Jonas Wood’s highly patterned and flattened paintings take up all four gallery rooms at David Kordansky Gallery. Evoking the decorative arts, their inherently “attractive” quality reminds one of a painted mosaic. Wood created this affect by using deliberate linear...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Jonas Wood
OUTSIDE LA: Andy Warhol Aspen Art Museum
It’s rare to encounter a Warhol exhibition with something genuinely new to say, but somehow Lifetimes (a co-production of Tate Modern, Museum Ludwig, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Aspen Art Museum — its only U.S. venue) accomplishes it. Thanks to both the thoughtful...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Ed Templeton Roberts Projects
Deceptively clean, simple, and filled with Southern California light, Ed Templeton’s new exhibition “The Spring Cycle” explores life in a suburban Southern California beach. And it has a deeper context: a critique of the banal isolation that often permeates suburbia....
Pick of the Week: Noelia Towers de boer
Be careful not to break a mirror, or it’s seven years of bad luck. Don’t hang a horseshoe upside down unless you want the luck it holds to trickle out the ends. Step on a crack, break your mama’s back. Though they are most often recalled trivially and half-jokingly,...
THE FRUGAL MEAL Ethereal Sandwiches and the Demand for Less
I’m not in the habit of writing restaurant reviews but I was so moved by a recent dining experience that I simply had to share it. I needed to get something to eat in a hurry and decided to check out a local lunch counter that has been doing spectacular business for a...
OUTSIDE LA: Gosha Levochkin The Hole, New York
Kicking off 2022, New York’s The Hole has debuted a solo show from Gosha Levochkin, the gallery’s first with the Russian American artist. Wild, vibrant and interminably buzzing, Last Element is rife with bright constructivist shapes, cartoonish figures and references...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Ross Bleckner Vielmetter Los Angeles
Ross Bleckner’s first solo show in 25 years, “Sehnsucht” at Vielmetter Los Angeles, is a haunting meditation on longing and the cerebral process of lamenting. The 15 new pieces (created from 2019 to 2021) are fleeting in nature, chilling and deep. Mostly large in...
Pick of the Week: Ken Gonzales-Day Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
In "Another Land" at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Ken Gonzales-Day invites viewers to face the ugliest parts of ourselves and our nation’s history: its legacy of racialized violence. This latest series of drawings is informed by Gonzales-Day’s extensive research into...
Pick of the Week: Jane Margarette Anat Ebgi
Jane Margarette’s otherworldly sculptures and installations mine the tensions between the rough and the sensual, the realistic and the fantastical, the mechanical and the organic. In her exhibition at Anat Ebgi, A Honey of a Tangle, Margarette has created a suite of...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Gianna Vargas TAG Gallery
Gianna Vargas’ latest body of work “Dessicate,” comprises photos taken throughout December of 2021 during the middle of the pandemic. The work stems from Vargas’ trip to Utah where she took images of the forest amid winter decay. I made my way toward the intimate back...
Remarks on Color: Mourning Dove Brown February's Hue
Imagine existing between two worlds, neither here nor there, neither one thing nor another, brown, then pink, then a shimmering iridescent green. Life is very confusing for Mourning Dove Brown, as she is continuously changing color depending on the light, the time of...
GALLERY ROUNDS: The Loft at Liz’s Group Exhibition "A Practical Guide to Parlour Games & Magic"
Dazzlingly inventive and lovingly curated by Jason Jenn and Vojislav Radovanovic, “A Practical Guide to Parlour Games & Magic” at The Loft at Liz’s, features work by Phoebe Barnum, Brad Davis, Adrienne Devine, Doug Hammett, Orit Harpaz, Jason Jenn, Ashley...
Ten More to Remember — or simply bring to Los Angeles Postscript to the 2021 Artillery Top Ten
As I wrote to preface ARTILLERY’s 2021 “Top Ten” compilation, there could have easily been a parallel list of 10 or more shows and exhibitions approaching the level of the ten I selected. At one time, the magazine designated a few “honorable mentions,” usually, as I...
Pick of the Week: Shrubs Night Gallery
Upon entering the stunning new group show at Night Gallery, one of my first thoughts was: Why is it called Shrubs? A shrub conjured in my mind a certain nondescript, low-growing bush — nothing memorable and certainly nothing to write home about. But after walking...
LA Art Show is Back Highlights, Fair ends this weekend.
Commandeering a mere 180,000 square feet the of the Los Angeles Convention Center’s 760,000, the LA Art Show Modern + Contemporary, resurrected after last year’s COVID cancellation, offers a brief glimpse of the offerings of more than 80 galleries—foreign, domestic,...
Travels in the Midwest Musing on Art and Architecture
A couple of months ago I took short trips to Phoenix and Denver for a change of scenery, to indulge in culture, and to see the rebranding of Sheraton hotels. Denver is a surprisingly interesting city, and we stayed in the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel, which is very...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Ilana Savdie Kohn Gallery
Ilana Savdie’s first solo show with Kohn Gallery comprises 13 canvases and nine works on paper. Savdie uses vivid color, structure and composition to explore ideas of a liquid world as a metaphor to an ever-changing identity. The title of the exhibit “Entrañadas”...
Pick of the Week: Kentaro Kawabata Nonaka-Hill
To walk through Kentaro Kawabata’s solo exhibition at Nonaka-Hill is to be constantly excited by original and unexpected forms around every corner. Working with porcelain clay, Kawabata creates an alchemical wonderland by amalgamating innovative materials into...