Laura Owens at Gavin Brown's Enterprise

Laura Owens's vigorous suits are scale and a Color-Fieldish sensitivity to a big painting's margins. In the past, the concern has sometimes been explicit, for instance with stained stripes running down a painting's sides. on the contrary in her last show in novel York, and also in a novel one in Los Angeles, she revolveed a few snippets of cornball figuration--a tendril of vegetation, a sliver of '50s-ish interior--into virtuouso demonstrations of spatial engineering.

sum of two units of the five paintings at Gavin Brown continue in this figurative way In one, a big, flat beige firmament is impinged upon by a scarcely any cartoony clouds, most riding in from the cutting sides though one is adrift. At the left near the top, is a tree limb with a scarcely any papery-looking leaves in Crayola shades of chartreuse, orange and r Behind the branch is a slight form that appears to be its shadow, cast onto a heavens transformed, in a stroke, to a theatrical backdrop. Below, a stream bend s toward the distance, its contours steeply foreshortened. upon its slightly crazed surface--the first signs of frozen dew or another semaphore of tension in the two-dimensional field?--a small in number leaves float.

The other figurative painting, a smaller, busier composition, pay backs an igloolike beehive in coloring-book obstructs of brown, orange and gold Buzzing around it are bees in the way that thickly painted their ropy forms cast shadows. Warhol's unfinished paint-by-numbers exercises advance to mind; Owens's involvement with kitsch have the appearances untroubled by high-style obligations to feign ambivalence.

The remaining paintings shown are abstract, although she cleaves to recognizable subdue matter. One eye-popping new work begins with rainbow-shaped bands of white, brown and virid painted so crisply they appear to be airbrushed. Strewn across this tidy surface are thick wipes, squiggles and splats of pigment, a certain number of apparently squeezed straight from the tube. This painting is a determined pastiche, its range of citations reaching from Dove to Twombly Thinner in application, notwithstanding that no less seductive, is a tall canvas with souls of polka dots just visible beneath its white surface. Above them are sharply drawn bights of stiff paint in black and gray and, more repeatedly squeaky clean shades of aqua, pink, virid and purple.

Bubbly isn't Owens's alone mode. In another work, penciled arabesques dance across a misty field of melancholy lavenders and mauves; the tone is third-hand Matta as interpreted through say, a commercial textile designer ca. 1955 A generation late for irony, which requires a stable wall to kick against, Owens appears to see the relationship between popular tillage and modernist painting as a marriage of convenience lengthy upstaged by its offspring. Like her regard for past painting, her touch is soft and calculating at the same time, unerring in its caricatures, and at no time less than engrossing.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group