LAURA OWENS | UNTITLED

Los Angeles-based artist Laura Owens became well known during the late 1990s for her strikingly individualistic paintings in which references to modes of seeing and making, television and popular culture, the autobiographical and the art historical, collide in kitsch pastel shades and candy colors. Having graduated from CalArts in 1994, Owens swiftly achieved gallery representation and critical recognition; in 1996 significant examples of her work were added to three of the most prestigious museum collections in New York – the Guggenheim, Metropolitan Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art – and in 2003, at the age of only 33, she was granted a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Indeed, Owens is the youngest artist to have been awarded a survey show in the institution’s history.

The present work firmly belongs within Owens’ practice of the mid-2000s: that of fairy-tale subjects rendered in a whimsical, dreamlike nature. Owens’ employment of watercolor heightens the effect. A girl on a boat is accompanied by a dog on a raft as they encounter a mystical land in the distance, with birds fluttering overhead. In November 2017, a major retrospective of Owens’ career opened to great acclaim at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and today her status as one of the most important artistic voices of the twenty-first century is truly set in stone.