Laura Owens was born in 1970 in Euclid, Ohio. She has had major exhibitions at museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, MOCA in Los Angeles, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and, in 2021, the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles, where she adorned the walls on which van Gogh’s paintings were hung with trompe l’oeil wallpaper featuring stickers of the French collectible figurines known as Les Babies. Since 1990, when she was a junior at RISD and incorporating stickers and illustrations from children’s books and gift cards into her abstract paintings, she has countered what she sees as a beleaguered self-seriousness long celebrated in painting, often by attempting to capture the pleasure she has found in ephemera, design, decoration, craft, and particular art books. In the watercolors and drawings in Influences, which Owens made on paper the size of the Review’s pages, she revisits some of the experiences that have shaped her own work. These include, in the order of the spreads, embroidering alongside her grandmother while the two sat on the sofa; discovering the pop-up books of the Italian designer Bruno Munari; poring over two folders of work by female art students at the turn of the century, which she bought at an antiquarian art fair in 2020; picking up a library book, in 2007 or 2008, of high-quality reproductions of Matisse, published in the forties; and being dropped off at the local library in Norwalk, Ohio, when she was five, to explore the children’s books there by herself.

All images courtesy of Laura Owens.