Laura Owen

Laura Owen is an American painter based in Los Angeles whose work is celebrated for its playful, idiosyncratic approach to abstraction and figuration. Her canvases often blend domestic imagery, organic forms, and gestural mark-making into densely layered compositions that feel simultaneously intimate and expansive. Owen's practice draws on a wide range of influences including craft traditions, folk art, and modernist painting, weaving these references into works that resist easy categorization. Her use of color is particularly distinctive, favoring soft, slightly off-key palettes that lend her paintings a dreamy, otherworldly quality. Owen has exhibited widely both in the United States and internationally, with solo exhibitions at venues including Sadie Coles HQ in London and Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago. Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions exploring the renewed interest in painting, pattern, and decorative art that gained prominence in contemporary discourse in the 2000s and 2010s. She has been associated with a generation of Los Angeles painters who brought renewed conceptual depth to figuration and surface, and her work is held in notable private and institutional collections. Owen has also been recognized for her collaborative spirit and her engagement with the broader Los Angeles art community. Thematically, Owen's paintings often center on scenes of domestic life, leisure, and the female experience, rendered with a light touch that belies their underlying complexity. Recurring motifs include plants, animals, interiors, and abstracted human figures, all embedded within compositions that reward close looking. Her willingness to embrace the decorative and the quotidian as valid subjects for serious painting has been noted by critics as a significant contribution to contemporary American art. Owen has also taught at the California Institute of the Arts, where she has influenced younger generations of painters.