Above image: Installation view of Laura Owens, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, February 13 – April 19, 2025. Photo by Bailey Coleman.

By Bailey Coleman

“Have you seen Laura Owens yet?”

Opening the door to the gallery I am welcomed by a nearly manic energy. Gallery goers are thrilled with themselves that they have finally made it to Chelsea to see the show everyone is talking about. Laura Owen’s eponymous exhibition at Matthew Marks has been widely lauded as a tour-de force of art making and I was just as excited as those around me to see what all the fuss was about. There is a swarm of people hovering around the gallery attendant’s desk with anticipation as the artist casts her first spell. An older woman with a fresh, blonde, blowout squeals with excitement, as a roll of tape magically moves across the desk. Suddenly, a drawer opens when her friend removes a pen from its holder. Having been witness to these moments of fantasy, we are baptized and free to pass through to the magical world of Laura Owens in her first solo show in New York City since her 2017 mid-career survey at The Whitney. 

Laura Owens, Untitled (Detail), 2025, Oil, pastel, charcoal, graphite, and silkscreened Flashe on linen, 130 x 90 inches. Photo by Bailey Coleman. 

In the first gallery, ten-foot tall vertical pastel paintings hang in effigy of Laura Owens. Though not intended to burn in sacrifice, these impressive works on canvas are singular retrospectives of Laura Owens’s unique style. Collage, digital media, hand-made silk screen prints and heavy daubs of oil paint compete and complement one another in an effort to excavate the nature of contemporary abstraction. Articulated in light teal cubist forms, the painting on the gallery’s farthest wall is a combustive battleground of style and technique. The result is a soft pixelation of abstracted shapes that superimpose each other and create the illusion of material layering. Her work has been likened to artists such as Picasso and de Kooning by The New York Times and others. These artists were interested in the integrity of the picture plane and celebrating the medium specific flatness inherent to its two-dimensionality. Owens, of course, adheres to these Greenbergian ideals, however, her degloving of the picture plane goes one step further. By outlining formal elements of her composition in shadow, Owens emphasizes that these shapes, designs, and motifs are, indeed, painted, suggesting that qualities that contribute to the illusion of three-dimensional painting can extend to elements usually thought of as contributing to flatness.

Installation view of Laura Owens, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, February 13 – April 19, 2025. © Laura Owens. Courtesy the Artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo: Annik Wetter.

Once ushered through the large vault-like doors at the rear of the first gallery, I entered into what appeared to be a secret garden with hide-and-seek mechanical pop-outs that reveal small paintings. This exhibition is a surprise departure from Owens’s previous solo shows in many ways. Owens’s 2017 Whitney mid-career retrospective featured her impressive paintings on typical white walls. Now, at Matthew Marks, Laura Owens invites the viewer into an immersive environment that the artist herself has dictated. Floor to ceiling aluminum panels boast one hundred and fifty layers of her silkscreen prints, oil painting, and clay-coated paper that showcases a complex botanical motif with a lattice gate and overflowing greenery. The intricacy of the design layers and subtle shifts in depth perspective become an enveloping environment of the artist’s imagination. Suddenly, a gallery attendant opens a final hidden door to reveal a video installation in a dark, tiny, 3 x 4′ closet-like room. Craning my head upwards in the claustrophobic cinema, I watch as two black crows wax philosophical on the fall of the Roman empire and the prevalence of misogyny throughout ancient history – acting as a subtext of sorts. It felt like type of fever-dream talk show I’ve always craved, but never realized was missing from my life until I saw it.

After a moment of surreal and comedic bird-watching, I exited the principal gallery space and went next door to the annex to catch the exhibition’s final act. There, large boxes with handles, pulls, and knobs hold books and other curios. Fingering through the objects, the printed matter tells a narrative of existential exploration and metaphysical interest beyond the scientific. To my nostalgic delight, I am reminded of show-and-tell in elementary school, sharing memories tied to objects. Overall, the exhibition affirms Laura Owens as an alchemist of painting. She melds painterly skill, an eagerness to adapt unique technologies, art history, and humor, to create something entirely new and wholly her own. 

“Laura Owens” is on view at Matthew Marks Gallery through April 19th, 2025.

Bailey Coleman is a contributing writer to Artifactoid and is the founder of her own art publication: Bin Day Art. She is an art advisor and writer based in New York working with clients to curate private collections that speak to both individual desire and market interest. She received her MA in the History of Art & Curating from the University of London and her BA in Art History from Barnard College of Columbia University.