Macbeth is the story of a villain who people understand and have pity for—when the story is told correctly. Both Macbeth and his wife have the difficult task of being evil and asking for our sympathy. They are tortured souls not because they are losing the battle but...
You’re sitting at an art fair (on what you hope is a chair) while your spouse has another look around. They handed you a magazine before they left, and you’re already back here. You can afford anything in the place, but everything was covered in hold stickers when the...
SOLD! (NOT!)Dear Babs, In my art practice, I gravitate toward using ephemeral media and creating installations. Sometimes my work deals with "difficult" subject matter. Do most gallery owners steer clear of those qualities in art because it is challenging to sell? Is...
POP-UPS WORTH YOUR WHILE Hospital Happening and a TraphouseKudos to art consultant John Wolf for throwing together one of the most ambitious and giddy art projects this year—“Human Condition,” a pop-up gallery at a former hospital, the LA Metropolitan Medical Center...
When Kim Schoenstadt first asked me if I would photograph “Now Be Here LA 2016”—the historic group photograph of hundreds of LA-based women artists that she was organizing at Hauser, Wirth, & Schimmel—I simultaneously felt flattered and out of my depth. I’m an...
It is now official: awe is an essential human emotion. Yes, awe—a sense of wonder at something that is greater or beyond any single individual. “Early in human history, awe was reserved for feelings toward divine beings,” writes Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology...
Gerard O’Brien founded The Landing a year ago and is the owner of Reform Gallery in Los Angeles, a store that quickly became a leading source for furnishings, crafts and accessories in the California Modern style.ARTILLERY: You’ve gotten a lot of admiration and good...
Exiting Electric Earth, Doug Aitken’s immersive, multichannel narrative installation first presented in 1999 and immediately confronting Twilight (2016), an eerie, translucent ghost-like freestanding replica of a now obsolete pay phone that pulsates from light to dark...
Henry Taylor has described his figurative painting, which is not infrequently straight portraiture, as landscape; and to press the point, he has taken the further step of mounting the work within a gallery prepared from the floor up, in effect treating the space as...
Visual affinities extend throughout Sam Falls’ solo exhibition at Hannah Hoffman, suggesting relationships between natural phenomena and man-made objects, while also developing a thematic unity for Falls’ heterogeneous production. A pair of texturally rich photographs...
A descendent of samurai-era Bizen sword makers, Miya Ando was first introduced to metalworking as a child while living in a Japanese Buddhist Temple. In homage to her ancestral heritage, she has since looked to this medium (whose impermanent properties convey the...
Through her show, “Paper or Plastic?”, at the innovative Mixografia studio, Analia Saban breathes new life into plastic grocery bags while highlighting their vapidity as an aging commercial technology.In earlier bodies of work, Saban cast mundane objects in pure paint...
The black-and-white photographs of Carina Brandes, which capture her ritualistically enigmatic performances for a self-timed camera, suffer a paradoxical fate: they’re modestly powerful images grounded in a uniquely European sensibility, but ultimately leave little...
Standing erect on pedestals, Colette Robbins’ seven skeletal sculptures twist and bend like limbs, frown and gape like skulls, and yet they are clearly not figurative. Rather, the ethereal totems coax the mind to create fiction from their abstract...
For over 35 years Karla Klarins has painted the built landscape, now presented in a survey exhibition entitled “Subdividing the Landscape.” In the early 1980s she gained attention for her expressive and unique sculptural relief paintings of downtown Los Angeles...
While earlier exhibitions used horse racing as a point of departure and a metaphor, perhaps, for the handicapping aspect of the art world, “FROM HERE,” recently on view at Jenkins Johnson Gallery in San Francisco, focuses on artist Sadie Barnette’s impressions of her...
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