Laura Owens
During the era of 1990s, many Las Angeles artists had found this period as one of the most challenging periods in history. Many artists were struggling to make their best achievement out of their works. However to Laura Owens who is a painter in Las Angeles found this era as the era of her success. While many artists were struggling to make an achievement, Owens’ works has become to be one of the most recognized works of the entire contemporary. Many of her works have been accepted for museum collection including the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Guggenheim Museum in Chicago. Her works are often time involved with landscapes, interiors, figures, animals, and abstractions. Owens’ works present in variety of canvas sizes, it depends on how much details she wants to express to the viewers. She commonly works with oil paint and sometimes her works come with a mixture of watercolor, collage, acrylic, ink, enamel, and marker as each of these medias allows her to high light every little details more explicitly.
Owens is always interested in learning different ways of practice in art and often time she tends to borrow a little bit from other artists’ ways of practice and manipulate them into her own. From modernist’s practices to European painter like Rousseau and Toulouse-Lautrec, Owens uses every bit of each practice to create a new work of art that represents both for fineness and pleasure to her audiences. Thus most of her works tend to be playful and abstract in which convey with meaning and beauty. Although meaning is constantly implied on most of her works, Owens never intends to give titles on any of her works as to her belief, untitled work of art tend to encourage the viewer to look at her works more in their own mean rather than by her mean.
The way Owens presents her works without titles has illustrated us that Owens is an open minded person who likes to give freedom to her audiences’ opinions on her works. For instance, on one of Owens’ interviews with Believer magazine, Believer made a comment about the bats that Owens used in one of her works as to the Believer, Owens’ works are suppose be for pleasure and the Believer was not sure if the bats support her works’ concept of pleasure. Owens’ argument about the bats was that bats were the types of mammal that can be interpreted in many different ways and that is all depends on the culture were are living in . By drawing out from this little conversation between Owens and the Believer, Owens again has informed us that by implying more freedom in the work of arts, it allows the viewers to build stronger connection with the art as they get to put it into their own mean.
Laura Owens- Benevolent Bats
According to the Believer, Owens tends to spend an amount of time studying other artists’ works and manipulate into her own in a new different way . Owens’ way of making success in her works seems to be similar to Chris Ofili in a sense that they both studied other artists’ works and covert it into their own. Even more they both consider beauty as a way to entertain their audiences. Although Chris Ofili’s work is more toward religious scene and Owen’s work is more on nature, they both are equally concentrate on beauty. Ofili’s impresses his works through bright color but elegant and very decorative whereas Owens impresses her works through neutral color, calm and peaceful in an abstrac tive way.
The Holy Virgin Mary by Chris Ofili (1996).
Owens’ works are one type of art works that consists of multiple meanings due to each individual experience. They often abstract but yet pleasurable as those cool color being implied onto the canvas. For those who are interested in abstract arts and enjoy relating his or her own experiences to a particular situation that he or she is facing with, Owens’ exhibition would be a prefect one to go to; as Owens always untitled her works and leaves the meaning up to the viewers.
“Laura Owens: Camden Arts Centre, London� Art Monthly (no301 N 2006), 23-4.
Rachel Kushner. “Laura Owens� Believer, ( May 2003), http://www.believermag.com/issues/200305/?
read=interview_owens (accessed Nov. 21, 2008)
Thomas Lawson and Paul Schimmel, Laura Owens (, Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art,
1999) , 39.