Laura Owens (born 1970 in Euclid, Ohio) is an American painter who, in 2003, became the youngest artist ever given a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles — a marker of how quickly her work reshaped ideas about what a painting could hold.
She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design before moving to Los Angeles for graduate work at CalArts, and has remained based there for more than two decades. Owens works at large scale, folding together sources that don't obviously belong in the same picture: needlepoint and wallpaper patterns, comic-strip line work, screen-printed text, collaged and digitally printed elements, and direct quotations from earlier painting. The result treats abstraction and figuration, high reference and craft vernacular, as equally available material — often with a deadpan humor about painting's own conventions and history. Her prints and editions extend that same restlessness onto paper, frequently produced in small runs for magazines, benefit auctions, and independent presses rather than as scaled-down versions of her canvases.
In 2013, she co-founded 356 Mission, an exhibition and community space in Los Angeles run with Gavin Brown and Wendy Yao until its closure in 2019. Owens had a mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2017–18, and is represented by Sadie Coles HQ, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, and Galerie Gisela Capitain.
