Metamorphosis can refer to processes both natural and supernatural; but the works in Douglas Tausik Ryder’s exhibition of this title, while they reference the commonly understood biomorphic dimension, also encompass a much larger domain: the metamorphosis between...
They gaze at us with supreme confidence. They are gods after all, aren’t they? Or leaders certainly – leaders of men. That is to say, soldiers – and they are all men, though anatomical details beyond the head are concealed beneath those often strikingly well-tailored...
If it feels as if it’s been years since you saw work by Beverly Pepper, it probably has. I don’t think she was even included in the Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel “Revolution In the Making” debut show. Not revolutionary enough? Or too far from the madding crowd? Pepper...
For those of us who grew up in America in the second half of the 20th century, especially the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, it would have been impossible to go through middle or high school without stumbling across certain staple school stationery supplies. One such...
The curators of Ecstasy, Virginia Broersma, Nick Brown and Kio Griffith, characterize their show as an “exhibition and lab” (the latter aspect of which may be more prominent in a couple of the objects by Candice Lin included here); but its installation has the airy...
Sometime between the morning of November 9th and the current holiday season, there was an interruption in the more or less weekly postings in this space. It’s not like it’s never happened before. I do drop out of sight now and again; and there are those intervals when...
As 2016 winds to a close, a lot of us are looking back on the past year, and (with some trepidation) forward to 2017, and wondering how we managed to arrive at this particular time and place. ‘How could we have missed….?’ – fill in the blank. The short answer is that...
Doug Aitken sings the earth and cosmos electric in a mid-career retrospective that could be a Pick of the Year exhibition. The Geffen space, which has never looked better, was entirely made over for the show – an immersive odyssey to mirror Aitken’s own process with...
Matthew Rosenquist knows his way around the block. I mean that in every sense. He’s acutely attuned to a certain street culture and attitude in common circulation both in L.A. and elsewhere – a suburbanized (and slightly desperate) vernacular observed not only in...
In Maria Lassnig’s career, we trace a continuously evolving negotiation between the conscious self and the alternately concrete and conceptualized other. The body of Lassnig’s work – evolving over the course of her long career from her first expressionist essays into...
R. H. Quaytman’s Morning: Chapter 30 has an assertive, unrelenting horizontal presence, but it really represents a kind of constellation – coextensive with the larger universe of associations that populate Quaytman’s entire body of work. That constellation may be...
Jeffrey Vallance was already something of a legend when I first became acquainted with his work – an ‘interventionist’ style of conceptual art in which the performance became a kind of deconstructed cultural inquiry. My first impression came by way of captioned...
Sometimes the bravest show can be one that parses its meanings seemingly by millimeters in the sheer sense structures to be elucidated between one work and the next. This is in pronounced contrast to the relatively unfiltered cascades of sensation that dominate many...
We Americans live in interesting times. The old Chinese curse has come home to roost long before the country itself has supplanted our economic and cultural hegemony. We have more freedom, more choices generally – but we’re not equally informed or empowered to sort...
It’s Halloween and it’s about time I finished my walk-through of Guillermo del Toro’s reconfigured ‘Bleak House’ home/office/inspiration space in the Art of the Americas Building at LACMA. What, after all, could have been keeping me so long? Maybe I simply needed a...
“The sound of gunfire, off in the distance, / I’m getting used to it now….” The words are from a 1979 Talking Heads song, “Life During Wartime,” which inspired the title and concept for this group show of five artists – Sadie Barnette, Aaron Fowler, Farrah Karapetian,...
You probably know Brian Rea’s work even if you’re not familiar with his name. In fact, it’s probable that you do know his name by now because his illustrations seem to be almost everywhere from book jackets and frontispieces to half the magazines you pick up, and even...
It is almost an existential question – of art, creation, medium – the ‘still point of the turning world … (w)here the dance is,’ to paraphrase Eliot’s “Burnt Norton.” Helen Frankenthaler was already well into her early maturity by 1962, which is where this 25 year...
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