American Laura Owens is among a select group of artists credited with the rebirth of painting. She has developed a style all her own, moving from landscape to abstraction with energetic thick brushstrokes, fanciful childlike doodles, or sophisticated fine line drawings. "Each painting can act as a question," she says, and, demonstrating a wide and imaginative range, she's constantly experimenting and changing her work. "Ultimately, you want to make the painting that you want to be with, not one that is constantly telling you everything it knows. Who wants to be with something or someone like that? It's more fun to be with someone who is willing to go out on a limb." This book is being designed by Owens herself to accompany an exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and will include, along with paintings from the show, new drawings made exclusively for the publication, as well as several textile works from the museum's collection that inspired her while she served as artist-in-residence in the Spring of 2000. Laura Owens was born in Ohio in 1970. Since her first solo exhibitions in the mid-1990s at Gavin Brown's Enterprise in New York and the Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Santa Monica, she has exhibited widely, and in 2001 is having her first solo museum exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. She has participated in many major group shows over the past several years, and is represented in public collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and others. "Laura Owens enables the viewer to see and feel more and that's important work." --Jennifer Gross, Yale University Musuem "Laura Owens' work stands apart-she's given new resonance to the meaning of the word 'painting.'" --Pieranna Cavalchini, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Edited by Pieranna Cavalchini. Essays by Jennifer Gross, Anne Hawley, and Russell Ferguson. 28 color and 28 b&w images 6.75 x 9.5 inches