On Thursday, May 24, the Broad Museum was infiltrated by a coven of four Latinx she-monsters wearing wigs on their faces, jeans tossed around their shoulders, and topless fake-hair onesies. In the Broad’s foyer, they appeared in the midst of a luxuriously-dressed LA...
Chris Kraus’ In Order to Pass: Films from 1982-1995 at Chateau Shatto
Chris Kraus made nine films between 1982 and 1995, each of which is on display at her solo exhibition, In Order to Pass at Chateau Shatto in downtown LA. Most are familiar with Kraus as the creator of I Love Dick, her feminist (?) epistolary novel about female desire...
Laurie Nye; Mindy Shapero
Two shows at The Pit delineate visionary worlds of wacky flourish and dazzling variegation. "Venusian Weather," the title of Laurie Nye's show, suggests the second planet from the Sun as well as the Greco-Roman ideal of female beauty. The paintings therein reflect...
Regen Projects: : Marilyn Minter
Like many modern women, Marilyn Minter has a complicated relationship with beauty. Both her personal feelings and her luminous artworks are fraught with contempt and desire for the beauty-industrial complex, and animated by attraction and repulsion for our society’s...
GREEN WITHOUT ENVY
The color green has had many connotations throughout history: Pope Innocent III declared it the official Church color for the “ordinary time” between holy days; Frau Minne, the 12th Century German personification of courtly love, wore a green dress, and the color was...
Lively Openings & Arty Haircuts
A wide range of lively openings dotted the city this past weekend, including openings at Launch and KP Projects on La Brea, the closing of a terrific exhibition at Keystone Art Space, and the intensely beautiful "Carbon" at Fellows of Contemporary Art in Chinatown...
Kamol Tassananchalee
Eastern concepts meld with Western painting methods in Thai artist Kamol Tassananchalee's mystical abstractions currently on view at LA Artcore. This transnational painter, who maintains a studio in Chatsworth, received his MFA from Otis in 1977, was titled National...
ArtCenter: : This is Not a Selfie
The larger than life-size, amber toned image of the German artist Joseph Beuys appears to be marching out of the gallery, striding forward towards us. In a hand written note at his feet, La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi (1972) grandly decrees, “We are the revolution.” The...
Eduardo Carrillo
"Testament of the Spirit" at Pasadena Museum of California Art encompasses over 60 paintings that Eduardo Carrillo (1937-1997) produced over a 40-year period. While traversing this engrossing retrospective, one feels as though perusing an eclectic panoply of peepholes...
After Henry – or Thanks Be to Mark
As Karen Finley wisely counseled me some years ago, an excess of gratitude can strike you dumb (or simply annoyed speechless), which is never a good place to be, especially if you’re on a podium and expected to render judgment, offer smart advice or commentary, or...
DENK: : Nathan Redwood, Folkert de Jong
Nathan Redwood and Folkert de Jong's tandem solo exhibits at DENK, which feature Redwood's paintings on walls surrounding de Jong's floor sculptures, integrate the two artists' discrete yet analogous flairs for applying satirical humor to classical figuration. Each...
Vision Valley, An Effortless Cool Factor
I was going to make fun of The Pit’s group show “Vision Valley” at the Brand Library for being a "biennial," since everything is a biennial these days, until I actually read the press release (whoops) and realized that they were making fun of this exact thing...
Mark Bradford; Geta Brătescu; Louise Bourgeois
A diverse trio of shows by significant artists is soon to close at Hauser & Wirth. If you haven't attended, and only have time to visit one gallery this week, you might try this three-for-one-special where discrete exhibitions by Mark Bradford, Geta Brătescu and...
Gallery Luisotti: : Mark Ruwedel
In today’s media saturated world, exhibitions of beautifully printed, small-scale, black and white photographs tend to fall through the cracks. As Mark Ruwedel proves in “Rivers Run Through It,” quiet and subtle pictures of nature can be more seductive and meaningful...
Michael Lindsay-Hogg – Working with what it is
I have to preface this sketch with an admission that seems odd even to me – as someone fairly impervious to the lure of Hollywood legend. What drew me to the first show I ever saw of Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s fine art was that he was a Hollywood legend. But that term...
A Feast For Your Eyes
Tasty art offered a feast for viewers’ eyes everywhere in LA this weekend. At the Korean Cultural Center, art collective Durden and Ray offered a terrific 23-artist group show, "Odd Convergences: Steps/Missteps." The expansive upstairs gallery featured a wide range of...
Christopher Page
Christopher Page's paintings appear as windows into neon voids. "Opening" at Baert Gallery comprises five trompe l'oeil abstractions whose geometric compositions appear flat from afar but disclose illusionistic shading as one approaches. Flashy color fields are...
EDITOR’S LETTER
Dear Reader, Who am I? Isn’t this the biggest existential question? All artists ask this question and continue to explore it. But do we ever get an answer? I watched an excellent documentary on the recently departed comedic genius, Garry Shandling, directed and...