow suggests that patriarchy predates our current terminology and norms) and the irony of teens smoking when their air is filled with wildfire fumes. The piece captures a touching intergenerational dialogue that uses the absurdity of its premise to evoke consequential themes in an intimate manner. With plenty of humour, the exchange conveys an earnest concern for the fate of our civilisation.
Owens’s sprawling exhibition demonstrates the aesthetic marvels that occur when an artist with a vast and eccentric mind is able to expend enormous amounts of labour and thought to articulate a specific vision of painting’s possibilities. Amid such a production, Owens also takes time to animate simple, silly ideas like using a motorised magnet to make a roll of tape move fitfully across a gallery attendant’s desk. At a time where narratives of scarcity dominate our politics, Owens chooses to splurge on visual pleasure.
Laura Owens at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, through 19 April
