From 19 June to 31 October 2021 the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles presented an exceptional exhibition, bringing together works by Laura Owens and seven paintings Vincent van Gogh made in the last years of his life.

Laura Owens transformed the Fondation’s ground floor, designing a monumental, handmade wallpaper, creating a suspended universe between the premodern and the contemporary. While this space can evoke the patterned interiors that Van Gogh knew from his time in Arles, they also summon the world of scanners, Photoshop and digital printing. The wallpaper motifs are borrowed from the work of the English artist and designer Winifred How, who studied in London in the early twentieth century.

With every work she makes, Laura Owens asks new questions about painting today, about its relationship to materials, processes and traditions that have been seen to lie outside it. The complex wallpaper installation she created in Arles is also an environmental painting. Its realization required the use of many techniques, as well as the addition of hand-painted elements. Conceived to last only for the duration of the exhibition, however, this work will remain ephemeral. Through this book you can live, or relive, the immersive experience that transformed the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles during the year 2021.