Laura Owens

Los Angeles-based artist Laura Owens (b. 1970) is one of the most highly regarded young painters working today. She is part of an international movement of emerging painters who investigate the formal issues of the medium through a highly personal blend of abstract and representational imagery. Her work incorporates an eclectic range of visual references, including English embroidery, Chinese and Japanese landscape painting, European and American modernism, and her own photography. Her unique style moves from landscape to abstraction with energetic, thick brushstrokes, fanciful childlike doodles, whimsical collage and sophisticated fine line drawings.

This exhibition, her most significant presentation to date, features approximately 20 paintings and several drawings, including a group of new large-scale works created especially for this presentation. The exhibition is accompanied by a major catalogue, with essays by exhibition curator Paul Schimmel and art historian Thomas Lawson.

Owens’s work has been included in the most important surveys of new painting, including Examining Pictures (Whitechapel Art Gallery, London and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1999), Painting at the End of the World (Walker Art Center, 2001), Painting on the Move (Kunstmuseum, Kunsthalle, and Museum für Gegenwartkunst, Basel, 2002), as well as the 1999–2000 Carnegie International and Drawing Now: Eight Propositions (The Museum of Modern Art, 2002–2003).