Amid the visible overwhelm on show in Laura Owens’s eponymous exhibition, which spans two of Matthew Marks Gallery’s Manhattan areas, an abiding picture is the sweet cigarette. Throughout the reception desk – itself an paintings, Untitled, 2025 – at 522 West twenty second Avenue, the artist has stashed a number of hand-painted fake cigarette cartons. Within the adjoining room, above 5 massive work riffing on the historical past of abstraction (all Untitled, 2025), she has painted the sweets into the trompe l’oeil jumble of cords ringing the ceiling. Subsequent door, at 526 West twenty second Avenue, are 5 handcrafted jewelry box-like instances (all Untitled, 2022), every containing books and works on paper; a field themed round fraud and deception pairs confectionary cigarettes with West Wing Reads, a listing of press releases from US President Donald Trump’s first time period, and a photographic index of revolting meals mashups, reminiscent of Flamin’ Scorching® Cheetos–lined Oreos.
The cigarettes are one in all Owens’s visible Easter eggs that reveal her modus operandi. A trickster merchandise, they’re candy on the floor but suggestive of darker cultural forces – say, firms that glamourize smoking for youngsters. Doubling as a frivolously feminist sendup of phallic imagery, they converse to the ways in which Owens deploys portray to decimate stale narratives about hierarchies of style, magnificence, custom and originality, whereas shedding not one of the enjoyable.
Rising in Los Angeles within the mid-Nineties – a metropolis and an period sceptical of portray – Owens took the medium to the following degree by combining deskilling and intensive labour. As a Gen X feminist, she constructed on second-wave genres just like the Nineteen Seventies Sample and Ornament motion by recuperating people artwork and craft components into her work. Her work synthesizes masterful approach with a winking humour, combining trompe l’oeil hand-painted components with screenprinting and digital manufacturing to mind-boggling impact. Right here, in her first New York exhibition since her 2017 Whitney Museum midcareer survey, Owens delivers manic painterly abundance. The visible equal of a sugar rush, nevertheless, is undercut with moments of sobriety – as when a sketchbook, squirreled away within the unassuming reception desk, asserts that ‘sociopaths are killing us all’.
Every room enfolds viewers in a novel world evincing Owens’s imaginative and prescient of enjoyment. The house behind the reception space exhibits off muted canvases that evoke cubist preparations of fragmented house. Behind three hidden doorways is a painterly tour de pressure: a floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall work with untold layers of overpainting – greater than 150 in components, in keeping with the press launch. Her wallpaperlike motifs right here embrace dense florals, trellises and breezeblocks; oceanic woodblock prints, paisley and wicker; even segments evoking palette scrapings. By means of one more secret door, a cramped alcove exhibits a video of two crows; voiced by the artist and her little one, they focus on gender divides in historical civilizations and Starbucks lattes, amongst different subjects.
Subsequent door, Owens invitations viewers to peruse her containers containing meticulously crafted books on topics reminiscent of natural world, loss of life, music and administration. This shift in scale and materiality displays her curiosity within the intimate and specialised inside her work. Owens performs with the thought of self-disclosure right here, too – from a tome reproducing slides of her child footage to a faculty essay she wrote on mould. Behind the containers and books, a battered picket door unseals one other painted set up dominated by cotton-candy-like swirls of pastels. The wobbly, powdery-blue moulding appears like fondant utilized through a piping bag; close to the ground, Owens has included a screenprint of her childhood library card. Maybe her most necessary breakthrough is permitting irony to reside alongside vulnerability – even nostalgia. These sweet cigarettes, so wealthy with symbolism, might need additionally been a favorite childhood deal with.
‘Laura Owens’ is on view at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, till 19 April
Important picture: ‘Laura Owens’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York; {photograph}: Annik Wetter
