Laura Owens

Laura Owens is one of the hottest American artists these days, with a huge "mid career survey" at the Whitney this winter that has been praised by the New Yorker, the Times, etc.

Owens was born in Norwalk, Ohio in 1970, where she dreamed from a very young age of being a great artist with paintings in museums, attended the Rhode Island School of Design, and is now based in Los Angeles. Here recent shows have looked like these two pictures, with lots of big, bold, abstract or semi-abstract works.

And some mysterious patterns; these are from a set displayed together as Ten Paintings.

But Owens used to do very different sorts of work: whimsical, child-friendly, like illustrations for avant-garde fairy tales.

Fantastic animals abound.

And before that, back in the early 1990s, she did minimalist stuff like this.

It's a remarkable variety for one person.

You can see her career laid out in thumbnails on her web site, with more than two hundred works spanning 1991 to 2016.

Great fun, I think.

And the artist herself in her studio.