from 19 June to 31 October 2021

Opening next weekend, the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles will present an exhibition bringing together new works by the American artist Laura Owens with seven paintings by Van Gogh, most made in and around Arles.

Van Gogh hardly needs an introduction but here’s what the gallery writes about Laura Owens:

“Owens is one of the most celebrated American artists working today. For twenty-five years she has asked probing questions about the parameters of painting. She has expanded painting’s possibilities by breaking through the boundaries between painting and other fields of visual and material culture such as embroidery, design, children’s illustrations and digital drawing. In this exhibition, Owens’s works will host and respond to Van Gogh’s paintings. Owens spent most of 2020 living in and around Arles, and her new work comes out of meticulous research into the history of the city and of Van Gogh’s connections here”.

The seven Van Gogh paintings to be shown at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles include loans from museums with which Owens has a deep connection. Hospital at Saint-Rémy (1889) comes from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the city where she lives when not in Arles. Other key loans include The Fields, painted in Auvers-sur-Oise shortly before Van Gogh died.

“Laura Owens has often addressed the spaces where she has exhibited. For this exhibition she has created a vast painting, in the form of a unique hand-painted and silkscreened wallpaper installation, which will cover the entire walls of the rooms where the Van Gogh works will be exhibited.

Van Gogh’s interest in setting up an artists’ community in Arles is echoed in Owens’s career-long efforts to create spaces for other artists to exhibit. In collaboration with Maja Hoffmann and LUMA Arles, Laura Owens has also started a parallel project in Arles. She has turned an apartment building, located in the town centre, into a studio and living quarters for artists who will spend short residencies there; this space will slowly be filled with their, and her art.”

Details: http://www.fondation-vincentvangogh-arles.org/en/expositions/laura-owens-vincent-van-gogh/

		Vincent van Gogh, Hospital at Saint-Rémy, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, October 1889 Oil on canvas, 92.2 × 73.4 cm (36.3 × 28.9 in) Gift of the Armand Hammer Foundation Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles © The Armand Hammer Collection