For more than twenty years, Los Angeles–based artist Laura Owens has pioneered an innovative approach to painting that has made her one of the most influential artists of her generation. Her bold and experimental work challenges traditional assumptions about figuration and abstraction, as well as the relationships between avant-garde art, craft, pop culture, and technology.
This mid-career survey, the most comprehensive of Owens’s work to-date, will feature approximately 60 paintings from the mid-1990s until today. The exhibition will highlight her significant strides over the past few years, showing how the early work sets the stage for gripping new paintings and installations.
Owens emerged on the Los Angeles art scene during the mid-nineties, at a time when many in the critical establishment viewed painting with skepticism. Her early canvases upended the traditions of painterly abstraction by incorporating goofy personal allusions, doodling, and common craft materials. These works often demonstrated her keen interest in how paintings function in a given room and used illusionistic techniques to extend the plane of a wall or floor directly into the space of her pictures. More recently, she has charted a dramatic transformation in her work, marshaling all of her previous interests and talents within large-scale paintings that make virtuosic use of silkscreen, computer manipulation, digital printing, and material exploration.
Laura Owens is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The Los Angeles presentation is coordinated by Bennett Simpson, Senior Curator, with Rebecca Matalon, Assistant Curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Lead support is provided by The Aileen Getty Foundation.
Generous support is provided by Tsipi and Daniel Mani, Sadie Coles HQ, London, Visionary Women, and Christopher V. Walker.
Exhibitions at MOCA are supported by the MOCA Fund for Exhibitions with lead annual support provided by Sydney Holland, founder of the Sydney D. Holland Foundation. Generous funding is also provided by Dr. Alexander and Judith Angerman, Delta Air Lines, Earl and Shirley Greif Foundation, Nathalie Marciano and Julie Miyoshi, and Jonathan M. Segal through the Rhonda S. Zinner Foundation.
In-kind media support is provided by 
Free weekend admission to Laura Owens is made possible by Sadie Coles HQ, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Galerie Gisela Capitain, and Hauser & Wirth.
New York–based artist Zoe Leonard (b. 1961) is among the most critically acclaimed artists of her generation. Over the past three decades, she has produced work in photography and sculpture that has been celebrated for its lyrical observations of daily life coupled with a rigorous, questioning attention to the politics and conditions of image making and display.
Zoe Leonard: Survey is the first large-scale overview of the artist’s work in an American museum. The exhibition looks across Leonard’s career to highlight her engagement with a range of themes, including gender and sexuality, loss and mourning, migration, displacement, and the urban landscape. More than it focuses on any particular subject, however, Leonard’s work slowly and reflectively calibrates vision and form. Using repetition, subtle changes of perspective, and shifts of scale, Leonard draws viewers into an awareness of the meanings behind otherwise familiar images or objects. A counter-example to the speed and disposability of image culture today, Leonard’s photographs, sculptures, and installations ask the viewer to reengage with how we see.
Zoe Leonard: Survey is organized by Bennett Simpson, Senior Curator, and Rebecca Matalon, Assistant Curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Lead support is provided by The Aileen Getty Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Major support is provided by Hauser & Wirth, and MOCA Projects Council.
Additional support is provided by the Galerie Gisela Capitain, Pasadena Art Alliance, 2017 Drawings & Photography Committee, Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco, Galleria Raffaella Cortese, and Karyn Kohl.
Exhibitions at MOCA are supported by the MOCA Fund for Exhibitions with lead annual support provided by Sydney Holland, founder of the Sydney D. Holland Foundation. Generous funding is also provided by Judith and Alexander Angerman, Delta Air Lines, Earl and Shirley Greif Foundation, Nathalie Marciano and Julie Miyoshi, and Jonathan M. Segal through the Rhonda S. Zinner Foundation.
