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...
Every once in a while (on those rare occasions when we’re away from our favorite gun clubs, firing ranges and ammunition shops), I’ll run into one of our ARTILLERY family and friends and s/he’ll ask me what I’ve been up to. It can be awkward—especially if I’ve just...
Jason Yates is preternaturally disposed to emulate, extrapolate and thoroughly and passionately investigate anything that relates to pop culture, therein creating his newest foray into the simultaneous realms of sculpture, paintings, installation and collage at C....
Time was running out for me and I had to experience some of the goggle hype at the New Frontier installation space. It’s a kind of expanded cinema meets art, meets doc, meets VR, meets Connect sort of space. A person could really spend three full days experiencing the...
Poet Wallace Stevens, in his seminal poem “Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction,” eschews a literal interpretation of anything, vying instead for a Greenbergian-like approach to art, indeed to life itself, privileging purity in abstraction over narrative. This recent...
I’m unclear what happened next but I do know after not getting into some parties (BET) and getting into others we ended up at the Celebration of Music in Film, highlighting the festival’s opening night film What Happened, Miss Simone? Performing at the event was...
There’s always a bit of suspense walking into an exhibition of Anish Kapoor’s work. At this point in the artist’s career, we may have certain expectations about what we will see, which are not infrequently satisfied (i.e., brilliantly finished, reflective surfaces,...
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