Leo Mock’s oil stick, oil and charcoal paintings are imaginative hybrids that distort the recognizable elements found in the natural landscape into something fantastic and surreal. Through six large-scale paintings, viewers are taken on a journey to an unknown world....
From an ultramarine field, a glyph emerges. It is the shape of something, human or animal, and it appears to pirouette in the center of the canvas. Drawing closer reveals other marks scratched into the surface of the blue, or small fragments embedded in the field. One...
Installation—often understood as the act of locating, positioning and inserting—has, in Nari Ward’s exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch gallery in Los Angeles, intersected with the examination of founding American democratic principles. This combination of past works and...
In his kinetic objects and interactive environments, Nick Dong combines the simple, fractal serenity of Buddhist design with the quirky warmth of Victorian curio cabinets, as well as a refined yet theatrical sense of surprise. Across a handful of discrete objects and...
The very model for a great photographer in the post-World War II era was Henri Cartier-Bresson, a cosmopolitan heir to a fortune who was a co-founder of the photographic cooperative Magnum and traveled the world taking photographs with his hand-held Leica camera. His...
The sculptures in Dozie Kanu’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles flirt with functionality but refuse to reveal a clear purpose. Instead, these stylish hybrids possess the elegance of aspirational interior design and the subtle menace of dystopian relics. Many of...
Subterranean Smog is not one color or another, but a sickening miasma of grays, browns and a lingering smoky orange. Drawn from the bowels of the earth, SS identifies with the antihero -- Pig Pen in Charlie Brown, Sir Gawain, the Green Knight, Alex from a Clockwork...
Almost all of Chuck Close’s paintings were based on photographs he took himself. In the mid-1980s, when I was a curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, I contacted Close with the first museum proposal he had had to do an exhibition of the photographs....
It’s hard to imagine another time in my life when the word “home” will carry so much weight. The past year has redefined it for all of us. Home has become more vital than ever, yet home is more unstable than ever. Home is where we were told to stay, but home has been...
Identity evolution, struggles and troubled transitions are familiar themes and storylines in Outfest fare, and Phil Connell’s Jump, Darling (the U.S. release of which was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic) fits neatly if slightly awkwardly into this category. What’s...
Neon is a medium that has been used over time to beckon, and Leticia Maldonado’s work viewed through the large glass windows of Bermudez Projects in Cypress Park does exactly that. Maldonado’s “Autonoetic” is a collection of mixed media that blends delicately thin...
“Ride on the street, man.” With difficulty, I attempted to maneuver my way around a young couple who, with their three dogs, were hogging the entire sidewalk. “I beg your pardon,” I said, as I cleared these five figures, who had only made the most minimal effort to...
Lachrymose Lemon cannot stop weeping. She sobs uncontrollably at everything all the time: the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace, softball games, dinosaur conventions, the day her favorite chicken finally laid an egg. From the moment the sun rises to the last...
Andy Kolar’s new show at Walter Maciel Gallery, “Head in the Clouds/Left Hanging,” is a play in three acts. Like any good play, and more so than most solo exhibitions, there is a vital rhythm and active plot – a cadence. And for good reason: Kolar’s exploration of...
We observe this unfolding in Packer’s paintings: intimate, cozy scenes of home life turn into majestic statements of Blackness, power, and vulnerability. There is something political about how dynamic these paintings are and how they challenge the conventions of portraiture painting. The paintings actively diverge from the authority and rigidness associated with classical portraiture.
Fans of Los Angeles' Craft Contemporary museum will enjoy Above & Below at Shoshana Wayne Gallery. The exhibition features twelve artists working in textile art, ranging from ethnic craft traditions to the wildly unconventional. The show marks the Los Angeles...
Art dealer Douglas Chrismas, the former long-time owner of LA’s storied Ace Gallery, was arrested July 27, 2021 and charged with embezzling $260,000 from Ace Gallery’s bankruptcy estate. Chrismas pleaded not guilty and was released on $50,000 bond. He was spotted by a...
“What are we looking at?” You hear that (usually rhetorical) question a lot in art galleries and design houses – also in accounting firms, screening rooms, at construction sites, and (really) business meetings of any kind – frequently spoken with some impatience. ...
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