A richly illustrated, expansive mid-career survey of the stand-out American artist’s pioneering and influential work, with each copy featuring a unique silk-screen cover printed in Owens's studio Since the early 1990s, Laura Owens (b. 1970) has challenged traditional assumptions about figuration and abstraction in her pioneering approach to painting. Created in close collaboration with the artist on the occasion of her mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, this inventive and comprehensive book features an incisive introduction by Scott Rothkopf, critical essays, literary texts, and short commentaries on a variety of subjects related to Owens’s broad interests, which range from folk art and needlework to comics and wallpaper. Reflections by more than twenty of Owens’s fellow artists, collaborators, assistants, dealers, family members, and friends offer an array of perspectives on her work at different periods in her life, beginning with her high school years in Ohio and ending with her current exhibition. A rich trove of more than a thousand images, drawn from the artist’s personal archive and largely unpublished before now, includes personal correspondence, journals, academic transcripts, handwritten notes, source material, exhibition announcements, clippings, and installation photographs. Strikingly, each copy also features a unique silk-screen cover printed in Owens’s studio, giving readers the opportunity to own an original work of art. Together, all of these elements provide a rare and intimate look at how an artist might make her way in the world as well as how art gets made, movements take hold, and relationships evolve over time.

Owens, Laura

Arts & Photography

Rothkopf, Scott

History & Criticism

Whitney Museum of American Art

A richly illustrated, expansive mid-career survey of the stand-out American artist’s pioneering and influential work Published to coincide with a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art that travels to Dallas and Los Angeles, this book on the work of Laura Owens (b. 1970) features an incisive introduction by Scott Rothkopf, critical essays, literary texts, and short commentaries on a variety of subjects related to the artist’s broad interests, which range from folk art and needlework to comics and wallpaper. Reflections by more than twenty of Owens’s fellow artists, collaborators, assistants, dealers, family members, and friends offer an array of perspectives on her work at different periods in her life, beginning with her high school years in Ohio and ending with her current exhibition. A rich trove of more than a thousand images, drawn from the artist’s personal archive and largely unpublished before now, includes personal correspondence, journals, academic transcripts, handwritten notes, source material, exhibition announcements, clippings, and installation photographs. Together, all of these elements provide a rare and intimate look at how an artist might make her way in the world as well as how art gets made, movements take hold, and relationships evolve over time. Each book includes a specially designed set of stickers that readers can use to customize their own cover.

In subtly lush paintings that charm viewers equally through their application of paint and their quirky iconography, Laura Owens touches on expressive abstraction, color field painting, and the occasional decorative glimpse of a monkey. Charged as one of the contemporary artists responsible for a revival of the painting, Owens has developed an enigmatic style all her own, moving from landscape to abstraction with energetic thick brush strokes, fanciful childlike doodles, or sophisticated fine-line drawings, culling her influences from any number of visual sources, including chinese landscape painting, japanese wood block prints, and patterned textiles. This volume includes new paintings created for her upcoming solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Laura Owens

SCHIMMEL, PAUL

Lawson, Thomas

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Douglas Hyde Gallery

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Books by Owens, Laura