Laura Owens at L.A. MOCA - Museum of Contemporary Art

Questions of sincerity and craft haunt this survey of over 50 works by L.A. painter Laura Owens. A whimsical range of subject matter--including smiling monkeys, doodled circles and a smooching couple--is executed with slapdash bravado and a shortage of skillful technique. Owens has been praised for a freewheeling approach to paint application that includes staining, layering and squeezing from the tube. But seven galleries of large-scale efforts fraught with blotchy stains, ham-fisted gestures, wobbly drawing, jarring textures and clumsy globs of paint wears on the most tolerant viewer. Owens seems to flaunt her ineptitude, presumably assuming it translates as charm.

Although the exhibition is hung without regard to chronology, a clear

division can be made between early works that reveal a jokey, skeptical attitude toward painting and more recent ones that celebrate a fanciful, hyper-feminine idea of romantic nature. An untitled painting from 1996 is a juvenile spoof of abstract painting in which a flat, 10-foot expanse of sky-blue is violated by a couple of simple gestural brush strokes that read as seagulls. In a 1997 painting parodying hard-edge geometric abstraction, Owens presents two rows of vertical stripes that read as skyscrapers receding into space.

Owens indulged for a couple of years (1998-99) in large-scale, doodled abstractions, lackadaisical goofs on Twombly and Miro, before graduating to willful fancy in nature and animal paintings allegedly inspired by Chinese landscapes. In an 11-foot-wide canvas from 2002--her most resolved work--Owens depicts a sparse, flat landscape inhabited by a cute bunny, turtle, monkey, bear, butterfly and cross-eyed owl. With banal forthrightness, a recently completed triptych presents a Pippi Longstocking figure singing in the sunshine, Iollygagging in fall foliage and making a snow angel.

Paintings that attempt more detailed renderings of figures are perhaps Owens's weakest. In an untitled work from 2000, She appropriates the sleeping figures from Toulouse-Lautrec's gorgeous small oil Le Lit, eliminating the French painter's refined draftsmanship and coloration in favor of unmodeled faces and a patchy bluestained background. Owens's blustery overconfidence diminishes both her freewheeling approach and self-consciously feminine subject matter. This bratty brand of museum-sized "girl power" comes across as arrogant and, paradoxically, macho. Florine Stettheimer would be appalled. [The exhibition travels to the Aspen Art Museum (Aug. 2-Sept. 28), the Milwaukee Art Museum (Oct. 18, 2003-Jan. 18, 2004) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (Mar. 4-May 9, 2004).]

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