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...
“I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap and still comes out on top”—Claes OldenburgNearly everyone who has ever written about art in Los Angeles has had to face the question I’m facing now: Should I write this by the pool, or stay in bed?This is a...
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...
John Knuth’s provocative “Base Alchemy” juxtaposes minimal abstractions: tiny specks of dark paint over solid lighter colors; stretched reflective Mylar surfaces torn to reveal predominantly monochromatic backgrounds. Knuth’s Mylar images pay homage to Lucio Fontana,...
This summer, in what seemed like a large seizure of prime advertising real estate, 10 LA billboards were repurposed for an alternative exhibition of text-based artworks by the Scottish artist Robert Montgomery. Sponsored by the Do Art Foundation and Art Share LA,...
Nostalgia for the raw flow of dreams suffuses Stas Orlovski’s hypnotic installation, “Chimera,” activating a longing for the power of imagination as dreams coalesce into interpretation and noetic concerns. Orlovski conjures a fantastic synthesis from diverse parts:...
“FOOD - WATER - LIFE” presents a sort of equation, a distillation of concerns about immigration, labor and meaning in a globalized economy that drags our personal lives along for the ride.Married French artists Lucy+Jorge Orta construct a figurative Ikea catalog of...
“Domesticating Disturbances,” Nathan Huff’s solo exhibit of drawings and paintings in gouache and sculpture/installation never dogmatically adheres to a set of organizing principles, instead freely adapting ideas to form a unique figurative language. His point of...
Taking the animal kingdom as a point of departure, Japanese-born artist Misako Inaoka explores formal and conceptual concerns, posing broad questions about life on our planet, its evolution and human interventions. As man exerts continual domination over beast, with...
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