Laura Owens was on view at Matthew Marks Gallery from February 14 to April 19, 2025.
“Laura paintings are fascinating excursions into a myriad and multi-textual world of childhood fantasies, formal painting tautologies and quotations from the history of painting.” This appraisal by the conceptual artist Charles Gaines was reproduced, grammatical infelicities lovingly intact, in the odd not-quite-a-catalogue published alongside Laura Owens’s 2017 Whitney retrospective. It’s the opening line of a mentor report from her time as a graduate student at CalArts; three decades on, it remains, as simple description, accurate enough regarding the work in Laura Owens at Matthew Marks, her return to New York after eight years away.
What Gaines gets right isn’t her style; it’s her sensibility. While certain formal elements recur—the drop shadow, the grid, impasto so cartoonishly thick it verges on sculpture, and, in the past fifteen years, increasingly complex layers of screen printing—there’s no easy way to sum up what an Owens picture looks like. And s…