Untitled (2004) Laura Owens is a young artist, born in 1970, who (as Holland Cotter wrote in the New York Times) “has a reputation as an influential artist, a role model for other, even younger American artists interested in painting.” In 1992 she received a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she had a rigorous training in drawing that included copying master works. She graduated in 1994 with an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts, and lives and works in Los Angeles.
Untitled: Installation view, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Owens makes very large paintings of subjects that, generally speaking, are enjoyable and engaging for her audience. Sometimes they are painted for particular places. An example is a large landscape of rolling hills painted for the Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2000.
Untitled, 1999: Installation view, Sadie Coles HQ, London. Sometimes Owens’s paintings are in parts, with the intention that space will be left between them. Two large paintings of monkeys exhibited in London in 1999 are an example. The monkey paintings include large areas of unpainted canvas, and Owens’s work in general has an openness or airiness about it, even though most of her paintings, like the one she exhibited in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, are filled with an abundance of animals, plants, and (in the Whitney painting) even ships at sea.
Untitled, 1998 Often bits of thick paint contrast with thin washes of color. In a 1998 painting of bees, inspired by crewel work, the bees are made of paint carefully squeezed from the tube in stripes.
Untitled, 2002-03 Although Owen’s paintings at a glance seem casually made, further inspection finds them layered and complex. She develops a space within them that is the hallmark of her work: a very deep rolling space that pulls the viewer from point to point with a strong physicality. Owens has said that she approaches her paintings in “a matter-of-fact way in order to take some of the preciousness or exclusiveness out of the history of the practice.” She is part of the post-conceptual-art generation that has learned about space from installation art and is comfortable using images from many sources—Owens is especially partial to historic examples of needlework. Her paintings are not ironic. They are not filled with angst. She leaves out the big theories of art in favor of pleasure and fantasy.
—Kathan Brown