World literature is filled with descriptions of courtyards opening into courtyards opening into even more elaborate and beautiful courtyards and gardens. Real versions have existed, too, in ancient Persia and Rome, or Chinese scholars’ gardens. These all come to mind in the Los Angeles artist Laura Owens’s wildly ambitious exhibition of paintings, wallpapered rooms and miniature cabinets of curiosities across two full galleries at Matthew Marks.
This is Owens’s first New York gallery show in eight years, following a midcareer survey at the Whitney Museum in 2017-2018, and shows at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles, France, and in Los Angeles. Originally known as a painter who crashed through the boundaries between fine art and decoration, folk art and kitsch, she’s now exploring painting as an immersive environment, one that also draws from various histories to build a compelling, singular vision.
Owens is hardly alone in treating painting as environment rather than as a stand-alone object. The German artist Kerstin Brätsch currently has an exhibition at Barbara Gladstone in Brussels with moody wallpaper based on the intersections of psychology and the body. There are also, of course, immersive “experiences” devoted to the likes of van Gogh, Hieronymous Bosch and Gustav Klimt — or a virtual tour of ancient Rome just outside the archaeological site of Herculaneum.
Owens distances herself from these examples with her dogged commitment to research and detail. Nearly everything you see here, handmade or silk-screened and painted, is sourced from her drawings (and occasionally those of her children), as well as other collected samples of wallpapers, a magic manual, maps, treatises, even a haunting birthday card from her father. Owens’s show begins at the gallery’s front desk at 522 West 22nd Street, which has been outfitted with sensors: Pick up the gallery release, and a drawer opens to reveal her delicately painted handmade books. A roll of tape wobbles along the desk’s surface and a ceramic pen holder triggers other movements. The magic of “Fantasia” and fairy tales has been transported to the gallery.
Enter the next room and you’re surrounded by large beige and neutral-colored canvases that harmonize with the wallpaper, also created by Owens. The paintings, all untitled, hark back to Willem de Kooning’s chunky abstract expressionism, with thick impastos that create texture and dimension, or Picasso and Braque’s curvaceous Cubist collages. They look collaged, but the shadows are painted rather than real, an Owens signature. Near the ceiling, ringing the walls, is a garland of trompe l’oeil electrical cords that look at first like vines — a funny reminder that we’re in New York, not in a country villa.
This seems like the end — but no. Two unmarked doors lead into a long room with bright green and floral painted and hand silk-screened wallpaper, a secret garden. Medieval tapestries and Monet’s waterlilies come to mind, as well as Rococo fantasy rooms like Fragonard’s “The Progress of Love” at the Frick.Owens borrows from wallpaper motifs here and also recreates a tree from a Pieter Bruegel painting. This room includes another dash of magic: Little flaps and miniature doors embedded in the wall and programmed with timers fling open every few minutes, revealing miniature paintings underneath.
And if you hang around long enough, you discover yet another backroom, also unmarked: a cramped nook where a video runs near the ceiling. It features birds in Los Angeles — but their beaks are moving and they’re not just chewing: They’re avian anthropologists, discussing human history (a dialogue originated by Owens and one of her children). They describe the experience of the volcano erupting in Pompeii (an obvious parallel to the fires in Los Angeles) and how most ancient cultures were deeply misogynist. Funny and poignant, the disasters of the past feel eerily immediate.
The gallery next door on 22nd Street offers a different, more tactile experience. Where most art these days is made for looking rather than touching, here are five large containers on tables, like jewelry boxes, outfitted with marvelous handles and pulls (facsimiles of crushed cigarettes and miniature envelopes and pencils) and lined with specially printed books and other curios that Owens has collected, including slides from her father’s extensive collection. The boxes(think of the famous boxes of the Fluxus movement) are organized around grand topics like Nature, Math, Magic, Death, Fraud and Deception. Manuals for magic, mathematical equations, maps and other printed matter can be leafed through, unfolded and admired. (An inventory of some of the materials, which appeared in a 2019 exhibition in Los Angeles, is at the website booksandtables.com.)
A door at the end of this room leads to another room, of course. This door is itself a relic: taken from a house Owens was planning to move into in Altadena, Los Angeles; the house it was attached to burned down in the recent fire. The room is awash with swirling patterns and trompe l’oeil tricks, but unlike the ones next door its peach and pink hues recall an ancient cave, or frescoed tomb. It could be the end of the world, inside a gallery in Chelsea.
Here you are coaxed into pondering the connections between remote civilizations and our own. An archive of knowledge is held in the boxes and embedded in the designs on the walls, which merge millenniums of human effort, research and technology. And yet, like the anthropomorphic birds conversing in the video , we might ask, What have we really learned? What do we do in the face of disaster, with all the wisdom and skill we have amassed?
Painting is a vastly expandable category: part trickery, part sorcery, part craft and labor. The show reminds us of our best deceptions, like pictures that trick the eye and equations translated into wallpaper patterns. But can art and ingenuity get us out of our present political and eco-quandaries? This show, with its extraordinary creative output, offers no escape but signals hope rather than defeat. In Owens’s universe, doors open into other worlds, and magic and beauty surround us.
Laura Owens
Through April 19, Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 and 526 West 22nd Street, Manhattan; 212-243-0200; matthewmarks.com.
