(BOSTON, MAY 11, 2001)- The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum will present the first solo museum exhibition of works by American artist Laura Owens, who is among a select group of artists being credited with the rebirth of contemporary painting. Organized by Pieranna Cavalchini, visiting curator of contemporary art at the Gardner Museum, the exhibition will feature new paintings and works on paper by Owens. The exhibition opens to the public May 31 and runs through September 16, 2001.

Owens has developed a style all her own, moving from landscape to abstraction with energetic thick brush strokes, fanciful child-like doodles or sophisticated, fine-line drawings. Her work is said to engage the viewer. "Each painting can act as a question," says Owens. Demonstrating a wide and imaginative range, she's constantly experimenting and changing her work. "Ultimately, you want to make the painting that you want to be with, not one that is constantly telling you everything it knows," Owens explains. "Who wants to be with something or someone like that? It's more fun to be with someone who is willing to go out on a limb."

"Laura Owens' work stands apart- she's given new resonance to the meaning of the word 'painting,'" says the Gardner Museum's Cavalchini. "The beauty and quiet power of the imagery stays with us for a long time."

An artist in residence at the Gardner last spring, Owens worked closely with then-curator of contemporary art Jennifer Gross. According to Gross, now curator at the Yale University Museum, Owens has been able to achieve something quite extraordinary. "Laura Owens enables the viewer to see and feel more and that's important work," comments Gross.

Fabric has been an area of ongoing interest for Owens. During her stay at the Gardner she spent time studying the Museum's collection of textiles. Her interest in the Gardner's textiles is reflected in some of the works in the exhibition and the artist book that accompanies the exhibition.

The publication, which will be available in the Gardner Museum Shop throughout the exhibition, is being designed by the artist and published by Charta, Milan, Italy. It will include a preface by Gardner Museum Director Anne Hawley and essays by Jennifer Gross and Russell Ferguson, chief curator at the University of California at Los Angeles' Hammer Museum. The catalog will be distributed in the U.S. by DAP.

Owens had her first solo exhibition in 1996, hosted by Gavin Brown, New York. Since then, her work has been widely written about in leading art journals and exhibited at: the Carnegie Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Walker Art Center; the Kunsthalle Basel; and the Inverleith House, Edinburgh, among other institutions in the U.S. and internationally. The 30-year-old Euclid, Ohio native, who now resides in Los Angeles, studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and earned her master of arts from the California Institute of the Arts.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Linda Norden, curator of contemporary art at The Fogg Museum, will lead a discussion of Owens' work on August 7 at the Gardner Museum.