reviews
DUELLING REVIEWS: MARILYN MINTER
R. CRUMB at David Zwirner
R. Crumb’s “tales” (even filtered through psychedelics and cannabinoids) weren’t always so paranoid—though they were frequently calamitous. The street-hip graphic domain Crumb freely improvised during the 1960s and 1970s across densely cross-hatched black-andwhite...
MOSIE ROMNEY at Sebastian Gladstone
I felt dizzy at mosie romney’s show “every Spiral has its law” at Sebastian Gladstone. I could chalk it up to external factors (fatigue, harsh gallery lighting), but I suspect that the work itself was the incubator of disorientation. My previous visits to the space,...
TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK & PHILIP GUSTON at Skirball Cultural Center
Entrusted to the sprawling Skirball Cultural Center in Brentwood by New York’s Jewish Museum, “Draw Them In, Paint Them Out” presents a handful of Philip Guston’s depictions of cowled Ku Klux Klan figures, alongside Trenton Doyle Hancock’s ambitious, mixed media...
MONUMENTS at MOCA Geffen & The Brick
150 years after the Civil War, it seems American art institutions are finally ready to discuss Confederate statuary. Seizing this opportunity, curator Hamza Walker (along with co-curators Bennett Simpson and Kara Walker) has gone to unusual lengths in his sprawling...
FLORA YUKHANOVICH at Hauser & Wirth
Ah, yes, the front room at Hauser & Wirth: the room you usually walk past on the way to the better shows in the back. There’s a certain type of painting one expects here: Blue Chip filler, the type of young artists who get mentioned in Vanity Fair articles. Where...
GRETCHEN BENDER at Matinée
You get a brief shot of Matinée, a new project space thought up by Los Angeles-based artist Andrew J. Greene, at around minute one of a video posted by a daredevil urban explorer YouTuber, Davy, titled “EXPLORING THE ‘WARNER BROS’ THEATRE IN DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES.” In...
ROOM 8: A CAT IN THE CLASSROOM at Central Library
Though I grew up with pets, I’ve never taken to them. As a boy, we had a beast of a dog, Soxy. She was scary and insane, except for when my older brother could tame her long enough to let me ride her around like a pony. My mother preferred fish, silent and remote,...
KEN GONZALES-DAY Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
At Luis de Jesus Los Angeles, Ken Gonzales-Day: Afterlife, shows new digital collages furthering his body of “nevermades;” a term coined by the artist to describe his revisionist reimaginings of Western historical moments and figures bringing into question the long...
YUVAL PUDIK at NOON Projects
Men in nice suits do not often crawl around on their hands and knees; there’s too great a risk of their shoes getting scuffed, their knees wearing through, or, God forbid, their seams splitting right along their backside. But brave men in suits defied the norms on...
NANCY BUCHANAN The Brick
Desire can make you sick, or it can make you try. Los Angeles-based artist Nancy Buchanan, working steadily since the 1970s, has consistently chosen the latter. Hair Room (1973/2025), a closet-sized chamber where strings of hair caress the top of your head as you walk...
ADAM ALESSI at Hoffman Donahue
“fullmoon” is a bit of a homecoming for Adam Alessi. The artist has been averaging around one solo show a year since his sudden art world ascent about five or six years ago, but with the last two having taken place in Italy and New York, Los Angeles has rarely seen...
FLORIAN KREWER Michael Werner
There’s an easy attractiveness to Florian Krewer’s paintings that obscures the complex formations of desire within them. At times they seem stripped of everything but their earnestness, but then at others, they are scattered with bold and reckless impulses. There is...
IT SMELLS LIKE GIRL at Jeffrey Deitch
“It Smells Like Girl,” at Jeffrey Deitch, in conjunction with Company Gallery, shares its title with a Tala Madani painting depicting a suspiciously phallic object, a lone actor against a cloudless blue sky. Stark and funny, the phallus is the main character, but its...
JASMINE JOHNSON at New Theater Hollywood
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Thus begins the most (and perhaps only) captivating scene from Jasmine Johnson’s film PCH & Heroin, which premiered recently alongside her film Tweakernam at New Theater Hollywood. The line, from...
MARINA WEINER at The Hermitage
In a backyard in Glendale, Marina Weiner’s solo exhibition, “Stripe Machine,” cleverly redefines the term “public art.” The art is not shown in public; the gallery, Hermitage Los Angeles, is a small, beautifully built shed behind a private home. Rather, Weiner’s...
AMERICAN ARTIST at California African American Museum
In a small gallery of the California African American Museum, a wooden table hosting just short of two dozen drawings and a life-size sculptural replica of a chicken coop invoke a perplexing story about institutional partnerships in the contemporary arts. In “Shaper...
