Dear Babs, I’m an art student about to graduate with a BFA in photography at one of the best art schools in the Los Angeles area. Is it okay to work in a commercial photography field while showing artwork in galleries? Besides presenting two separate portfolios/series...
Narrative art is art that holds a story in it. It is as old as a simple clay bowl that holds life-giving water. The narrative art that most effected me, at a tender age and for the rest of my life, were the pictures by Kay Nielsen that I saw in my fairy tale book,...
» Now that binge-watching is officially a thing, it’s getting easier to convince people to sample Jacques Rivette. A three-hour film by Rivette is considered average to short. His longest film (Out: One) runs over 12 hours. The length of his films is more than a...
GALLERY MOVESIn and Out, Back and ForthTwo of our longtime Los Angeles galleries are closing: Angles Gallery is shutting down its La Cienega space, and Frank Lloyd has vacated Bergamot Station with its final show—of two legendary figures in postwar LA art, Peter...
There were moments in the recent James Darrah directed production of the Los Angeles Philharmonic performance of the Beethoven Missa Solemnis, conducted by Michael Tilson-Thomas (a co-production with the San Francisco Symphony, in celebration of Tilson-Thomas’ 70th...
The first ever retrospective of Pierre Huyghe’s work presents 50 works spanning 20 years which, like flicking through a scrapbook, provide a montage of Huyghe’s most prevalent themes, motifs and inspirations, drawn from the fields of literature, film, music, science...
To walk into the Jim Morphesis exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of California Art is to be flooded by rich, intense waves of color. The tsunami of red, blue, black and white is matched by roiling surges of thick, densely textured impasto. Only after the initial...
Revealing a neglected and deliciously beautiful world from which we get only a handful of 72” x 60” snapshots—monochromatic yet stippled with smears, cracks and drips—Brenna Youngblood’s eight massive canvases, all mixed media, narrate a fall from grace. Titles...
This survey of Al Payne’s work goes back a half century and spans his entire career, establishing the late artist as an assured painter and colorist, no matter what his subject matter or his style: figurative or abstract, conceptual or retinal. That is, the survey...
Artists known for their breakthrough projects or a specific style often have difficulty changing directions. Fortunately, Sadie Benning has resisted this conundrum, moving successfully between mediums and subjects. Her early works were confessional videos created with...
Chinese dissident artist Zhao Zhao is inevitably associated with Ai Weiwei, both because he worked with the renowned older artist and because he has experienced the same persecution at the hands of the Chinese government—arrest, travel bans, confiscation of artwork....
Originally from the East Coast, San Francisco-based artist Richard Hoblock displays a palpable joy in the process and materials of painting, his second career. Previously immersed in the film and arts communities of Los Angeles, he obtained an MFA in 1998 from UCLA’s...
“Songbook,” Alec Soth’s current exhibition of documentary-style black-and-white environmental and ensemble portraiture at Sean Kelly Gallery is compellingly complicated in the aggregate, ultimately pointing to a deeply American dilemma of how physical and social space...
Kianja Strobert makes abstract painting the old-fashioned way, with surfaces to die for. Her powdery blacks recall the days when artists ground their own colors—and her gold when nothing else would do. Pigment presses to the edge and then some, as an extension of her...
Even mountains deserved to be loved. I don’t mean literally of course, but metaphorically the mountain represents a force to be reckoned with, and hopefully, if not scaled, then appreciated. Jacci Den Hartog, in her newest exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery has...
The second edition of the Kochi Muziris Biennale held on the Malabar Coast of Kerala, South India, kicked off with great fanfare. Thunderous music at the opening ceremony from a traditional ensemble of drums, cymbals, pipes, and horns normally used before evening...
In his first solo show in the U.S., French artist Benoît Maire includes a video presented on a MacBook showing an image of another MacBook showing a video of the artist watching a video of Foucault on YouTube (on a MacBook). Foucault is shown praising Gaston Bachelard...
Anish Kapoor is a master in “organic monumentality.” Working with literal organic matter including pigments and earth as well as nonorganic substances including resins and silicone, Kapoor has forged yet another series of complex and visually challenging sculptural...
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