“I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap and still comes out on top”—Claes OldenburgNearly everyone who has ever written about art in Los Angeles has had to face the question I’m facing now: Should I write this by the pool, or stay in bed?This is a...
PRIVATE EYE
When Kai Loebach emigrated to Los Angeles 27 years ago, after a brief vacation during which he was blown away by the friendliness of the people and the “visual orgasm” of a clean-as-new supermarket in the San Fernando Valley, he knew no one, had no place to stay and...
BUNKER VISION
By the late 1960s, whatever fun The Art World had promised with pop art was settling back into something more serious and denim-clad. Glamour was once again a dirty word, and the less there was to see at an art show, the more profound the art was deemed. If one was...
SHOPTALK
Gallery MovesIt’s a Californian Kinda ThingBy Scarlet Cheng It’s hard to keep up with the rash of new and relocated galleries this year—is this because of the economic rebound, or because Los Angeles continues to become more important in American’s cultural...
Forrest Bess
Forrest Bess (1911–77) was, by his own account, a man divided. He saw himself as containing two selves: the masculine, roughneck hard-drinking fisherman, and the sensitive painter. He believed that he could unify these parts of himself by surgically becoming a...
Field Report: Hong Kong
Once a city on the margins of the art world, Hong Kong now sits center stage, boasting the world’s third-largest art market. A wealth of galleries, museums and art centers can be found on either side of Victoria Harbor, which separates the commercial center, Hong Kong...
Darren Almond
Darren Almond’s two decades of paintings, sculptures, videos and photographs reflect on time as a paradox. He is not the only contemporary artist to investigate time as a subject—Andy Goldsworthy, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and John Divola come to mind—but his approach...
John Knuth
John Knuth’s provocative “Base Alchemy” juxtaposes minimal abstractions: tiny specks of dark paint over solid lighter colors; stretched reflective Mylar surfaces torn to reveal predominantly monochromatic backgrounds. Knuth’s Mylar images pay homage to Lucio Fontana,...
Robert Montgomery
This summer, in what seemed like a large seizure of prime advertising real estate, 10 LA billboards were repurposed for an alternative exhibition of text-based artworks by the Scottish artist Robert Montgomery. Sponsored by the Do Art Foundation and Art Share LA,...
Stas Orlovski
Nostalgia for the raw flow of dreams suffuses Stas Orlovski’s hypnotic installation, “Chimera,” activating a longing for the power of imagination as dreams coalesce into interpretation and noetic concerns. Orlovski conjures a fantastic synthesis from diverse parts:...
Lucy+ Jorge Orta
“FOOD - WATER - LIFE” presents a sort of equation, a distillation of concerns about immigration, labor and meaning in a globalized economy that drags our personal lives along for the ride.Married French artists Lucy+Jorge Orta construct a figurative Ikea catalog of...
Nathan Huff
“Domesticating Disturbances,” Nathan Huff’s solo exhibit of drawings and paintings in gouache and sculpture/installation never dogmatically adheres to a set of organizing principles, instead freely adapting ideas to form a unique figurative language. His point of...
Misako Inaoka
Taking the animal kingdom as a point of departure, Japanese-born artist Misako Inaoka explores formal and conceptual concerns, posing broad questions about life on our planet, its evolution and human interventions. As man exerts continual domination over beast, with...
Darja Bajagic
Showcasing appropriated images of young girls alongside pornography from niche fetish websites in her daring mixed-media works, Darja Bajagic’s solo exhibition offers “Cold Comfort,” as the show’s title so aptly indicates. The recent Yale MFA grad stirred controversy...
Charlotte Schulz
To write about Charlotte Schulz’ drawings requires a language equal to their elegant and surreal lyricism. The poet Jorie Graham comes close, describing a mythical space as consisting of “little whelps, vanquishings, discoveries, here under this / rock / no, over...
Los Angeles Fall Openings 2014
"We were everywhere during the Fall Opening Season of the Los Angeles Art world. The 20th anniversary of ACME gallery, Chinatown, Beverly Hills, Culver City...we were there!" From Los Angeles Fall Openings 2014. Posted by Artillery Magazine on 11/04/2014 (27 items)...
Hold Me! – Barrie Kosky’s “Boy Girl, Boy Girl” spin on Dido and Aeneas and Bluebeard’s Castle
For all the talk about its fragility (at least in economic terms), opera remains a remarkably durable art form. Great music wedded to a strong dramatic core can never be easily dismissed. Add some good orchestration and the human voice in its full dynamic range,...
Mark Licari
We’ve all played gin rummy, or been beat at poker at some time in life, but Mark Licari, in his first exhibition at Koplin Del Rio, reconstitutes the everyday playing card as a luminous object of desire, violence, death and impermanence, wherein the drawing on each...