Tandem shows by Candice Lin and Genesis Belanger divide François Ghebaly into two curious realms as materially engaging as they are thought-provoking. Each artist's work is replete with backstories of historical and anthropological purport. Incorporating weaving,...
Last Thursday night I walked amongst the hoards of tourists, along the Hollywood walk of fame and arrived at my destination – a storefront in the corner of a strip-mall with blackout windows and no light coming from inside. Upon opening the doors to Freedman...
Greyhounds sprint in front of Frank Stella paintings; songbirds perch before Rothkos; a metallurgist pours glowing popcorn from a giant crucible: These are just a few goings-on in "All of the Above," Ralph Allen Massey's entertaining painting show at bG Gallery....
Michael Massenburg’s paintings eddy about the boundaries of figuration and abstraction. The artist’s acrylic on paper and acrylic and collage on panel, earth-toned works, which seem to encircle first the one, and then, the other mode of painting, express an intuitive...
A wide range of passion-filled projects added excitement to the art scene this past weekend, ranging from a stellar three-artist exhibition at Castelli to the 2019 COLA event at Barnsdall Art Park’s Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. On Saturday night, the moving,...
In the early 1980's, George Condo coined the neologism "artificial realism" to describe his unique manner of interpreting human contrivance through emotively exaggerative paintings. Rather than growing stale, his work only seems to increase in relevance as reality...
Littered with newsprint—though not from an actual newspaper, but instead, oversized diptychs (34 x 21 inches) printed with news photographs and headlines drawn from The New York Times—the gallery floor in York Chang’s installation The Signal and the Noise (all works...
This past Saturday there were an exciting array of openings to attend, but top on my list was in lieu gallery’s opening "Body remnants, and other impressions." The exhibition organized by Kate Eringer featured work by Jack C. Baker, Alice Jacobs, Bennet Schlesinger,...
Heidi Hahn's grandly scaled paintings lend iconic status to plain-Jane women going about quotidian routines. Breezily limned in free-flowing brushstrokes and translucent washes, her anonymous characters appear lost in dreamy, meditative worlds even as they shop,...
Roy Dowell seems to be forever attempting to reconcile physical actualities or their aftermaths with moments of apprehension or anticipation, agents or instrumentalities with their symbolic equivalents. Collage is his medium par excellence, but in recent years, his...
As noted in 1001 Things Everyone Should Know about African American History (1996) by Jeffrey Stewart, Althea Gibson received her first tennis racket in 1940, being barely a teenager. She was not only the first African American to win a women’s singles at Wimbledon;...
In a world where robots gauge workers' bathroom breaks, attending to one's basic needs is seen as an indulgence. Current buzz around "self-care," a notion often shrouded in a mystical feel-good aura as though it were elusive as a rainbow, attests the dysfunctionality...
The Conspiracy of Art: Part I; a prelude or forward Entering the Bendix Building, at which Chateau Shatto is located (“[on] the 10th floor,” the security guard kindly reminds me, without my telling him which gallery I am looking for), one feels momentarily transported...
The exhibition not to miss this past weekend was the jam-packed opening at the Brand Library and Gallery in Glendale. With Sway, curated by Chenhung Chen, artists Debbie Carlson, Chenhung Chen, Gina Herrera, Echo Lew, Snezana Saraswati Petrovic, Linda Sue Price, and...
Via distortion and exaggeration, Christina Quarles strips figures to their essence, exposing aspects of the human condition in the raw. Recalling Francis Bacon with a more hopeful, feminine twist, the large-scale paintings in Quarles' Regen Projects show, "But I Woke...
Different memories within each of our lives are associated with some space and with distinct details that carry the narrative of any specific occurrence. In Augusta Wood’s second solo exhibit at DENK, “The Shape of My Head,” the environment becomes the storyteller of...
Dear Reader, The inimitable philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote On The Concept of History in 1940 while fleeing the Nazi death machine and his words have never been more prescient: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘emergency situation’ in which we...
NEW FAIRS IN TOWN, PART 2 I don’t know about you, but Yours Truly is still recovering from our robust art fair season, when for one weekend in February we had five fairs bubbling up around the city. Seeing wonderful work was bliss, driving through traffic in the rain...