The concept of an artist commemorating a particular time and place is always interesting, specifically in this case the border between Tijuana and the U.S. Here, the creation of images becomes a means by which the artist begins to understand his own deeply personal...
Grind
The idea of a failed utopia is certainly nothing new as those of us who live in any bustling city like Los Angeles will tell you, but the way in which this failure is understood can, and must be, redefined according to the state of disintegration we have become...
Alexis Smith
Mining the territory of surrealism, juxtaposing everyday objects to create metaphoric meanings; Alexis Smith, in collaboration with poet Amy Gerstler, have created a visual journey that encompasses a wide array of associations—some witty, some violent. Working mostly...
Robert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe's recent retrospective at LACMA is stunning in its breadth and cohesiveness. What comes across most profoundly is the artist's sensitivity to his subjects. When looking at these images one senses the artist's own investment in these relationships....
Shirley Tse
Shirley Tse is one my favorite artists working in Los Angeles today and her fifth exhibition at Shoshana Wayne is once again astonishingly inventive, moving and full of wonder. Reminiscent of Louise Bourgeois' strangely magnificent totems of the 1950s, Tse's...
Joakim Ojanen
Joakim Ojanen's playfully enigmatic ceramic sculptures are strangely endearing. Throughout the exhibition, the artist has set up a series of intimate vignettes using small-scale ceramic figures of people with bald heads and duckbill faces engaged in the various and...
Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman's stunning retrospective at The Broad constitutes a compendium of fiercely iconic imagery that has, for decades, influenced our cultural vision of how women are represented in the media. The exhibition spans 20 years and represents the largest holding...
Tigeraugen (Tiger Eyes) Martin Durazo and Kottie Paloma
In their recent collaborative exhibition, Martin Durazo and Kottie Paloma have created a dialogue that is both socially conscious and willfully playful. Durazo's raw canvas works incorporate an odd array of materials including acrylic paint, found macramé, spray...
Elliott Hundley
Elliott Hundley's fourth exhibition at Regen Projects once again takes its narrative cue from literature, specifically Antonin Artaud’s play, There Is No More Firmament, also the title of his show. These mostly large-scale works possess a dynamism of movement, shape...
Marc Fichou
Imagine being able to chart the interior of someone's brain—to witness ideas as they begin to take shape between ecstatically firing neurons. This is “intermedial” artist Marc Fichou's obsession as evidenced in his most recent exhibition “Outside-In.” Fichou succeeds...
Paco Pomet
Paco Pomet's newest paintings on view at Richard Heller Gallery are unusually wondrous and gorgeously rendered. Drawing from a surrealist impulse, these works celebrate the “stranger in a strange land,” with all its complex vicissitudes. More often than not the...
Delicious Taste (Grant Levy-Doolittle & Bruce Yonemoto)
Technology is always suspect, even in its pleasurableness. We love to hate it, yet we rely on it arguably to the point of our own obliteration. Bruce Yonemoto and Grant Levy-Doolittle have quite literally woven together the fibers that decimate information in our...
Dirk Braeckman
Dirk Braeckman's photographs celebrate the passing moment. Images that we are all too familiar with yet often take for granted, are laid bare in exquisite and ethereal shades of gray whereby a single tree set into the landscape explodes with a glowing internal...
Amy Park
New York-based artist Amy Park, in her second solo show at Kopeikin Gallery has reproduced, in intimate and gorgeously rendered watercolors, Ed Ruscha's 1966 seminal book project “Every Building On The Sunset Strip.” This is no easy task to be sure, and Park nails...
TRI (…ed) Revisting TRI Gallery
Artist Rory Devine has organized a perfectly exquisite gem of a show at Wilding Cran Gallery. One that revisits—with much celebratory aplomb—the artists who once exhibited at the fabled TRI Gallery back in the 1990s. Though disparate, thankfully the artists featured...
Abel Alejandre
Abel Alejandre's meticulously crafted charcoal drawings address the complexities of the human experience with eloquence and power. "Public Secrets" represents an amalgam of acrylic paintings (and paintings on hats) that memorialize the richness of the world we live...
Deveron Richard
Sometimes “outsider” artists are really not that far outside, though they may indeed be “far out” in content and imagination. Deveron Richard, whose first exhibition at The Good Luck Gallery in Chinatown, is far out in its glorious exploration into the fantastical...
Carrie Seid
In the tradition of the famous and innovative Light and Space artists working in Los Angeles in the 1960s, Carrie Seid fashions beautiful sculptural works that, like her predecessors, celebrate light in all its luminous vicissitudes. For Seid, optics can be an...