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Laura Owens

Untitled

June 25, 2019 - January 14, 2020
Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade

About the Exhibition

Laura Owens is known for her innovative and evolving approach to the medium of painting. Her works encompass multiple sources, from personal symbols to newsprint and computer manipulations, in order to challenge and dismantle traditional assumptions surrounding abstraction and figuration. Her work for the Façade reflects this process through its combination of gestural, graphic and grid-like motifs. Familiar concepts of spatial depth and Modernist flatness are overturned by means of an intricate layering of forms and colors—variously representational, geometric, textual and digital. The purple and gold color scheme, mediated through a swarm of pixels, invites numerous readings. An ambiguous mood—benign, irreverent, trolling—is signaled moreover by the emoji symbol (eyes closed, tongue stuck out) that anchors the composition at the bottom right. Like many of the artist’s works, this one is self-referential as much as site-specific: Owens excised the composition from a recent ceiling painting created in Rome, transforming the fragment (through enlargement and relocation) into a self-contained and monumental work.

About the Artist

Laura Owens (Artist-in-Residence, 2000) is known for her innovative and evolving approach to the medium of painting. Her works encompass multiple sources, from personal symbols to newsprint and computer manipulations, in order to challenge and dismantle traditional assumptions surrounding abstraction and figuration.

The Artist-in-Residence Program is directed by Pieranna Cavalchini, Tom and Lisa Blumenthal Curator of Contemporary Art, and is supported, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Barbara Lee Program Fund. Funding is also provided for site-specific installations of new work on the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade on Evans Way. The Museum receives operating support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which receives support from the State of Massachusetts and the National Endowment for the Arts.