![]() ![]() ![]() Safely enclosed by their elaborately gilded frames, Van Gogh’s paintings seem a little prim, a little stiff: just one more detail to draw the eye in Owens’s glorious all-over composition. ![]() That they are lost to art history while the Dutchman looms so large is an object lesson in the vagaries of fame (and a reminder that Van Gogh was never the naïf outsider so often portrayed). The wallpaper patterns are drawn from early 20th-century designs by a little-known British designer, Winifred How, and an unknown French artist. (One room seems to have been covered with googl y-eyed stickers from a child’s activity book in another, a facsimile of a handwritten note from Owens to a friend appears to have been pinned to the wall.) ![]() On the exhibition’s first floor, seven Van Gogh paintings, on loan from various international institutions, are hung against a visually overwhelming floor-to-ceiling wallpaper, dense with graphic motifs, luminous colour and trompe l’oeil detail. How do you solve a problem like Van Gogh? As a contemporary artist, can you make a show in an institution which bears that most familiar of names without gilding his myth? In Arles, Laura Owens's delicious, brilliant response has been to smother him. ![]()
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