Laura Owens, an American painter, gallery owner and tutor, was born in 1970 in Ohio. She first appeared in the early 1990s in Los Angeles art scene. She is better known for her large-scale paintings that combine many historical references and are executed in different painting techniques. In 2013, she transformed her studio into an exhibition space, 356 Mission, in collaboration with art dealer Gavin Brown and Wendy Yao. She studied painting at Rhode Island School of Design, where she graduated in 1992, while in 1994 she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and received a Master’s degree from the California Institute of the Arts.
Laura Owens paintings are versatile. She has incorporated very different styles in her work – from a crisp abstraction and gloomy landscapes to the vernacular style and Japonisme. Her paintings show an artist in full possession of their means, providing a living and organic materiality to the traditional landscape. And while the viewer easily falls into the ‘airy atmosphere’ of Owen’s paintings, they we are constantly reminded of the fact that the image is built, one stroke of paint after another.
Laura Owens’ works are accessible in many art collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMa, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim.
