LOS ANGELES ARTIST Laura Owens might not be a household name along the lines of a Jean-Michel Basquiat (or even a Banksy), but many in the art world are betting that will soon change. Born in Euclid, Ohio, Owens attended college at the Rhode Island School of Design and then matriculated to the California Institute of the Arts, where she earned a master’s degree.
Her kooky paintings first found their footing during the late nineties, when the art world was again falling in love with painting—thanks to a new generation of figurative painters like John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage. Today, Owens shows with some of the most esteemed galleries in the world—Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Sadie Coles HQ, and Galerie Gisela Capitain—and last fall, she opened a mid-career survey of her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
Owens has managed to win the hearts of collectors and museum curators alike, an impressive feat
for an artist who has covered so many different subjects and styles. Her survey exhibition spans nearly a quarter-century of joyful art-historical allusions as viewed through the lens of American kitsch, craft, and applied arts. Despite the rollicking good time she’s been having in her practice, the conceptual underpinnings of her art are evident in this tightly composed show.
“Owens’ art bridges the modes of conceptualism that dominated her training at CalArts and the current
appetite in the market for painting,” says Katherine Brodbeck, assistant curator of contemporary art at the Dallas Museum of Art, where Owens’ show will travel after its run at the Whitney. “[Her] work is highly sensitive to the sites in which it is exhibited, which could be seen as an inheritance from the institutional critique that artist and CalArts professor Michael Asher pioneered, but it is also undeniably painting. As a museum curator, one of my favorite things about Laura Owens’ paintings is that they operate on so many levels.”
The show makes a point to highlight Owens’ intellectual rigor with re-creations of some of her past exhibitions, where artworks are dependent upon the placement of related artworks, objects, and architectural eccentricities. It stands as ample proof of how this unique artist has viewed her practice as installation art all along.
“Owens’ work illuminates her own personal sense of the world,” says art consultant Todd Levin, director of Levin Art Group, who has been following Owens’ career since its infancy. “For the artist, this sense is immense and inexorable… [Her] artworks are about the enlargement of life, without pretense, beyond a desire for simplistic definitions. The inherent interest in her artworks is not in their meaning, but in that they illustrate the realization of her individual reality.”
It’s this unique—and charming—view of the world around her that brings Owens’ work so many accolades. Museums want to show the art of Laura Owens because it truly connects with everybody, from art historians to weekend macramé knotters and model-train builders.
Laura Owens will be on view through July 29, at the Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 North Harwood Street. dma.org