Laurence Owen

Interested in the fragmentary and suggestive, Laurence Owen pulls from art history, literature, music, contemporary culture, and everyday life to create paintings and ceramics filled with an ambiguous assortment of abstract marks and semi-figurative images. As he describes, “I’m interested in the fragmentation of different sources from many different elements in art, life, landscape and music, and in trying to construct them together in a false environment…I think this practice creates a kind of surreal yet familiar realm.” Some of his paintings feature otherworldly scenes, often incorporating references to faces, human figures, and landscapes; others are composed of collections of soft-edged shapes and passages of color, rendered with expressive, gestural brushstrokes. Owen’s variously shaped and richly colored ceramic vessels are also often adorned with faces and figures, ranging from mask-like to emoticon-inspired.