To realize her site-specific installation at House of Gaga, Laura Owens locked herself up in the gallery with her assistants for weeks, during which time she applied a series of minutiose operations to the L-shaped, middle-size gallery. The installation mixes silkscreen patterns, applied with utter precision on the walls, with hand-painted elements that are difficult to differentiate from the printed parts. The artist used patterns incorporating plant leaves, lemons, cute mice wearing costumes, and office supplies — parts of her usual repertoire — but also more abstract motifs like fading vertical lines, rhizomatic picture frames, and obsessive compositions of almost-transparent squares and dots that recall the screen-inspired, pixel-like elements that made her famous a decade ago. These patterns and hand-painted parts feel intentionally neurotic in their precision, yet their beautiful trickery is unfortunately not able to mask the plainly domestic aspect of the gallery (it’s the former garage of the gallerist’s home). The technical prowess is undeniable, based on hours and hours of studio practice and a severe control of the artist’s chain of production; and it is pleasing to see that in the US today, a female painter can reach a level of market and institutional success equal to her male counterparts. But despite Owens’s virtuosity and lively picturesque anecdotes, which, as I totally understand, function as pretexts for graphic and spatial investigation, I am left thinking about the social function of an artist whose only desire is to be constantly in quarantine in order to make her work. What does this work tells us about the world? What does its level of extreme Western refinement bring to a quite larger conversation that many of us, quarantined against our will, wish to activate through art and culture on a global level? I feel Laura Owens, like the rest of us, will probably revise her priorities and visions of the world in the next few months and years. I am already curious about what her brilliant, painterly mind will come up with to break the creative self-quarantine she has imposed on herself.
