Rachel Wetzler at Artforum:
If nothing else, 2025 was a good year for demented painting. This might have been obvious to anyone who saw Laura Owens’s maximalist fantasia at Matthew Marks in Chelsea this past spring—the single best gallery show I saw all year. 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 confections dangling 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.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.