Laura Owens

Owens's Whitney retrospective catalogue is less a companion volume than a work in its own right: 664 pages assembled with the artist, tracking twenty-five years of painting that has never settled into a signature style.

Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art for the retrospective organised by Scott Rothkopf, which opened in New York in November 2017 and travelled to the Dallas Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the book covers Owens's output from the early 1990s to the present. Rothkopf's text is set alongside an unusually dense apparatus of documentation - installation views, source material, correspondence and studio ephemera - reflecting the artist's own archival habits and her involvement in the book's making. It is the fullest published account of a practice that runs from wall-scaled clock paintings to silkscreened wallpaper grids.

Owens (b. 1970, Euclid, Ohio) lives in Los Angeles, where she co-founded the exhibition space 356 Mission. Her work is held by the Whitney, MoMA, MOCA Los Angeles and Tate, and she has since shown paintings in dialogue with Van Gogh at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles.