Untitled, 2016

Vinyl paint, screen-printing ink, and bicycle wheel on dyed linen
©  Laura Owens; courtesy the artist; Sadie Coles HQ, London; and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. Photo by Prudence Cumming.

Laura Owens’s work has long been characterized by an idiosyncratic and inclusive approach to source material. Art historical references to Henri Matisse, color-field painting, and Japanese folding screens appear alongside visual quotations from folk art, children’s coloring books, tapestries, wallpaper, clip art, and her grandmother Eileen Owens’s embroidery. The artist alludes to this layering of references in the bulbous shapes that sweep across the canvas—a nod to the image-editing software that the user to select a brush shape and alter its thickness to create marks and erasures. Some of the shapes are packed with colored “pixels” of Flashe vinyl paint that the artist screenprinted directly onto the dyed linen support; others are traversed by an enlarged lattice pattern created by a stencil, which she first filled with several coats of gesso and then with a CMYK (four-color) halftone image, in screenprinting ink. While Owens’s allusions to the everyday are often subtle, at times she physically affixes an object to the surface of the canvas, as with the bicycle wheel in Untitled.