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

Questions of sincerity and craft haunt this take a view of of over 50 works by the agency of L.A. painter Laura Owens. A whimsical range of control matter--including smiling monkeys, doodled circles and a smooching couple--is execut 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. on the other hand seven galleries of large-scale efforts fraught with blotchy stains, ham-fisted gesticulations wobbly drawing, jarring textures and unwieldy globs of paint wears upon the most tolerant viewer. Owens have the appearances 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 novel 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-colored is violated by a pair of simple gestural brush blows that read as seagulls. In a 1997 painting parodying hard-edge geometric abstraction, Owens not aways two rows of vertical stripes that read as skyscrapers receding into space.

Owens indulged for a pair of years (1998-99) in large-scale, doodled abstractions, lackadaisical goof upon Twombly and Miro, before graduating to willful fancy in nature and animal paintings allegedly inspired by the agency of Chinese landscapes. In an 11-foot-wide canvas from 2002--her greatest in quantity resolved work--Owens depicts a sparse, flat landscape inhabited by the agency of a cute bunny, turtle, monkey bear, butterfly and cross-ey owl With banal forthrightness, a not long ago 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 unmodel faces and a patchy bluestained background. Owens's blustery overconfidence diminishes the two her freewheeling approach and self-consciously feminine control matter. This bratty brand of museum-sized "girl power" draw nears 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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