Flash Art uses cookies strictly necessary for the proper functioning of the website, for its legitimate interest to enhance your online experience and to enable or facilitate communication by electronic means. To learn more about cookies please see Terms & conditions

Flash Art
Flash Art
Shop
  • Home
    • CURRENT ISSUE
  • Features
    • Conversations
    • Reviews
    • Report
    • On View
    • FLASH FEED
    • Audacious Advice
    • Dance Office
    • Listening In
    • The Uncanny Valley
    • Flashback
    • (In)Visible Hands
    • PARADIGME
  • STUDIOS
    • Dune
    • Flash Art Mono
  • Archive
    • DIGITAL EDITION
    • Shop
    • Subscription
    • INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTION
    • Contact
→
Flash Art

330 April-May 2020, Reviews

1 May 2020, 3:00 pm CET

Laura Owens House of Gaga / Mexico City by Dorothée Dupuis

by Dorothée Dupuis May 1, 2020
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Installation view at House of Gaga, Mexico City, 2020. Photography by Annik Wetter. Courtesy of the artist; Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York, Rome; Sadie Coles HQ, London; and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Installation view at House of Gaga, Mexico City, 2020. Photography by Annik Wetter. Courtesy of the artist; Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York, Rome; Sadie Coles HQ, London; and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Installation view at House of Gaga, Mexico City, 2020. Photography by Annik Wetter. Courtesy of the artist; Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York, Rome; Sadie Coles HQ, London; and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Installation view at House of Gaga, Mexico City, 2020. Photography by Annik Wetter. Courtesy of the artist; Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York, Rome; Sadie Coles HQ, London; and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Installation view at House of Gaga, Mexico City, 2020. Photography by Annik Wetter. Courtesy of the artist; Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York, Rome; Sadie Coles HQ, London; and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Installation view at House of Gaga, Mexico City, 2020. Photography by Annik Wetter. Courtesy of the artist; Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York, Rome; Sadie Coles HQ, London; and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Installation view at House of Gaga, Mexico City, 2020. Photography by Annik Wetter. Courtesy of the artist; Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York, Rome; Sadie Coles HQ, London; and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.

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.

Share this article
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Mail
More stories by

Dorothée Dupuis

Invulnerable Vulnerabilities: Life and Art in the Time of the Virus

20 April 2020, 1:00 pm CET

Nathaniel Mellors: We should talk about some of your work and the exhibition you’re working on for the museum. Tala…

Read More

Jana Euler: Contextual Painting in Times of Global Groundlessness

27 April 2020, 1:00 pm CET

As much as an apt consideration about painting today would have been a welcome opening, there is an elephant in…

Read More

Emily Mae Smith: A Broom of One’s Own

18 May 2020, 1:00 pm CET

Fresh, febrile, shot through with humor and glamour, the paintings of Emily Mae Smith are reliquaries of art history and…

Read More

Maison Margiela Artisanal Apparel – Photography by Rudi Williams

22 May 2020, 12:00 pm CET

NewCostume is a column by Matthew Linde exploring contemporary fashion practice. Episode I: a visual essay by photographer Rudi Williams…

Read More

  • Next

    Jenna Sutela “NO NO NSE NSE” Kunsthall Trondheim / Norway

  • Previous

    Arte Povera 1967-1987. An Indirect continuity runs down through Antiform and Arte povera to intertextuality and the “weak” relativistic subject of the 1980s

© 2023 Flash Art

  • Terms & conditions
  • Contact
  • Work with Us