Laura Owens

Who Is Laura Owens?

Laura Owens is a Los Angeles-based painter whose career began in the early 1990s. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1992, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1994, and completed a Master of Fine Arts at the California Institute of the Arts in 1994. Her education gave her a strong foundation in painting, but her subsequent work deliberately questioned many of the conventions associated with the medium.

Owens emerged on the Los Angeles art scene in the mid-1990s, at a time when painting was often treated with critical suspicion. Rather than abandoning the medium, she expanded it. Her work combines the visual language of abstract painting with figurative elements, craft traditions, advertising imagery, cartoons, and digital technology. The result is a practice that resists easy classification and invites viewers to consider how images are made, circulated, and understood.

• Experimental painting: she blends abstraction, figuration, decoration, and digital imagery.
• Los Angeles base: she has been a significant figure in the city’s contemporary art scene since the 1990s.
• Major recognition: her work has been shown at the Whitney Museum, MoMA Los Angeles, Tate Modern, and other leading institutions.
• Expanded practice: beyond painting, she has created artists’ books and co-founded the exhibition space 356 Mission.

Owens is represented by Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Sadie Coles HQ in London, and Galerie Gisela Capitain in Cologne. Her international exhibition history and institutional recognition demonstrate that her work is not limited to one national art scene. Nevertheless, Los Angeles remains central to her identity as an artist, both as a place of production and as a context for her experimental approach to exhibition-making.

Laura Owens’s Painting Techniques

Laura Owens’s work is difficult to summarise because she deliberately combines techniques that many artists keep separate. Her paintings can include thick layers of Flashe paint, screen-printed images, digitally manipulated graphics, clay-coated paper, embroidery, and collage-like arrangements of found material. The Whitney Museum describes her interest in texture, unconventional subject matter, and the boundaries between gesture, surface, and layering.

Flashe paint is a water-based vinyl acrylic paint known for its matte, opaque finish. Owens has used it to create bold, flat areas of colour that contrast with more textured or illusionistic passages. In other works, she incorporates screen printing and digital printing, allowing photographic or graphic material to coexist with hand-painted marks. This mixture creates a visual tension between the handmade and the mechanical.

Her use of text is another defining feature. Words, numbers, diagrams, and fragments of language can appear directly on the canvas, becoming visual elements rather than simple explanations. This approach reflects a broader interest in how painting communicates: not only through image and colour, but also through typography, layout, and the viewer’s habit of reading.

Owens’s work often seems playful, but it is also conceptually serious. By mixing high-art references with popular imagery, she questions cultural hierarchies. By combining abstraction with figuration, she challenges the idea that a painting must choose one visual language. By using digital tools alongside hand-painting, she shows that contemporary art can absorb new technologies without abandoning traditional materials.

Laura Owens’s Major Exhibitions

Laura Owens’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally. A major milestone was her mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2017, which featured approximately 60 paintings made from the mid-1990s onwards. The exhibition travelled to the Dallas Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2018.

Earlier solo exhibitions include shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2003 and 2018, the Secession in Vienna in 2015, the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco in 2016, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 2019, and the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles in 2021. These exhibitions demonstrate the range of institutions that have engaged with her work, from contemporary art spaces to historic museums.

Her group-exhibition record is equally extensive. Public Art Fund lists appearances in exhibitions including Capturing the Moment at Tate Modern in 2023, Day for Night: New American Realism at the National Gallery of Ancient Art in Rome in 2024, and exhibitions in Milan and Metz in 2025. This history shows that Owens’s work is frequently placed in dialogue with both contemporary and historical art.

For UK audiences, Tate Modern’s inclusion of Owens in Capturing the Moment is particularly relevant. It placed her work within an international conversation about painting, photography, and contemporary image-making. Viewers encountering her work in a group exhibition may notice how differently it operates from traditional portrait or landscape painting: the canvas becomes a layered field of references rather than a single unified scene.

Laura Owens, 356 Mission and Los Angeles

Laura Owens’s influence extends beyond her own paintings. In 2013, she co-founded 356 Mission Road, a contemporary exhibition space in downtown Los Angeles, with Gavin Brown and Wendy Yao. The space became known for ambitious exhibitions, performances, and public programmes, reflecting Owens’s interest in the social and institutional conditions under which art is experienced.

356 Mission operated until 2018. During that period, it provided a platform for artists and projects outside the conventional commercial-gallery model. For Owens, the project was consistent with her artistic practice: both her paintings and her exhibition-making challenge assumptions about where art belongs, who it is for, and how audiences should encounter it.

Los Angeles has been central to Owens’s practice. The city’s art scene, light, architecture, entertainment industries, and history of experimental art all provide a broader context for her work. Her studio and exhibition space also reflected a Los Angeles model of artistic production: expansive, adaptable, and less bound by the traditional separation between studio, gallery, and public programme.

Her work has also been connected to wider debates about painting’s relevance. When Owens emerged, some critics questioned whether painting could still be innovative in an era dominated by photography, video, and digital media. Her response was not to defend painting defensively, but to make paintings that absorbed those media and traditions. That strategy has helped make her an important reference point for younger artists working across media.

How to Understand Laura Owens’s Art

Viewers approaching Laura Owens’s work for the first time should avoid looking for one fixed meaning. Her paintings often operate through accumulation: a figure, a pattern, a printed image, a phrase, and an abstract gesture may all occupy the same surface without resolving into a single narrative. That openness is part of the work’s appeal, but it can also make it feel unfamiliar.

A useful approach is to begin with materials. Ask what has been painted, printed, collaged, or digitally produced. Then consider scale: many of Owens’s works are large enough to surround the viewer, turning painting into an environment rather than a window onto a scene. Finally, notice references to art history, popular culture, craft, and everyday visual language. These references are not decorative extras; they are part of the work’s argument about how images circulate.

• Look closely: identify painted, printed, digital, and handmade elements before interpreting the whole work.
• Accept ambiguity: her paintings often combine competing styles rather than offering one clear story.
• Notice scale: large canvases can create immersive, architectural experiences.
• Consider context: art history, pop culture, craft, and digital media all inform her visual language.

Common misunderstandings include treating Owens’s work as merely decorative, dismissing its humour as unserious, or expecting a single symbolic explanation. Her paintings can be funny, beautiful, and intellectually demanding at the same time. The combination of playfulness and conceptual rigour is central to why her work has remained influential across several decades.

For collectors, students, and museum visitors, Laura Owens is best understood as an artist who expanded the possibilities of painting rather than abandoning them. Her work demonstrates that a painting can incorporate digital images, craft techniques, text, figuration, and abstraction while still being fundamentally concerned with surface, colour, composition, and the experience of looking.

Frequently Asked Questions

This Laura Owens guide helps Cardiff readers and international art audiences understand the techniques, exhibitions, and ideas behind one of contemporary painting’s most influential figures.