Matthew Brown Gallery’s second opening was eagerly anticipated; especially after an impressive and overwhelmingly well-attended debut last month premiering Yale MFA graduate Kenturah Davis. We arrive on the early side so it is a little quieter though with the same...
LACMA: : Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler
Flora, Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler's enticing and enigmatic, double-sided film installation premiered at the 2017 Venice Biennale (in the Swiss Pavilion) and is currently on view at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (through April 7). In this presentation,...
Pierre Picot; Stan Edmondson; Lou Beach
Craig Krull Gallery seems larger than usual for the quantity of intriguing work in its current trio of tandem solo shows. Pierre Picot, Stan Edmondson and Lou Beach each work in different mediums but overlap in their surrealistic sensibilities rooted in prior eras....
Feminihilism
Feminism is an ideology that powers political and social movements dedicated to establishing gender equality between men and women. As such, it serves as inspiration for artistic exploration of the various issues involved in that process. First-generation feminist...
Art Party Openings at the Bendix Building
Last Saturday night, the Bendix Building in the Fashion District was the place to be, when a wide range of openings spilled out of galleries on multiple floors, causing crowds to trample the stairways and cram onto elevators that persisted in heading down to garage...
Lara Schnitger
With crafty charm belying provocative content, Lara Schnitger's textile collages strike a unique balance between daintiness and mordancy. One of the first pictures you'll find in her show, "Victory Garden" at Grice Bench, is a portrait titled Judith (all works 2019),...
Museum Joy
The last time I was bowled over by an artist’s installation was Damien Hirst’s Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results and Findings at Gagosian, New York in 2000. I have just seen and felt the bar raised again. The artist doesn’t live in New York...
Pitzer College Art Galleries; Elephant: : Cathy Akers
For over a decade, Los Angeles artist Cathy Akers has tenaciously researched two experimental open land communes in Northern California—Morningstar and Wheeler’s Ranches, each historically located in West Sonoma County. Through the years the artist has built...
The Longest Kyrie: Carrie Mae Weems’ Past Tense
I didn’t have the opportunity to see Carrie Mae Weems’ Guggenheim retrospective last year, but I was vaguely aware that she had taken advantage of the occasion (and location) to create something of a forum for conversation—both around the exhibited work and presumably...
Carolina Maki Kitagawa at Eastside International
When we withdraw from other people out of choice, we call the result privacy. When someone forces us into seclusion, it’s kidnapping. The artist Carolina Maki Kitagawa’s new show at Eastside International Los Angeles, “Story’s End No. 1 // Continúa El Cuento Nº....
Rona Pondick
Jewel-like translucency and vibrant hues set off the disturbing nature of sculptures by Rona Pondick at Zevitas Marcus, where luminous human heads are frozen in resin blocks or attached to freakish creatural bodies. Several pieces, such as Encased Yellow Green...
The 2019 Armory Show
The Armory Show is 25 years old and bears little resemblance to the original Gramercy International Art Fair founded by New York Gallerists Colin de Land, Pat Hearn, Matthew Marks and Paul Morris. Held in the Gramercy Park Hotel the show was intimate, funky and fun....
COLOR PSYCHIC & ABEX
This weekend we were lucky enough to start off Friday afternoon with an exclusive preview of Mash Gallery’s group exhibition, "Radiant Spectrum," curated by Mark Murphy. The show comprised a vibrant array of works by 16 contemporary artists including, Michelle A....
Stargazers: Intersections of Contemporary Art & Astronomy
The Stargazers show at the Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion in Costa Mesa, curated by gallery director Tyler Stallings to coincide with the opening of Orange Coast College’s state-of-the-art planetarium this month, interweaves scientific explorations of the cosmos with...
Diane Rosenstein: : Emma Webster
The 19th-century landscape painter Albert Bierstadt may have been a deer whisperer, able to corral an entire herd to pose for "Among the Sierra Nevada, California," but let's be real. The deer are fake. In Emma Webster's recent foray into landscape painting, she takes...
Floating moments in a dying world: Christiane Jatahy’s What If They Went to Moscow?
There’s a pair of wonderful lines somewhere near the opening of Stephen Sondheim’s decades old musical, Pacific Overtures that introduce and contextualize much of the drama that follows; and also, in typical Sondheim fashion, open our eyes to another world—not simply...
Packed Openings Even in the Rain
It might have been a rainy weekend in LA that started the spring art season, but it didn’t put a damper on attendance at gallery shows. On Thursday, the Palladium paid tribute to iconic rock stars such as Tom Petty, Bob Marley, and Ray Charles, with the opening of the...
Fellows of Contemporary Art: : Medium
George Braque's simple act of stenciling the words “BAL” and “BACH” onto two of his Analytic Cubist paintings in 1911 launched a trend in modern and contemporary art so pervasive, there is no way he could have imagined the ramifications. The use of text in art has...