Laura Owens at Matthew Marks Gallery

Installation view

By NADS NEMAN March 7, 2025

I think it would be insincere to approach this show in any way other than structural. It is didactic yet intuitive, decorative yet conceptual, rigorous in a way that unfolds easily. Though the works themselves are monumental in their own right, I was primarily struck with the experience of navigating through the show—and the discoveries and rediscoveries that become evident along the way. The show is split between Matthew Marks’ locations at 522 and 526 W 22nd Street, but I have chosen to focus solely on the larger gallery at 522.

Buckle up and come with me to Laura Owens’ first exhibition in New York in 8 years.

The first gallery, obscured from the street by a white wall, feels like a warm-up. It’s got a lot going on—a wall vinyl, massive paintings—but it’s nothing compared to the next room. In this first gallery, you’re trained into careful perception. The image of a dangling computer cord at the entrance directs your gaze up to a printed tangle of wires and string running along the top of each wall. The tangle is littered with candy, chocolates, and snacks, as if for birds to pick at. While you gaze at the wire, your eyes wander a little further up to the building’s decorative ceiling, white with patterned reliefs. Then, with a thud, your eyes fall back down to take in the massive paintings.

Executed with silkscreened flashe on linen and adorned variously with oil, pastel, charcoal, graphite, watercolor, sand, and resin, these paintings seem to hold time, to seal it into their chalky, stone-like surfaces. This uniformity is broken only by impasto embellishments in oil paint, but these serve to reinforce the uniformity of the rest of the surface through their break from it. One painting in particular, a washed out tan with swaths of sky-blue and teal, offers glimpses of tile, silkscreened in meticulous detail. These glimpses are vibrant in parts and seem to fade in others, giving the illusion of uneven degradation over time. Owens’ method of printing in 100s of layers lends a genealogy to the work, allowing subtle evidence of lost layers and marks almost completely gone. The painting is like a weathered fresco. But it’s also not. It’s complicated. There’s a pattern to it, and in one corner a subtle grid is revealed from underneath. You see this layer, then look back at the rest of the work. You discover that, subtly, the grid is present throughout the entire work. You didn’t see it before.

Detail, 1

This experience, a sort of need to review, is embedded throughout the exhibition. It forces you into careful perception, focus, and waiting. You must spend time on it, you must look again, you must remember things for later. You must wait for it. The show demands clarity and analysis, vision and revision.

Through this clarified focus, you notice seams in the wall, forming the shape of two doors. You dare yourself to stick your hand into the seam and pull gently to open one. And suddenly, the floodgates are open.

The second gallery is much busier than the first gallery, but somehow more subtle. Inside alone, you’re faced first with silence. But as you look around, you hear distant noises, hidden somewhere in the wall. In Manhattan, this sound is ambiguous enough to be mistaken for ambient noise, but after waiting to hear more, it’s made clear that it’s intentional. This room’s walls are lined with an overwhelming wallpaper-like painting mounted to aluminum panels, collaged with colorful, intricate patterns and littered with illusions of depth and three dimensionality. Most of the wall is flat in form, excepting more impasto swatches of oil paint, which play further with the flat wall’s dimensional illusions. There’s so much to see, and you ravenously begin to take it all in.

Where do you start? Your eye is drawn around the room. But just as you focus in on a section, you hear a click behind you. In the glimpse of an eye, a panel pops open to reveal a small, childlike egg tempera painting in the wall. Whipping around, you crouch down to admire it. Compared to the large, labor-intensive paintings in the first room, these are executed effortlessly and, it seems, quickly. And just as you get a good look at this little painting, the panel shuts. Time is again central to your viewing of this work, but in a very different way than in the first room. You realize that you had to wait to see it, then take it in with urgency. It helps that egg tempera is a famously fast-drying medium, settled right away.

Once the panel shuts, you spend a moment looking at the wall with a new skepticism. The seams where it opened are almost imperceptible against the troupe l’oeil background, and you start to doubt the flatness of the rest of the wall. In this moment you know that more panels may exist, and you start looking for them. But you have to wait, maybe longer than you expected. Suddenly, just as you decide that maybe there is only one hidden painting in the room, you hear another click behind you. The process repeats with another little painting.

Untitled, 2025. Oil, acrylic, silkscreened Flashe, sand, and flocking on clay-coated paper mounted to alumnium panels, egg tempera on panel, video, and sound.

The runtime of this sound in this room is 80 minutes. You could spend what feels like ages in there, waiting for the wall to reveal more paintings to you. This process of waiting and being summoned to look both slows you down and speeds you up, but most importantly it opens you up to the possibility of more in the room. It leaves you searching throughout the four walls for more little details, for something you might have missed.

This search leads you to the far corner of the room, to what looks like a darkened hallway to another room. You quickly discover, though, once stepping inside, that it’s just a niche, big enough for one person, maybe two. Light above you draws your eyes up to a video, projected across the top of the wall just below the ceiling.

You’ve been so in your head in the second room. Outside of yourself and immersed in your surroundings. When you step into this little video room and strain your neck to look up, though, you’re snapped back into your body, into corporeal awareness. The video plays with this awareness through its content—two ravens talking, dubbed over with a conversation between two women. It’s funny, and full of little references to this conduit structure. “There’s something on my shirt,” one bird mumbles. “Is it poop?” says the other. Their conversation unfolds into the kind you have when you have nowhere to be. They discuss Ancient Greece and whether misogyny existed in history or was constructed over time. At one point, one of them seems stumped.

All the while, you’re standing your ground in the room. You’re choosing to look up. Then you start looking around, looking for more like you’ve been led to do in the previous room. You look behind and to the left of you, and see only dark walls. Then you look right, and see another seam in the wall, another door. You have to open it—the rest of the show has conditioned you to do so. You can’t help but try.

When the door is opened, the artifice is broken. It’s just a drab supply closet, messy and complete with a slop sink. Assumedly, this isn’t part of the show. It’s functional. But you can’t help but wonder if the doorway somewhat intentional. The whole structure of the show has an exteriority to it that does not create a dream world but instead incorporates itself seamlessly into your perception. You can pick this little perceptual framework up and take it with you. Somehow, this storage closet is not a break from your experience of the show at all, but instead a way of extending it.

As you turn back, lingering again through the two galleries and looking for details you didn’t notice before, you approach the show more carefully. You have a new frame of reference. And as you exit the first gallery and walk back past the gallery assistant at the front desk, your newly heightened perception notices more. The desk, which you passed quickly on the way in, holds several small books in its front drawer.

Flourescent pink D.O.D. report

You pick these up, and they unfold in classic Owens fashion. As you work your way through each, the gallery’s phone starts to creak and dance around, as if on its own.The desk is chock full of cheeky kinetic references to the ritual of visiting a gallery–when you pick up the pen to write in the book, a cabinet opens. Upon picking up the checklist, another drawer opens. You kneel down beside the open drawer and rifle through its contents, pulling out artist books and pamphlets, including a fluorescent pink report on U.S. Defense Department programs from the Pentagon and a little sketchbook with a sweet note addressed “Dear Charline.” In this way, you get a glimpse into the peripheral of the show— all the ever-present topics Owens might have filed away in her mind (and this drawer) while making the show. You do your own research —of the things she read, considered, maybe even forgot about. The exhibition’s scope extends again.

You exit the gallery with a heightened sense of focus and perceptive awareness. You hope it doesn’t wear off. At the risk of sounding on the nose for Owens’ work, this exhibition feels like a book, containing a newly conceptualized structural framework for seeing.

I, for one, would like to pick it up and take it with me. I think I will. WM