For many centuries, the wunderkammer model of organizing collections of art and objects of curiosity was de rigueur. The earliest wunderkammer, or cabinets of curiosity, were the private collections of wealthy Europeans, including Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, Ole...
Prestidigitator, composer, engineer and conceptual artist Nahum hails from Mexico City, has lived in London for many years after a degree from Goldsmith’s College, but really, he belongs anywhere. Recently he and eight other Mexican artists, along with a Mexican...
Ornately grotesque, Aaron Johnson's paintings, on display at Stux & Haller Gallery, are vibrant, densely packed expositions on sex and death. According to Johnson the effect he’s after is the erotic intensity of two bodies merging together and two individual...
Claudia Parducci currently has three stunning paintings up at Sloan Projects at Bergamot Station, paintings that straddle the chasm between landscape and psychological terrain, works that are as much about evacuation as they are about prescience. Works like Doomed...
Cole Case is a gem of an artist who, in his most recent exhibition at Western Project, has demonstrated tremendous sensitivity of the finer elements of life. He is a master of seeing – dead birds, Iberian hounds with pink legs, the variegated lines and shadows that...
Having followed Gabriel Kahane’s songwriting career for some time, I was primed for a terrific show this past Saturday evening at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse. Kahane has the dual gift of an innate musical talent and extraordinary musicianship wedded to a peerless gift for...
Dear Readers Our paint-themed issue just makes me want to paint. I figure that’s a good thing. As a former serious painter, I get wistful for the days when I was alone in the studio for hours with pigment, medium and turpentine—especially when I see a good painting...
IN THE BEGINNINGThere is something about abstraction. The concept of the non-pictorial, non-mimistic image is unique in art, and in the world. Sometimes it seems to me that there is abstract art, and then there is everything else. This is what Ad Reinhardt meant when...
Los Angeles painter James Hayward taught a USC graduate seminar in 1987. That was my introduction to him. He wasn’t much of a teacher, but he sure was a talker. He sat in a chair front and center in the classroom with his legs stretched wide open. When he would get...
Think about the differences between the long-standing practices of painting and sculpture, and clichés persist: Painting is “flat,” sculpture is not; paintings go on a wall, sculptures do not. In contemporary art these separate paths often intersect; some notable...
An acknowledgment of tradition coupled with a refusal to conform to established conventions makes Analia Saban an artist not easily categorized. Her work flows seamlessly across genre, concept and medium.A native of Argentina, Saban recalls arriving in California...
I met Sheldon Figoten in San Francisco in the mid 1970s. We were just a couple of ambitious young artists from Los Angeles on sabbatical in California’s northern hemisphere at the time. After returning to SoCal, Figoten settled in Venice and over the years has become...
Propped against the wall of her second-story Hollywood Boulevard studio, three of Liat Yossifor’s gray paintings—each about seven feet by five feet—in various stages of completion sit perched on low wood supports. Yossifor’s high-ceilinged studio feels spacious, if...
The early 20th-century’s turn towards modernism in painting was a decisive shift in interest away from artistic representation of acts of witnessing. Abstract art—which now seems to dominate many visual demesnes including the decorative and graphic design, and sets...
Curated by Laura Hoptman and on view at MoMA through April 5, “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World” attempts to identify a distinctly current impulse to select and recombine styles, materials, iconography and other references from a broad...
Nestled in an upscale residential community in Montecito, Lotusland is a 37-acre nonprofit botanical nirvana filled with over 950 species of exotic plants arranged in nearly 20 gardens. It’s also the historic estate of the late Polish opera singer and socialite Madame...
I had never heard of Lancaster, let alone gone there, before I drove up the 405 and the 14 last November to see “Being Here and There” at the Museum of Art and History. It was “worth the trip,” as the Guide Michelin says of exceptional destinations. Almost all the 26...
JANE CHAFIN owns and operates Offramp Gallery with life partner Chaz Alexander out of their historic home in Pasadena, California. ARTILLERY: You grew up in West Virginia as a descendent of the feuding Hatfield family and your grandfather was an infamous union-busting...
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