LAURA OWENS'S WORK

A NEW self-awareness entered painting toward the end of the 20th century, which initiated an irreverent, sometimes but not always loving interrogation of the medium.

Artists of several generations and many stripes pushed this approach forward, ransacking painting's history and conventions, examining it as both a commodity and an object in space, toying with its taboos and its pursuit of signature style.

One of the most innovative explorers of this vanguard has been Laura Owens, the subject of a jubilant, chameleonic midcareer survey,  just months ago on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through Feb. 4.

Ms. Owens loves paintings but she approaches it with a rare combination of sincerity and irony.

Distinguished by a sly, comedic beauty, her work has a playful, knowing almost Rococo lightness of being in which pleasure, humor, intelligence and  seductive sense of usually high color mingle freely.

Her polymorphous ways with motifs and material recalls the  German maverick Sigmar Polke; her intense forward propulsion is not unlike Frank Stells's

Ms. Owens is unafraid of heavy oinks or frilly brushwork that play feminine, as well as the feminist, against the macho bravura typical of the medium.

Nor is she shy about the allure of the low : greeting cards, cartoons and children's book illustrations; embroidery, sequins and felt applique, elaborate uses of digitalization and printing.

Her work riffs on past styles; the tensions between pictorial and actual space; the eternal conflict of abstraction and image; the act of looking, including peripheral vision. Some paintings here even make cameos in neighboring paintings.

The World Students Society thanks author, art-critic and researcher Roberta Smith.