"The works on view deployed all manner of painterly illusion, trick, and gag. Giant canvases hung in the main space, their collage-like compositions built up from dense aggregates of silk-screened layers (over a hundred in some cases). These were set against artist-made wallpaper, with a trompe l'oeil border of pretzels, donuts, and assorted other confectionsdangling from electrical cords whose dainty loops were modeled after trailing vines. Hidden behind a false door was a wraparound installation of paintings on aluminum panel."
"configured as a mural, featuring a grab bag of floriated patterns jostling and colliding, with miniature canvases intermittently popping out of trapdoors like cuckoo clocks. Throughout this madcap ensemble, Owens made liberal use of flatly painted drop shadows that introduced a confounding fictive depth, alongside exaggerated instances of real depth-fluffy pastel dollops and smears of paint with the consistency of buttercream projecting off the surface. At room-size scale, the combination was as destabilizing as it was ridiculous."
2025 saw a surge of demented painting embracing maximalist, mischievous, and illusionistic strategies that foreground painterly tricks and tactile surfaces. Laura Owens produced a sprawling installation of silk-screened, collage-like canvases, trompe l'oeil wallpaper, and sculptural buttercream-like paint projections. Other artists delivered ghoulish reworkings of old-master nudes, stained-glass riffs, quasi-ecclesiastical toolboxes, warped boozy snapshots, and dainty dreamscapes. The works combined flat painted devices—drop shadows, collage, printed layers—with exaggerated real depth through impasto and protruding swaths of paint. These works prioritize spectacle and material surprise over restrained compositional harmony.
Read at Artforum
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]