Laura Owens

(American, born 1970)

Laura Owens is an influential contemporary American painter. Known for her large-scale mixed media paintings, she incorporates a mix of art historical and cultural references in a wry yet sincere manner. Referencing anything from cartoon characters to an Henri Matisse painting, her work is consistently more concerned about making an interesting painting than fitting into a niche. Like her contemporary Charline von Heyl, Owens plays with the scope and versatility of her style, creating more aesthetic questions than answers. “I feel no shame about having paintings be as grandiose and ridiculous as possible,” she has declared. Born in 1970 in Euclid, OH, Owens studied at the Rhode Island School of Design before receiving her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. After emerging onto the art scene in the late 1990s, she became the youngest artist ever to receive a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. She has exhibited with Gavin Brown Enterprise in New York, and her works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the National Gallery in Washington D.C. among others. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.