Owen Land
°1944 - ✝2011 , USA.
Solo Exhibitions
| 2012 | Owen Land, Essex Street, New York, USA |
| 2009 | How can you believe anything he says, Kunstwerke, Berlin, Germany Dialogues, Office Baroque Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium Owen Land: Dialogues, Kunsthalle Bern at Liste, Basel, Switzerland Owen Land, Kusthalle Bern, Bern, Switzerland |
| 2008 | Owen Land Logical Facades, Office Baroque Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium |
Selected Group Exhibitions
| 2010 | The Way it Wasn't, Celebrating ten years of castillo/corrales, (curated by Castillo/Corrales), Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, USA The Unpardonable Sin, Castillo/Corrales, Paris, France Curated by - Martin Arnold, Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna, Austria The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age, 17th Sydney Biennial, Sydney, Australia |
| 2009 | Owen Land & Hannah Sawtell, Vilma Gold, London, UK Evanston Art Center, Chicago, USA |
| 2008 | Artists of the Gallery, Office Baroque Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium |
| 2007 | On the Marriage Broker Joke, Office Baroque Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium |
| 2006 | 7th Werkleitz Biennale, Halle, Germany |
| 1972 | Documenta 5, Documenta, Kassel, Germany |
Selected Press
| 2011 | Heidi Phillips, 'Owen Land/George Landow', Screen Slate, December 2011 P. Adams Sitney, 'Owen Land', Artforum, November, p.63-66 |
| 2009 | Paul Young and Paul Duncan, Art Cinema, (cat.), Taschen, p.187 Rainer Bellenbaum, 'Entering into Dialogue, About Owen Land in the Kunsthalle Bern' (translation: Julian Reidy), Texte zur Kunst, September Indra Devriendt, 'Owen Land, Dialogues', Hart, May Stefanie Christ, 'Owen Land verführt zum Film'Berner Zeitung, April 3 Alice Henkes, 'Verwirrende Ansichtssachen', Der Bund, 3 April Philippe Pirotte,'Dialogues, Owen Land', e-flux, April 2 Anonymous, 'Kabbala trifft Avantgarde', Derstandard.at, April 1 |
| 2008 | Scott Foundas, 'Avant-gardist Owen Land Comes Out of the Shadows', LA Weekly.com, June Chris Sharp, 'Owen Land', Frieze Magazine, April |
Filmography
| 2009 | Dialogues |
| 1999 | Undesirables |
| 1984 | The Box Theory (video) |
| 1983 | Noli Me Tangere / Don't Touch Me (video) |
| 1977 – | 79 On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed? |
| 1978 | Diploteratology |
| 1976 | New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops |
| 1975 | Wide Angle Saxon No Sir, Orison! |
| 1974 | A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour Commissioned by Christian World Liberation Front of Berkeley California |
| 1973 | Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present |
| 1972 | What’s Wrong With This Picture 2 |
| 1971 | What’s Wrong With This Picture 1 |
| 1970 | Remedial Reading Comprehension |
| 1969 | Institutional Quality Baroque Slippages |
| 1968 | The Film that Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter |
| 1967 | Bardo Follies |
| 1965 – | 66 Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, etc. |
| 1965 | This Film will be Interrupted after 11 Minutes by a Commercial Adjacent Yes, But Simultaneous? The Skin |
| 1964 | Not a Case of Lateral Displacement |
| 1963 – | 64 Fleming Faloon |
| 1963 | Fleming Faloon Screening Richard Kraft at the Playboy Club |
| 1962 | Are Era |
| 1961 | A Stringent Prediction at the Early Hermaphroditic Stage Faulty Pronoun Reference, Comparison and Punctuation of the Restrictive or Non-Restrictive Element Two Pieces for the Precarious Life |
About Owen Land
Owen was born and grew up in the suburbs of New Haven, Connecticut. He spent his teenage years hanging around Yale University. As a young child,he was always drawing pictures and was given the role of class artist, drawing holiday pictures on the blackboard. At the age of sixteen he saw a Yale production of Ionesco's The Bald soprano, and he decided to become a playwright. He soon saw Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Krapp's Last Tape, and was even more determined to write plays. As high school graduation approached, he was having difficulty deciding whether to become a writer of plays or a painter in the manner of De Kooning.His parents discouraged his artistic interests, urging him to become a lawyer, a career he had no interest in.He decided to enroll in an art college, and also took some academic courses in ancient Greek language and literature. He can still write in the Greek alphabet, a useless ability. He studied drawing,painting,and sculpture for about ten years, not consecutively. He was also experimenting with film-making at this time,like many painters and sculptors in the early 1960s ,including Oldenburg, Whitman, and Warhol. He also became a serious student of the classical guitar with several private teachers. Around 1966 his films were regularly mentioned in the Movie Journal columns of Jonas Mekas,which brought Land's films to the attention of an intenational audience. By 1969 Land was concentrating on sculpture and films,and produced Diploteratology, the first of his films he considers an artistic success. In 1970 he accepted a teaching position on the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where many of his films were then made with students in film production classes. He founded the Experimental Theatre Workshop at The Art Institute of Chicago, and wrote and directed several musical theatre pieces, with original songs and music, including Mechanical Sensuality and Schwimmen mit Wimmen. Retrospectives of Owen Land's films have been held at the Edinburgh Film Festival in Scotland, The American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria New York, The Rotterdam International Film Festival in the Netherlands, The Tate Gallery in London, and The Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2004 he featured in the retrospective exhibition Behind the facts. Interfunktionen 1968-1975, in the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain, travelling to the Fundação Serralves, Porto, Portugal and the Fridericianum Kassel, Germany. In 2009 the Kunsthalle Bern featured the first institutional solo exhibition of Owen Land's works.