Untitled, 2013

Scott Rothkopf: One of the things I love about this painting from 2013 is the way that Owens is really pushing her thinking about abstract painting, at the same time as she's making us feel sensations of curiosity, wonder, joy, exuberance. On the abstract side, you see this incredibly complex approach to the surface, the way that she's mixing together silk screens with painting on top of the canvas, with collage elements. In this case, actual bicycle wheels that push into our space. She thought so much about these bicycle wheels and their color, that she even custom painted some of the rims, and picked the tires very carefully so that they would be actual elements in terms of the pallet of the work.

The painting sort of invites us to reach out and touch it, to spin the wheels, and although we're not able to do that in the context of the museum, even this imaginative suggestion opens the possibility of how people might engage with work, both with their eyes, or with their hands, or perhaps in this case a bridge that they would connect with their minds. That sense of the way that a painting or a work of art is an invitation to play, to think, to look, and to experience is really one of the qualities of her work that she's always pushing to the fore.