The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum presented the first solo museum exhibition of works by American painter Laura Owens. Although Owens’s paintings at a glance seem casually made, further inspection finds them layered and complex. Her work has a very personal style that engages the viewer, moving from landscape to abstraction with energetic thick brush strokes, fanciful child-like doodles or sophisticated, fine-line drawings. Demonstrating a wide and imaginative range, she is constantly experimenting and changing her work. “Each painting can act as a question,” says Owens.

Owens’s work often incorporates patterned textiles and fabric, which she sometime paints or collages. It comes as no surprise then, that during her stay as an Artist-in-Residence at the museum in 2000, she grew interested in the founder’s use of textiles and fabrics. Then curator of Contemporary Art Jennifer Gross noted, “ I invited Laura Owens to be a resident artist at the Gardner Museum because of the collaging of form and space that occurs across its coutyard and through it’s corridors, an effect that parallels Owens’s own process for making paintings. Looking through to images across framed spaces and at the carefully orchestrated contexts engendered by the Museum dares and enlivens the view‘s conception of the relation ship between art, nature, and design, the source materials in Gardner’s practice as an installation artist and in Ownes work, the recipients of her painterly address.”

Laura Owens eventually selected several items from the collection that she integrated into drawings, paintings, or featured in the artist book that accompanies the exhibition including a silk kimono depicting a badger looking at the moon and Christ Embracing John the Baptist an etching by Filippino Lippi.

Laura Owens lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Publications:
Laura Owens: New Works at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Laura Owens limited edition exhibition poster

Learn more about the artist

List of works in the exhibition

Untitled, 2001
Oil and acrylic on canvas
106 x 67 1/2 inches

Untitled, 2001
Oil and acrylic on canvas
46 x 54 1/4 inches

Untitled, 2001
Tissue paper, collage, and watercolor on paper
14 x 10 inches

Untitled, 2001
Watercolor, pencil on paper
30 x 22 1/2 inches

Untitled, 2001
Watercolor, pencil on paper
44 x 30 1/4 inches

Untitled, 2001
Watercolor, tissue paper, felt on paper
14 x 10 inches

Untitled, 2001
Watercolor, tissue paper, felt on paper
7 x 10 inches

Untitled, 2001
Watercolor, felt, collage on paper
12 x 9 1/2 inches

Untitled, 2001
Acrylic, oil and collage on paper
18 x 24 inches

Gallery Talk
August 7, 2001, 12 noon
Linda Norden, curator of contemporary art at The Fogg Museum

Included in the lecture will be a rare opportunity to see a nineteenth-century kimono that inspired Owens' large "monkey painting." The kimono has not been previously exhibited to the public.