Is fashion the medium of the moment? I’m not talking about haute couture or luxury ready-to-wear fashion design. Since the ascendance of Conceptualism, the means of fabrication have been more or less beside the point in fine art; and so it would be here. This isn’t...
“I’m a hypocrite,” Linda Vallejo says, referring to her latest series “Make ’Em All Mexican.” “I grew up on Fred Flintstone and Frank Sinatra. I’m all American.” She adds, “I think we are all hypocrites in one way or another. We all have our prejudices and judge each...
Ross Rudel’s art has haunted my consciousness for a few years now. Encountering occasional works of his in group shows throughout Los Angeles, I would find myself consistently drawn in and hypnotized by what felt like a quiet, faraway presence filled with hidden potency. The LA–based artist’s sculptures and performances, carefully crafted and often employing found objects, exude deep mystery and deep purpose. Why does this work—sometimes so slight and minimal as to be barely noticeable in the gallery—have so much resonance? Where does this strange energy come from?
“There is no one authentic way to present Asian art and culture,” according to Christina Yu Yu, who was recently appointed as director of the USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, California. “Once you take a piece of art and place it in a case with a spotlight,” she explains, “you remove it from its original context.” Yu well understands the importance of context. Born in Wuhan in China’s Hubei province, she came to the United States as a student and trained in Asian art history here in the West. It was while in the U.S. that she began to appreciate the art of her own culture. “Sometimes it takes distance” she admits, “to learn about where you are really from.” Her point of view, both Eastern and Western, as well as her academic and professional background place her in a unique position to lead a museum of Asian art in the greater Los Angeles area, where, despite a growing population of transplanted Asians like herself, the art of the East is not widely appreciated.
When I arrive at Night Gallery to meet gallerists Mieke Marple and Davida Nemeroff, behind the front desk are champagne bottles and other artifacts leftover from “Sexy Beast,” the Planned Parenthood Los Angeles (PPLA) benefit/art auction. The event, which took place...
Elizabeth Turk transforms huge blocks of marble into refined sculptures, pieces that display classical beauty and technical virtuosity. Observing the graceful artist at work in her studio in a Santa Ana marble yard—wearing ear protectors, safety glasses and padded...
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art continues to set a high bar for film exhibitions with their latest, “Haunted Screens: German Cinema in the 1920s.” The striking exhibition design by architects Amy Murphy and Michael Maltzan has it “interrupted” by three...
In September, while in New York, I popped into the Whitney to check out the occupation of the entire museum by Jeff Koons. While I’m not under the spell of what The New York Review of Books recently proclaimed “The Cult of Koons,” the “Banality” series of the 1980s is...
In a brick-arched space of the Serpentine Sackler Gallery—a Grade 1-listed 19th-century building in the middle of Hyde Park, originally designed to store gunpowder during the Napoleonic wars—a strange noise is being emitted. It comes from a pair of transparent...
As the philosopher Lindsey Buckingham once observed “You win prizes if you stay, because that’s how we do it in LA.” When I landed in here in the very early ’90s, there were a number of local art legends who had been working the program for decades, yet seemed to have...
Running the words “memory, narrative, perception, artist statement” into an Internet browser unleashes a veritable torrent of results. Take this: “I am interested in narrative, memory and the influence of place upon our perception of these topics.” And this: “Most of...
A lover of Marsden Hartley’s landscapes, especially the “Dogtown” series, I have never been interested in his so-called cubist series depicting German symbols. Why would someone who could paint the mystical rhythms of Dogtown or the insane colors of the Mexican desert...
When Kai Loebach emigrated to Los Angeles 27 years ago, after a brief vacation during which he was blown away by the friendliness of the people and the “visual orgasm” of a clean-as-new supermarket in the San Fernando Valley, he knew no one, had no place to stay and...
By the late 1960s, whatever fun The Art World had promised with pop art was settling back into something more serious and denim-clad. Glamour was once again a dirty word, and the less there was to see at an art show, the more profound the art was deemed. If one was...
Gallery MovesIt’s a Californian Kinda ThingBy Scarlet Cheng It’s hard to keep up with the rash of new and relocated galleries this year—is this because of the economic rebound, or because Los Angeles continues to become more important in American’s cultural...
Forrest Bess (1911–77) was, by his own account, a man divided. He saw himself as containing two selves: the masculine, roughneck hard-drinking fisherman, and the sensitive painter. He believed that he could unify these parts of himself by surgically becoming a...
Once a city on the margins of the art world, Hong Kong now sits center stage, boasting the world’s third-largest art market. A wealth of galleries, museums and art centers can be found on either side of Victoria Harbor, which separates the commercial center, Hong Kong...
Darren Almond’s two decades of paintings, sculptures, videos and photographs reflect on time as a paradox. He is not the only contemporary artist to investigate time as a subject—Andy Goldsworthy, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and John Divola come to mind—but his approach...
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