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...
Robert Yarber
What does it mean to fall from grace? To really fall, from great heights, perhaps at first thinking you’re flying and only realizing too late that this was an illusion, probably induced by the drugs. That would explain why the world out there appears so eerie, so pink...
CODE ORANGE: NOV/DEC 2018
Congratulations to our winner Osceola Refetoff and our finalists. Refetoff's photo is seen above and first in our photo gallery. His image is also printed in our November/December issue of Artillery. The following photographs are the finalists from our...
SHOPTALK
AI WEIWEI IN LA We haven’t seen much of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in these parts since LACMA presented his installation “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Head” in 2012. This fall he returned with a well-orchestrated splash—with three high-profile exhibitions opening in LA, all...
ART BRIEF
The first week of October was Ai Weiwei week in Los Angeles—a triple-header of shows including the Marciano Foundation, the opening show of former MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch’s new Hollywood gallery, and at the recent UTA gallery in Beverly Hills. First stop was the...
UNDER THE RADAR
NOTE: Ultimately, the correct response to each of these prompts is one or more paintings. 1. How is a painting different from the screen of your phone? 2 Does the image in a painting end at the edge of the canvas, or continue to infinity? 3. What is a painting? Give...
DECODER
Writing “It’s beautiful but…” means you’re stupid. Other fields don’t put up with this shit. “Delicious” is no joke: in the 17th century the Dutch and Portuguese went to war over it (Spice War: 1602 to 1663, ended with the Treaty of the Hague). No matter how...