Laura Owens
Matthew Marks Gallery | 522 & 526 West 22nd Street
Through April 19, 2025
Early in her career, the Los Angeles painter Laura Owens placed the brushstroke in scare quotes and never looked back. I’m thinking of a small, untitled canvas from 1995 in which an enlarged daub—a cartoony version of a slightly drippy mark made by a flat brush loaded with gesso—hangs in black space. It looks like it could have been cut out: painting’s fundamental gesture recast as a gash. But the silhouette isn't empty; it’s been filled in with horizontal bands of thinned-out acrylic color. Brown on top, pink on bottom, a bright stripe of vanilla in the middle, it's a Neapolitan “brushstroke”—a new shape for ice cream.
For three decades, the artist has put her medium through the paces with her nose-thumbing post-post-modernist feminist formalism, a resolutely intellectual as well as humorous project of synthesizing alleged opposites—deskilled and reskilled aesthetics, the handmade and the digital, Greenbergian precepts and illusionistic space (for example). But all the while, dessert has never left the table. Beauty, inseparable from the social baggage of taste, is always present and always presented self-consciously, free from the delusion that it’s something greater or more complicated than what someone (such as the artist herself) likes.
