Last Saturday night the LA arts scene was in full swing and we gladly joined the frenzy. Our first stop was Wilding Cran Gallery, which immersed us in installations by Vikky Alexander for her show Vertical Dreams, and Jen Stark’s opening, Multiplicity. After entrance...
Ghebaly Gallery & M + B: : Aaron Fowler
Ostensibly a presentation of individual large-scale mixed media sculptural works, Aaron Fowler’s current exhibition is more like a series of pocket universes. Occupying the entireties of two art galleries on opposite sides of the city, Fowler presents these monumental...
Kimberly Brooks
Calling all Kimberly Brooks fans: A short time remains to catch "Fever Dreams," her mid-career survey at Mt. San Antonio College Art Gallery. More than 20 pieces, from small studies to watercolors on paper to large-scale oil paintings, sketch Brooks' artistic...
Danvy Pham: The Woman Within
When my dear artist friend Danvy Pham texted photos of her works in progress for her upcoming solo show, I replied, "Klimt! But from a feminine perspective." Danvy draws from many such inspirations — Schiele and Picasso also come to mind — but the result is one...
Art Aplenty to be Thankful for
As we approach Thanksgiving, it’s pretty awesome to be living in Los Angeles where the art scene gives us plenty to be thankful for besides cornbread stuffing and candied yams. Art at the Rendon: "Stories" took attendees into the lives of multiple characters in an...
Susu Attar at The Mistake Room
Iraqi-born, Los Angeles artist Susu Attar opened an expansive exhibition on October 20th filling LA’s very own The Mistake Room with dynamic paintings made on long scrolls of white paper. Entitled Isthmus, TMR Deputy Director Kris Kuramitsu curated the wonderfully...
Jo Ann Callis
Uneasy undercurrents seep from Jo Ann Callis' delusively simple images. Her versatile talent for finding eeriness in the everyday is amply demonstrated in "Now and Then" at ROSEGALLERY. This manifold selection of paintings, sculptures and photographs from the 1970's...
Regen Projects: : Tavares Strachan
The entry into Tavares Strachan’s “Invisibles” exhibition is a kind of anteroom (Six Thousand Years, 2018) evoking something like a private library or even a Wunderkammer. It’s wall to wall, floor to ceiling array of acrylic vitrines, each the exact same size, holds...
FLUXUS ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
In many ways, opera is the high point of the Western classical music tradition. Originating as royal entertainment in Italy at the close of the 16th century, opera evolved to become fashionable throughout Europe. This remained the status quo until the early 20th...
Ivan Morley & Ricky Swallow
David Kordansky Gallery’s opening this past Saturday featuring the work of Ivan Morley and Ricky Swallow was a full house--and well worthy of the audience. A line of cars built up to the gallery, making it clear from the get-go that Kordansky was an anticipated stop...
Alex Roulette; Eric Hesse
Two painters posit banal architectural environments as metaphoric expressions of thoughts and emotions at George Billis Gallery. Each of the eight oil paintings comprising Alex Roulette's show, "Memory Moving Sideways," features one or more people dwarfed by...
EDITOR’S LETTER
Dear Reader, The death of painting has been declared with either enthusiasm or dejection so many times, as has its corollary, the “improbable” resurrection of the medium, that the tandem seems now like a market gyration—either a panicked sell-off or a spate of giddy...
BEYOND MOOD: Yunhee Min
Yunhee Min’s work at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects last summer follows an earlier body of work similar in style, “Movements” at her New York gallery in 2016. Both of them mark a strong new direction for her painting. The new series, entitled the “Wilde...
Finger Paint: Vera Arutyunyan
Vera Arutyunyan coats her canvases with pigment and passion. For much of her 25-year artistic career, the Armenian-born artist’s bold abstract oil paintings have been expressions of her complex emotions as an immigrant building a new life in the United States. Growing...
The Haunted Objects of Ariana Papademetropoulos
On an old oak-lined Pasadena avenue, I’m standing before an imposing wrought-iron gate to a stately Tudor mansion. In dappled afternoon sunlight twinkling beneath breezy treetops, this mysterious setting feels like the beginning of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Sprawling...
LENZ GEERK
The paintings of Lenz Geerk are unprepossessing and quietly sublime, his figures poised inside singular moments of divine inscrutability as they consider the world around them, whether it be a dying flower or the pointed edge of a table. This sense of veiled mystery...
The Empathetic Encausticisms of Pamela Smith Hudson
In her Culver City studio on a late summer afternoon, encaustic painter, printmaker and educator Pamela Smith Hudson revealed the origins of her vocation as a “materials artist” dedicated to exploring the potentials of paint, clay, print and wax: “My dad was a cement...
Van Gogh’s Mulberry Tree
Van Gogh’s Mulberry Tree (1889) was a key work in my conversion to appreciating the pleasures of modern art. When I first saw it as an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley in the 1970s, it was still in the collection of the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San...