Crown Point Press is pleased to announce new color etchings by Laura Owens on view in the gallery through March 5, 2011. This is Owens' second project with Crown Point Press and during her recent time in the studio she completed a large color soft ground etching and an expansive multicolored triptych.
Laura Owens is a painter who defies easy classification. She is best known for her wildly colorful canvases with depictions of animals, robots, flowers and trees but has also experimented with abstraction over the years. Her diverse influences range from folk art and textiles to color field and landscape painting and her body of work seems to balance an artistic curiosity with skillful earnestness.
Owens places her subjects in deep space with an inventive use of technique. In her most recent etchings with Crown Point Press, she places the viewer directly within her imaginative seas and landscapes. In the large triptych print, Untitled (LO 426), the viewer can feel immersed in a turbulent ocean. Tiny pink stars pop against black crested waves and Owens' distinctive curves and fanciful brushstrokes are set against a stormy purple-blue sky. The nighttime, almost dreamlike scene in three panels shows a progression through a storm. The fiercely ominous beauty transforms into a clearing sky reflecting Owens' characteristic charm.
In the color soft ground etching Untitled (LO 425), three moons bounce through a hilly, undulating landscape and seem to follow the viewer. Owens chose a palette of pink, blue and mauve inks and used the soft ground process so the print appears almost like a colored pencil drawing. There is a quiet exuberance in the swirling leaves and petals as they flutter throughout the moonlit landscape.
Laura Owens lives and works in Los Angeles, and was born in 1970 in Euclid, Ohio; she studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the California Institute of Arts. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, Netherlands (2007); Kunstalle Zurich, Switzerland (2006), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA.(2003).