In an era when many younger artists struggle with issues of heroism and the weight of achievements past, Los Angeles-based painter Laura Owens seems to have opened her umbrella and floated over the art historical baggage collecting on the tarmac. Owens borrows where she pleases—from modernist movements past such as Color Field, Op Art, and Pattern and Decoration, from European painters like Rousseau and Toulouse-Lautrec, from anonymous mediums such as textile and embroidery. Art historical references and any sort of imagery, high or low, that Owens feels like incorporating are co-opted with finesse and a clear-eyed sense of no-fuss entitlement, in service to a larger goal: her own precise vision for what makes a painting pleasurable to behold. Despite this precision she is highly versatile, and her paintings vary from abstraction to figuration to kooky nature landscapes in which the animals cohabitate in a harmony that limns the absurd (a monkey reaches out playfully to a butterfly, an owl stakes out a fragment of moonlit night amidst a backdrop of blue sky and puffy clouds). Owens’s flowers—magnificently tropical and poisonous-looking, or humble and wan—are unconstrained by any sort of botanical accuracy. She balances impressive paint-handling with a dose of purposely humble de-skilling. Or she can opt for sheer virtuoso, such as in her deft figurative depiction of a romantic embrace (Untitled, 2003), which has the delicate luster of a silent movie still, as if the kissing couple were floating in an iridescent soap bubble.

Owens has had meteoric success since graduating from CalArts in the mid-nineties, and this spring her solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art opened in Los Angeles—a mid-career survey that seems all the more impressive for the fact that the artist is only thirty-two years old. One criticism that has been leveled at Owens is that there is too much of a feel-good quality in the work, which would be a problem if her paintings were maudlin or shallow or overly cute, but they are not. Regardless, a new canvas in her Moca show reveals a darker side: a large-scale desert scene of scrubby trees and rolling hills, with machete-wielding men in ten-gallon hats and pentagram-adorned pullovers roaming the landscape on horseback. Above, an oppressive sky radiates chilly hues of putty and greenish-gray. When I first saw this painting, it brought to mind Cormac McCarthy’s dark tale of the Western frontier, Blood Meridian, despite the playfulness in the rendering of Owens’s desertscape—a contrast that made the reference all the more eerie. Owens, who had been up for three days finishing it, was standing next to me. “The guys in the pentagram shirts are Bush and his pals,” she explained. I pointed...