Laura Owens (1970, USA) is a painter who easily moves from landscape to abstraction with energetic brush strokes, collage, fanciful child-like doodles or sophisticated, fine-line drawings. With each new painting, Owens sets out to stretch her own limits by varying scale of her work and incorporating an eclectic range of visual references, including textiles, her own photography, Asian landscape paintings, and popular culture. Her first solo exhibition in 1996 was hosted by Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York. Nine years later in 2003, the Milwaukee Art Museum's Vogel/Helfaer Contemporary Galleries presented her first major monographic survey. Owens’ work has been widely written about exhibited including at the Carnegie Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Walker Art Center; the Kunsthalle Basel; and the Inverleith House, Edinburgh; and Studio Guenzani, Milan. Owens studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and earned her master of arts from the California Institute of the Arts. Laura Owens was born in Euclid, Ohio and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

In the spring of 2000, Laura Owens spent a month at the Gardner. She divided her time between reading in the apartment and painting daily in a studio at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She devoted a lot of time to studying the museum’s collection of Japanese screens as well as several examples of cut velvet fabrics, embroideries, and a 19th century, Japanese silk Kimono with a painting of a badger looking at the moon. Owens incorporated this scene into a large painting that was later shown in her 2001 exhibition Laura Owens: New Work. Other imagery from the collection found its way into the ten works on view in the gallery including, an embroidered panel with the double-headed eagle of the Holy Roman Empire and crown of the Hapsburg family in the Raphael Room, and the pen and ink drawing, Christ Embracing John the Baptist, ca. 1503-04 by Filippino Lippi, in the Short Gallery. Owens also installed a pair of silk Chinese chair covers embroidered with elephants and birds in silk yarns in a space adjacent to the gallery. In addition, Owens created an artist book that included original illustrations and texts by Pieranna Cavalchini, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Gardner, Russell Ferguson, who at the time was Associate Curator at Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and Jennifer Gross, Curator of European and Contemporary Art at the Yale University Art Gallery.

Laura Owens: New Work