Owens, who is based in Los Angeles, has been making paintings since the early 1990s, but her work never fit neatly with the various movements that went in and out of vogue. “It didn’t look like art that was being made at the time,” says Westreich. “It’s a very original practice.”

But as the years went on and her aesthetic shifted somewhat, her paintings expanded in scale, maturity, and visual flair, culminating, arguably, in a 2012 show at Sadie Coles gallery in London, where her new body of work—including the one that just sold at Sotheby’s—ushered in a new level of collector interest. “The show at Sadie Coles broke her out of her shell,” says Schiff.

A New Level of Prestige

A lot of artists are supported by rich collectors, of course, and sold out shows or single, extraordinary auction results are by no means a guarantee that similarly robust sales will follow.

Yet there are multiple signs, including the well-received Whitney retrospective, that Owens’s work has reached a new level of prestige, price, and recognition.

Currently, Owens’s works on canvas sell from about $75,000 for a small painting to about $450,000 for a giant one. Works in between, ranging from around 60 inches to 84 inches high, cost in the range of $250,000 to $350,000, dealers and collectors say.

While the largest of those works are more difficult to sell—not only because of their cost, but because most people don’t have a living room wall that can accommodate a 14-foot-tall artwork—“domestically scaled works that are in the quintessential Laura Owens style are in high demand,” says the adviser Rob Teeters. “That work has gained momentum.” (Gavin Brown, Owens’s New York dealer, declined to comment; Sadie Coles, his London dealer, didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

There’s an added factor, Westreich says, that with market recognition and the imprimatur of the Whitney show, “as it becomes more and more present in the international art world, people can accept it into collections that don’t necessarily accommodate it, visually,” Westreich says. “The market has caught up to a curatorial and critical position.”

Staying Power

The multimillion-dollar question, in turn, is if Owens’s current popularity is the product of a fleeting trend or something more sustainable.