The first and most physically imposing work in Thomas Houseago’s exhibition, “The Ridge,” on view at Gagosian Gallery, is Open Wall (Beautiful Wall) (2016). According to his Instagram, Houseago built this wall in response to the election of Donald Trump. This alone is...
Laura Forman’s debut solo show at Sloan Projects—a rather small collection of six new artworks that differ clearly from each other—induces curiosity and offers a wide range of possible interpretations. Created in 2016, her oeuvre (all works untitled) reflects the vibe...
Egan Frantz’s show, “The Oat Paintings,” provides a possible opening into a discussion of the nature of political art: how we distinguish it from among the myriad latent political aspects of most other art; how we recognize and define its characteristics; how it...
For Rachel Lachowicz, lipstick—the actual infused-wax substance—has long functioned not simply as a gimmick, or brand, or even social signifier, but as a kind of idée fixe, a material so embedded in our culture, and so closely associated with femininity, that it...
In Orkideh Torabi’s caricatures of silly men, comedy and poignancy stealthily overcome the unsuspecting viewer. Midway through this exhibition, one is liable to titter aloud as the portraits’ repetitive simplicity resounds to a starkly touching yet hilarious effect....
Jill Mulleady’s new paintings offer an experience akin to tumbling down a rabbit hole into a mad and decadent party orchestrated by the Surrealists (is that a cheetah sitting at the counter? A policeman fighting a green coyote?) and attended by reveling sinners,...
Unexpected Portrait (2016) is a large-scale acrylic-on-canvas painting where a long tube-shaped orange line with dark edges glides across the work defining a cartoon-like head and shoulders. Two simple dots for eyes and a short line for a mouth are similarly...
If Lauren DiCioccio’s chosen materials of fabric, thread and found objects at first appear playful and lighthearted, a closer look reveals the disturbing little works assembled in “Comfort Objects” as apropos of the collective mood of wariness, of the persistent...
Paul Anthony Smith’s third solo exhibition at ZieherSmith represents an ultimately fruitful distillation, apparently in both the methods of his practice, and subsequently in the visual nature of the roughly dozen works that make it up. “Procession,” as Smith’s latest...
Painting by Mauricio Cárdenas, Make America White Again, 2017, acrylic on canvas, included in the Guadalajara, Mexico, exhibition, “Fuck The Wall,” which is a featured article written by Mexican art writer Gerardo Lammers in this issue.
Tony Conrad is one of the unlikeliest figures to be the subject of the kind of late-career historical recontextualization that authenticity-starved hipster youth have made their simulacral avant-garde. Don’t get me wrong. His bona fides are all in place; a pivotal...
Like many artists who have spent most or a significant portion of their career outside the U.S. or U.K. or the major art capitals, Jimmie Durham may be less than familiar to many of us who (until now) have had only the most fleeting (or even anonymous) contact with...
Last week’s online political art exhibition was a hit! (Click here to see the exhibition.) However, I failed to put a deadline on the call for entries and I’m still getting submissions. So we’re going to do Part 2 next week. Here’s the info, this time with a deadline:...
It is the area between downtown LA and the Valley, between suburbia and superstition, and it lies between the strip of Halloween stores and the summit of Griffith Park. This is the dimension of imagination, it is an area which we call Burbank, and we're at the Bearded...
"Creature" springs from the same Latin root as creation, yet the two conjure polarities. The former suggests a beast, a lower animal, or if human then a distinctly lower form of human; a savage, a bestial Mr. Hyde. The latter implies a divine force, a desire or idea...
“She’s famous for her use of negative space.” The security guard’s soft voice wafted over to me from the corner of the gallery. I stood in the white cathedral of LACMA’s Broad Contemporary building, narrowing my eyes at a huge expanse of what looked like nearly...
The Los Angeles Opera’s co-production of Mozart’s The Abduction From the Seraglio (Die Entführung aus dem Serail), which closed February 19th, updated the action of this singspiel from its original mid- to late-18th century Ottoman Turkish setting, when the Ottoman...
Every now and then an artist pops above the horizon line with a private cosmology like the late Mati Klarwein whose Aleph Sanctuary in the 1970s was a marvel of jewel-like paintings. An artist like Alex Grey known for his visionary painting and his "Chapel of Sacred...
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