For the 9th edition of the Artes Mundi Prize, an international panel of jurors —made up of Cosmin Costinas (Executive Director and Curator of Para Site, Hong Kong), Elvira Dyangani Ose (Director at The Showroom, London) and Rachel Kent (Chief Curator at MCA,...
OUTSIDE LA: Artes Mundi 9
Pick of the Week: Alissa McKendrick & Diane Kotila de boer gallery
Everyone has a fascination with the more macabre parts of life. Not that everyone is John Waters, but there’s a reason we all slow down to look when we pass an accident. It’s just human nature to be transfixed by the dark and the deadly, to find it not only shocking...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Vanessa Prager
It’s Vanessa Prager versus art history in this confounding and enchanting suite of oil on panel paintings, and her aggressive Impressionism-infused impasto is a knockout. Taking on the foundational figurative tropes of nude, still life, and landscape but proceeding...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Evita Tezeno Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
As the planet enters the beginning of a post-pandemic, post-Trump administration era, it was wonderful to be baptized in optimism from Evita Tezeno’s exhibition, “Better Days” at the Luis De Jesus Los Angeles gallery. One sweeping taste of these works results in a...
Pick of the Week: Caitlin Keogh Overduin & Co.
With spring just ahead, we are on the precipice of a momentous transition. Rays of hope are beginning to warm the cold landscape of our world, as they have again and again throughout humanity's existence. Caitlin Keogh explores this cyclical nature of history (and our...
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at Tate Britain "Fly in League with The Night" at Tate Britain
A man sits center frame, drowned within an interior sea of red hues, arms spread as he pensively gazes against our direction into the distance of the frame. A woman laughs cross-legged on a stool, mouth wide open as if paused mid-speech or laughter, as a grinning fox...
PHOTOGRAPHING PUNK ROCK Review of Michael Grecco's New Photography Book
If you wanted to get an indoor photo during the first wave of punk rock, you needed a camera that you could adjust the settings on, and you had to learn what the settings were. That didn’t really change until the advent of digital photography, which makes photographs...
Pick of the Week: John Waters Sprüth Magers
Sprüth Magers is currently exhibiting two shows by two of the most notable creatives of the last forty years: Cindy Sherman’s "Tapestries" and John Waters' "Hollywood’s Greatest Hits." Though, if you’re anything like myself, one will leave you elated, and the other,...
Gallery Rounds: Ulala Imai Nonaka Hill
Although "Amazing" is the first exhibition of Ulala Imai's works in Los Angeles and the United States, she has quite a following in Japan. Imai is a prolific painter as the presentation of over thirty paintings at Nonaka Hill demonstrates. She successfully combines...
John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres Charlie James Gallery
“The Bronx Comes to LA” features artworks from the larger body of work set up in Bronx storefronts by John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, dating from 1990 to 2020. The life casting process for making the figures is fairly complicated, but even more importantly, requires...
Fu Site Kylin Gallery
“Fictions in Fragments,” the latest show by Fu Site at Kylin Gallery in Beverly Hills, is an adventure not to be missed. Mixing ghostly characters and cracking lightning with influences stretching from modern architecture to baroque drama, Fu’s paintings alternately...
Karen Carson GAVLAK
The title of Karen Carson’s show of new "bas relief" paintings, exhibited alongside some of the zippered canvas works that marked her debut into the Los Angeles art world almost half a century ago, “Middle Ground” is a kind of conundrum, consistent with the kinds of...
Hamishi Farah Chateau Shatto
Portraiture is almost certainly the artistic genre in which power and privilege imprint themselves most legibly. To "represent" can mean to depict, but also the right to speak on behalf of a group. The tension between these two meanings is at the heart of Hamishi...
Ludovica Gioscia Baert Gallery
It is difficult not to be taken with Ludovica Gioscia’s exhibition “Arturo And The Vertical Sea.” Upon entry, viewers confront three free-standing wooden structures akin to unfinished walls that criss-cross two gallery spaces at different angles, dividing them into...
Amanda Wall The Cabin
Amanda Wall’s debut solo show, “JUICY” at The Cabin entices us into the intimate gallery. The exhibition space, which is in fact a small cottage-like structure in the backyard of artist and collector Danny First’s residence, immediately evokes a sense of casual...
Caroline Kent Kohn Gallery
Already known for planting her cut-out shapes onto a dense matte black ground, which she has characterized as ‘non-space,’ for this show, Kent challenges viewers straight off with a plunge into a black field already seemingly torn away to reveal both apparent voids...
David Hicks Diane Rosenstein Gallery
Central Valley ceramicist David Hicks doesn’t have a big footprint in Los Angeles. To see his work, you have to drive out to a hospital in Sylmar: a sun-parched, semi-rustic neighborhood at the northernmost tip of Los Angeles. There, above the lobby welcome desk, once...
Tristan Espinoza Los Angeles Municipal Gallery
Poetic, internal, observational and mysterious—all describe Tristan Espinoza’s “Index, Interiors,” currently on display at the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery. Both inscrutable and mesmerizing, Espinoza’s work uses the mediums of hand-made cyanotypes and AI, a...