LAURA OWENS & VINCENT VAN GOGH 19 JUNE TO 31 OCTOBER PRESS KIT SUMMARY PRESENTATION OF THE EXHIBITION P 3 ESSAYS FROM THE CATALOGUE BICE CURIGER P 5 “THE DOMESTICITY OF ART: LAURA OWENS PAINTS META-WALLS FOR VINCENT” MARK GODFREY “STUDIOS OF THE SOUTH: LAURA OWENS AND VINCENT VAN GOGH” UPON REQUEST JULIA MARCHAND EUGÈNE MARIE, MORACO & LAURA UPON REQUEST BIOGRAPHIES OF THE ARTISTS P 12–14 LAURA OWENS VINCENT VAN GOGH THE FONDATION VINCENT VAN GOGH ARLES P 15 LIST OF PREVIOUS EXHIBITIONS P 16 PRACTICAL INFORMATION P 17 SELECTION OF IMAGES P 18 2 LAURA OWENS & VINCENT VAN GOGH To host seven canvases Vincent van Gogh made in the As a parallel project to this exhibition, Laura Owens last years of his life, Laura Owens has produced a monu- instituted Luma Arles’s “Studio of the South” – a house mental painting on handmade wallpaper. On the Fonda- that has been temporarily turned into a living space and tion Vincent van Gogh Arles’s ground floor she has studio to host artists’s residencies over the next two created an environment suspended between the pre- years. She has created tiles and ceramics for the space, modern and the contemporary. The spaces on this level and while making work in Arles, each artist who follows evoke not just the wallpapered interiors that Van Gogh will add to it in their own ways. knew from his time in Arles, but equally the world of scanners, Photoshop and digital printing. Vincent van Gogh came to Arles to experience its light and climate, but also to form an association of artists. The motifs in this wallpaper are borrowed from the work His aim was to set up a “Studio of the South” for other of the English artist and designer Winifred How, who painters as well as himself, and throughout her career, studied in London in the early 20th century. By sampling Laura Owens has also found ways to create communities and reworking How’s designs to host Van Gogh’s pain- of artists. tings, Owens points to the different posthumous reputa- Curators: Bice Curiger & Mark Godfrey tions of these two artists: while Van Gogh became a mythical figure, How is virtually unknown. With every work she makes, Laura Owens has asked new questions about painting today, about its relationship to materials, processes and traditions that have been seen to lie outside it. Here the American artist proposes a complex wallpaper installation as an environmental painting. This painting uses screenprinting, felt flocking, black sand, oil woodblock printing, airbrushed passages, pastel and watercolour, as well as hand-painted ele- ments. Parts of the wallpaper have over fifty layers of silk-screening; some of the paints include iridescent pig- ments whose colours shift under different lights. Owens also suggests that a painting can host other paintings – in this case, those of Van Gogh and her own. Owens’s interest in Van Gogh has been apparent – if never before acknowledged so clearly – since the begin- ning of her exhibiting career. Her Untitled painting of seagulls from 1997, included here, riffs on Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows (1890). Many of her early col- lages featured photographs she had taken of his pain- tings in museums. As she began to experiment with impasto, one reference point was the heavily worked surfaces of Van Gogh’s late works. For this exhibition, Laura Owens has conducted detailed research into the provenance of each of the Van Gogh paintings presented here, loaned from collections and museums around the world. This has led to a series of artist’s books, presented upstairs, which also draw from her time in Arles in 2020 during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. 3 ESSAYS OF THE CATALOGUE "LAURA OWENS & VINCENT VAN GOGH" Publishing date: August 2021 All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without prior permission from the publisher. © Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, 2021 Essays by Mark Godfrey and Julia Marchand are available on request: [email protected] AUTHORS BICE CURIGER Bice Curiger is an art historian and curator. Since 2013 she has been Artistic Director of the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles. As a curator at Kunsthaus Zürich from 1993 to 2013 she curated major exhibitions including Birth of the Cool (1997), Hypermental (2000) and Riotous Baroque (2012). In 2011 she served as the Director of the 54th Venice Biennale. Editorial director of Tate Etc magazine from 2004 to 2014, Bice Curiger was also co-founder and editor-in- chief of Parkett, published in Zürich and New York from 1984 to 2017. She has written numerous books about art. MARK GODFREY Mark Godfrey is a curator and art historian based in London. Between 2007 and 2021 he was Senior Curator at Tate Modern where he or- ganised major exhibitions including Soul of a Nation (co-curated with Zoé Whitley) and retrospectives of Sigmar Polke, Alighiero E Boetti and Franz West. Outside Tate he has curated exhibitions by R. H. Quaytman (Tel-Aviv Museum of Art), David Hammons (The George Economou Collection, Athens) and Christopher Williams (Whitechapel Gallery, London). He is the winner of the Absolut Art Prize for Art Writing (2015). Mark Godfrey has written about the work of Laura Owens on several occasions. JULIA MARCHAND Co-curator at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles since 2015, Julia Marchand is also Artistic Director of Extramentale, which she founded in 2016. She settled in Arles after completing an MFA Curating at Goldsmiths College and undertaking research on visual anthropology. Exhibitions she has conceived include Dark Centuries: James Ensor & Alexander Kluge (2019), as well as La Vie simple – Simplement la vie / Songs of alienation (2017) and Complicity (2020) both co-curated with Bice Curiger. Her current research on the notion of carnivalesque has led her to coordinate a day of study and performance at the Centre Pompidou in February 2020. She is also vice-president of the Provence Art Contemporain network. 4 BICE CURIGER THE DOMESTICITY OF ART LAURA OWENS PAINTS META-WALLS FOR VINCENT “I believed that thinking and not dreaming was our In 1997, filling a large canvas with a flight of walls, duty...” Vincent van Gogh1 Owens created a classical enfilade. This too is a bright, promising painting, inviting the eye to become immersed Applying unexpected gestures to the walls of an exhi- in a universe saturated with art, where a small picture bition—more than just the usual hanging of pictures— hanging perfectly centred in the foreground next to an has always been a feature of Laura Owens’s presenta- easel once again references Van Gogh: the head of a tions. As if she were inviting the walls to adopt a peasant woman wearing a conspicuously white, flower- different, perhaps Sunday-best role. Walls, of all things! shaped hood, one of his studies for the The Potato Eaters Aren’t they just supposed to be functional? Owens is ob- (1885). viously not targeting aloof, tautological contextual art. In her custody, the wall becomes an intoxicating, In an acclaimed exhibition of 2013 at 356 Mission in refreshing means of conquering the space of an exhibi- Los Angeles, Owens hung her novel, large-format pain- tion and charting surprising new mental territory. tings so close together that they were primarily per- With inimitable ease she takes advantage of the pa- ceived in their totality, broken only by the brief staccato radoxically unobtrusive obtrusiveness of walls and suc- of the gaps in between. A year before, in Pavement Ka- ceeds in bringing their physical presence and symbolic raoke, a series of paintings of furiously superimposed potential into artistic play. The wall becomes so enme- geometrical grids, giant gestural curlicues and trompe shed with Owens’s art that it seems as if a magic wand l’oeil effects, she even inscribed the two words of the had unbounded all sense of boundary. Early on, there title in large consecutive letters across six of the seven was a now famous large-format painting, Untitled paintings. (1997), in which the vast sky rising above the sea proves to be a camouflaged wall. And only because the two In 2012, at Art Basel’s Art Unlimited, Owens positioned birds circling through the air—an obvious, frequently re- numerous small format paintings in two rows like marked reference to Van Gogh, by the way—cast a drop a wall frieze high above the heads of visitors. Handmade shadow on the azure. For all the world like a nod to artist’s books were laid out on tables for people to leaf Magritte, telling us “Ceci n’est pas un ciel!” But Owens, through so that their heads moved up and down, first fully persuaded that art opens horizons, seems to be craning their necks to see the frieze and then down saying: “A picture is part of the wall, and the wall is not to look at the books on the table. And finally in 2016, at only part of the picture—together they are another kind the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in of sky!” San Francisco, an exhibition titled Ten Paintings proved to be something like an enormous, floating spaceship, Walls have always intrigued Owens; they are an expres- conjured on one hand by the unique fusion of painting sion of her pleasure and delight in discovery while ma- (as wallpaper) with the wall and with the vaulted ceiling king art, which explains why she notices the corners of and supports, which were both real and rendered illu- rooms and takes an extremely unconventional, probing sionistically. On the other hand, extremely bewildering, approach to hanging pictures.