Laura Owens: A Contemporary Painting Exhibition at Secession Exploring Digital Art and Visual Culture

This exhibition showcases the work of Los Angeles-based artist Laura Owens, known for her innovative approach to contemporary painting that blends technical skill, digital media, and diverse cultural inspirations. The exhibition features large-format canvases exploring themes of art history, popular culture, and digital aesthetics.

Laura Owens is a prominent contemporary artist whose work significantly shapes the discourse on painting through her technical mastery, experimental spirit, and incorporation of digital media. Since gaining attention in the late 1990s, Owens has been celebrated for her large-scale paintings and a distinctive visual language that draws from art history, popular culture, and non-Western visual traditions. Her canvases are characterized by a fusion of techniques, media, and motifs, often featuring printed, painted, sprayed, or embroidered elements, sometimes enhanced with applied objects. Owens equally utilizes painting and image editing software as integral tools, fostering a dynamic evolution of her visual language through extensive preparatory work and technical experimentation. Her complex compositional spaces involve overlapping planes that shift between formal and thematic connections, treating painting as a means of spatial and physical experience. The exhibition highlights Owens' engagement with the exhibition space, often influencing the dimensions and installation of her works. Her interest in the 'picture within a picture' trope, traditionally explored in art history, is seamlessly integrated with the contemporary aesthetic of screens and overlapping digital windows. Recent works, particularly those produced for the Secession, predominantly feature digitally manipulated elements combined with the analogue technique of screen printing. This series is inspired by the artist's discovery of paper negatives from the Los Angeles Times in the 1940s, which she combined with contemporary news and advertisements. The resulting large-format paintings represent a newspaper's constructive idea, with recurring textures, colors, and motifs spanning multiple canvases, creating an unstable visual space where digital and analogue elements, historical and contemporary content, are fluidly interwoven. Alongside the paintings, the exhibition also presents a series of handmade artist books, offering a more intimate glimpse into the artist's process and creative investigations.