Since first coming into prominence in the ’90s and early 2000s, Laura Owens’s work has offered a set of wholly new and critical ideas about painting. Propelled by the conviction that her work should prompt difficult questions about the nature of painting, Owens distinguishes her work by refusing to commit to one artistic identity.

From a consideration of the Owens’s varied use of line (Suzanne Hudson), the artist’s brilliant redefinition of painterly gesture (Walead Beshty), or her mining of visual contradictions (Trinie Dalton), Owens’s formal and conceptual inventiveness is reviewed from multiple perspectives. Owens’s use of language—as a graphic element, as words to be read, or more broadly as a system of signification that she explores and ultimately upends—is attended to by Rachel Kushner and Linda Norden. Mark Godfrey traces the recent developments in the scope of Owens’s work from 2012 to now. And wonderfully pithy texts by Gavin Brown and Wendy Yao (as well as a section of Norden’s essay) bookend the volume with personally inflected musings on the artist’s gallery/studio space in Los Angeles, 356 S. Mission Road.   

LAURA OWENS surveys the many facets of the artist’s work that have been responsible for her influential career, and it is the first title to critically assess the Owens’s most recent work.