Laura Owens exhibition at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles was an conceptual overcoming of individual creative predicaments. On one hand stands Winifred How, an rather unknown English artist and design from the XIXth century who created outstanding wallpaper patterns. On the other hand there is Vincent van Gogh with its overloaded biographical details and worldwide reputation. For her exhibition, Laura Owens created an imaginative way to bring them together on the same line of enquiry: Van Gogh paintings, acting like image, would posit themselves on a wallpapers background reminiscent of Winifred How design. By doing so, Laura Owens is setting up a conceptual and visual balance between these two artists, while expanding the scope of the exhibition to today’s image making process.

Indeed, she transformed the Fondation’s ground floor, designing a monumental, handmade wallpaper, creating a suspended universe between the premodern and the contemporary. The space can evoke the patterned interiors that Van Gogh knew from his time in Arles, they also summon the world of scanners, Photoshop and digital printing.

With every work she makes, Laura Owens asks new questions about painting today, about its relationship to materials, processes and traditions that have been seen to lie outside it. The complex wallpaper installation she created in Arles is also an environmental painting. Its realization required the use of many techniques, as well as the addition of hand-painted elements.

Additionally,  Laura Owens conceived a dozen of artist books throughout her duration in Arles in 2020 and 2021, exploring local histories and painterly gestures: a way to hand out specific components that nourished her stay in Arles during the covid years.