Laura Owens’s Painted Sugar Rush

Amid the visual overwhelm on display in Laura Owens’s eponymous exhibition, which spans two of Matthew Marks Gallery’s Manhattan spaces, an abiding image is the candy cigarette. Within the reception desk – itself an artwork, Untitled, 2025 – at 522 West 22nd Street, the artist has stashed several hand-painted faux cigarette cartons. In the adjoining room, above five large paintings riffing on the history of abstraction (all Untitled, 2025), she has painted the sweets into the trompe l’oeil jumble of cords ringing the ceiling. Next door, at 526 West 22nd Street, are five handcrafted jewellery box-like cases (all Untitled, 2022), each containing books and works on paper; a box themed around fraud and deception pairs confectionary cigarettes with West Wing Reads, a catalogue of press releases from US President Donald Trump’s first term, and a photographic index of revolting food mashups, such as Flamin’ Hot® Cheetos–covered Oreos.

The cigarettes are one of Owens’s visual Easter eggs that divulge her modus operandi. A trickster item, they are sweet on the surface yet suggestive of darker cultural forces – say, corporations that glamourize smoking for children. Doubling as a lightly feminist sendup of phallic imagery, they speak to the ways that Owens deploys painting to decimate stale narratives about hierarchies of taste, beauty, tradition and originality, while losing none of the fun.

Emerging in Los Angeles in the mid-1990s – a city and an era sceptical of painting – Owens took the medium to the next level by combining deskilling and intensive labour. As a Gen X feminist, she built on second-wave genres like the 1970s Pattern and Decoration movement by recuperating folk art and craft elements into her paintings. Her work synthesizes masterful technique with a winking humour, combining trompe l’oeil hand-painted elements with screenprinting and digital production to mind-boggling effect. Here, in her first New York exhibition since her 2017 Whitney Museum midcareer survey, Owens delivers manic painterly abundance. The visual equivalent of a sugar rush, however, is undercut with moments of sobriety – as when a sketchbook, squirreled away in the unassuming reception desk, asserts that ‘sociopaths are killing us all’.

Each room enfolds viewers in a unique world evincing Owens’s vision of pleasure. The space behind the reception area shows off muted canvases that evoke cubist arrangements of fragmented space. Behind three hidden doors is a painterly tour de force: a floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall work with untold layers of overpainting – more than 150 in parts, according to the press release. Her wallpaperlike motifs here include dense florals, trellises and breezeblocks; oceanic woodblock prints, paisley and wicker; even segments evoking palette scrapings. Through yet another secret door, a cramped alcove shows a video of two crows; voiced by the artist and her child, they discuss gender divides in ancient civilizations and Starbucks lattes, among other topics.

Next door, Owens invites viewers to peruse her boxes containing meticulously crafted books on subjects such as flora and fauna, death, music and administration. This shift in scale and materiality reflects her interest in the intimate and specialized within her work. Owens plays with the idea of self-disclosure here, too – from a tome reproducing slides of her baby pictures to a school essay she wrote on mould. Behind the boxes and books, a battered wooden door unseals another painted installation dominated by cotton-candy-like swirls of pastels. The wobbly, powdery-blue moulding looks like fondant applied via a piping bag; near the floor, Owens has included a screenprint of her childhood library card. Perhaps her most important breakthrough is allowing irony to live alongside vulnerability – even nostalgia. Those candy cigarettes, so rich with symbolism, might have also been a favourite childhood treat.

‘Laura Owens’ is on view at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, until 19 April

^{Main image: ‘Laura Owens’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: © Laura Owens, courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York; photograph: Annik Wetter}