When the show closed—with no prospect, Owens said, of ever being repeated—the supports were cut out. I saw the results hanging at her studio, each nine feet high by seven feet wide, and terrific: arbitrary fragments of the wallpaper which, owing to the formalizing power of rectangles, feel discretely composed. Cropped, the installation’s ambient energies become compressed dynamisms. The works’ derivation makes them highly original aesthetic objects. On the model of Duchampian readymades, perhaps call them “made-alreadies”: created by being revealed. In the studio, heaps of the surplus wallpaper, like outtakes on a cutting-room floor, awaited possible roles in works to come.

In a vertiginously hilly part of Echo Park, near Dodger Stadium, Owens shares a tidy two-story house, clinging to a steep slope, with her second husband, Sohrab Mohebbi—an Iranian-born writer and curator who works at Redcat, a CalArts-affiliated art center in downtown Los Angeles—and her two children, Nova and Henry (who is twelve), from her previous marriage, to the painter Edgar Bryan, who lives nearby. She told me by e-mail that when she moved to Los Angeles to attend CalArts, in 1992, she was put off by how “dry” a place it is, the climate and architecture “so jarring.” “But after two years I felt very differently. Felt easy and familiar.” Oak, deodar, citron, and pepper trees and capricious gardens crowd up to the stairs and patios around Owens’s house. A sleek building below contains a studio and room for guests.

I was invited for dinner one summer evening. Owens’s mother—who moved from Ohio to Los Angeles eight years ago, and, last year, into a house next door with her second husband, Richard Hendrickson, a retired small-city-newspaper reporter and editor—brought salad. Pasta and sauce materialized amid the comings and goings and breezy chat, in the open kitchen, of Owens and of friends from her capacious circle of artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers, and other creative Angelenos. (“I would be nowhere without them,” she told me.) Two or three times, the frenetic family dog, a rescue mutt named Molly, escaped the house and had to be recaptured. Downstairs, Henry and Nova took turns practicing the piano.

At twilight, we all took a walk—or a hike, what with the hills—a half mile or so to a park and back, in a sort of mood, at once energized and haphazard, that I now associate with Owens. In company, she is cordial and voluble—nice, in a word—but with what often seems a fraction of a mind that is occultly busy elsewhere. The first thing that you notice about her is her gaze, wide-eyed and fixed on you, as if you had dropped from the sky. It takes a moment to realize that you are not obliged to be commensurately interesting. She consumes so little social oxygen that people around her tend to get a bit high, laughing at anything. She submits to being interviewed as you might to being treated by a trusted dentist: it’s endurable and over with soon enough. I found myself repeatedly apologizing to her for the imposition. She seemed not to hear. She was answering questions.

Owens’s father died of complications following knee surgery this year, in July. He was a flamboyant attorney, who strutted around Norwalk in a Stetson. Her parents divorced when she was seventeen. She credits her father with having instilled in her a fervent liberalism, which has prompted her to engage in feminist causes and in campaigns for Democratic candidates, but which is only rarely and obliquely expressed in her art. Raised Catholic, she left the church in rebellion against its anti-abortion doctrine. I was startled when, in her car one day, as she drove us between gallery shows, her usual mildness gave way to flaming rage. We had seen a policeman hassle a young guy whose offense, it appeared, had been to cross a street so lackadaisically as to impede the cop’s car for a few seconds. “That is so like them!” she said of uniformed authority. She told me a maxim imparted to her by her father: “Never tell the police anything.”

But Owens adores rules, even, or perhaps especially, trivial ones. In an interview with one of her close friends, the novelist Rachel Kushner, in 2003, she described a summer job that she had had when she was seventeen: checking trucks hauling trash and garbage into a landfill. She recalled, “I had the power to say, in a logical and non-emotional way, ‘You can’t deliver that without a tarp over it.’ People would get frustrated and respond, ‘What do you mean? You want me to just pull out of here, put a tarp on, and then come right back?’ I would look at them and say, ‘Yes, that’s what you’ll have to do if you want to dump your trash—it’s the law.’ It had its appeal.” An anarchic stickler: that’s Owens.

Owens can be certain that her Echo Park house was built in 1942, because a renovation, in 2013, discovered paper stereotype plates (used to cast lead cylinders for printing) of the Los Angeles Times from that year. They had been employed as flashing beneath the shingled exterior. Transferred to silk screens in a complex procedure involving monoprint molds, the antique reports of distant war and of local events, and the commercial and classified ads, now do double duty as text and texture in some of Owens’s paintings. The source and content of the plates both do and don’t matter to her, it seems. What counts is their specificity, as things distinct from other things that are like them. “All art now is collage,” she said to me, with reference not just to cutting and pasting but to the incorporation of methods and images with prior uses. “Heterogeneous in form,” she explained. “Against the different paradigm of the Gestalt object, like a Jackson Pollock painting—a single image that jolts you. Now art is all about being constructed out of relationships between parts.”





1 / 12 Chevron Chevron Courtesy the artist; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, Rome; Sadie Coles HQ, London; and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne “Untitled,” by Laura Owens, from 1987.

“Say very little,” Owens told herself in her early-nineties journal. And, in a way, she maintains that policy, even when going on at length about her art. Her public talks, delivered with an air of professional duty, tend to be remarkably boring. But get her on the subject of another artist and she brightens. She and I discussed by e-mail the country-music paragon Patsy Cline. I commented on Cline’s way with the 1952 chestnut “You Belong to Me,” rather a high-class number for a country girl: “Fly the ocean in a silver plane . . . Just remember till you’re home again / You belong to me.” Cline sings it with wondering respect for its decorum, such that the song is no longer about a fancy girl remonstrating with her fancy guy, but about Cline’s imagining of what it’s like to be such a girl, with such a guy. Owens commented, “She has a way of singing that feels like she is so relaxed and confident, that what she says, it could be anything and I’d believe she meant it but on an even deeper level than the words could convey.” That’s the very tenor of the borrowed images that Owens paints: not appropriations but vicarious embodiments.

In 2003, Owens became the youngest artist ever to be given a retrospective at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art. By that time, she had begun to gravitate from abstraction toward fanciful figurative imagery, loosely brushed. “I decided I needed to bring in the human figure, because it was something that I was leaving out, and to break the habit of working for sites. To push myself.” In 2006, she returned to Ohio for a year. She helped her mother buy a new house with a four-car garage, which became her studio, and painted her baby Henry, Edenic landscapes, flowers, and wacky animals, such as the horse that she showed to the schoolchildren. The works often suggest to me the state of mind of a new mother too tired to think while too dedicated not to work. Owens confirmed the impression in an e-mail: “Being a mom and still making art involves absolutely opposite parts of your brain. One is really selfish and the other is absolutely selfless.” The domestic turn in Owens’s life and subject matter dismayed friends when she returned to L.A. “It was uncool. I was told by many people, ‘Well, that’s the end of your art career.’ ” How did that make her feel? “Angered,” she said. I think that the gawky pictures were a way for Owens to reconnect with the soul of the girl who had tried to get just right the vision of a figure in jail and a sassy dog. She wasn’t going to be embarrassed about it.