Last December, with little fanfare, a major monograph celebrating the great postwar photographer Art Kane came into being. A 20-years-in-the-making labor of love for his son Jonathan, it presents, in one gorgeous volume, the first truly cumulative collection of Kane’s...
RECONNOITER
Francesco X. Siqueiros is an artist/printmaker, founder of El Nopal Press, publishing fine-art limited-edition prints since 1990 in downtown Los Angeles. The focus of El Nopal Press is to underscore the heterogeneous nature of culture and to acknowledge its borders...
“Alien She”
The Riot Grrrl movement, which emerged in reaction to the male-dominance and sexism that infused West Coast punk scenes in the 1990s, spawned a subcultural movement in art, publishing, and performance. Even in the resolutely anti-establishment punk rock scene, many...
Eric Wesley
Eric Wesley loves to kid around and unbalance the viewer. In this survey or rearrangement and reworking of objects from his production dating back a decade, he checks in with a wide variety of works distributed in a clock pattern throughout the spacious warehouse...
Leigh Salgado
Our clothes are, as Virginia Woolf reminds us, more than “vain trifles” serving “to merely keep us warm.” Instead, as Woolf asserts, “They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.” Art that turns our attention to our clothes illuminates how we see each...
Mernet Larsen
Born in 1940, Florida based painter Mernet Larsen exhibits a body of older as well as recent paintings in her Los Angeles debut. These moderate-sized canvases feature geometrically distorted figures that populate skewed interior and exterior spaces. After teaching...
JESSICA RATH
“A Better Nectar” is a rare exhibition merging art with nature, while focusing on the daily activities of bees—those diligent flying insects that pollinate our planet. Among this show’s surprising pieces are several larger-than-life fiberglass sculptures that...
Theodora Allen
William Blake’s proverb “Eternity is in love with the productions of time” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is an apt lens through which to contemplate the paintings of Theodora Allen, both because her style and imagery suggest the visionary Romantic painter and...
AMIR H. FALLAH
Despite their welter of contrivances, and their aesthetic dependency on such elaboration, Amir Fallah’s paintings maintain a deep, charming and abiding sense of mystery. Like so much current painting that conflates figurative and abstract elements—and like so much...
James O. Clark
The show’s title, “1993 to 2011,” gave some indication of the artist’s preoccupation with the relative ‘curve’ of time; but that was scarcely half of it. Clark took full advantage of the space-time manifold within the gallery’s rectangular ‘white cube’ space, not...
Cornelia Schulz
Last fall Patricia Sweetow relocated to Oakland’s vibrant Uptown district, where Spun Smoke, her new venue, combines fine art with high-end, high-fire ceramics and a few skeins of her very own hand-spun, hand-dyed wool. Spun Smoke recently presented work by...
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook
Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s retrospective at SculptureCenter in Queens, New York, and her concurrent solo exhibition at the Tyler Rollins Gallery titled “Niranam” is the work of a profound humanist. Using videos as her primary medium, she tackles subjects...
Pierre Huyghe
The first ever retrospective of Pierre Huyghe’s work presents 50 works spanning 20 years which, like flicking through a scrapbook, provide a montage of Huyghe’s most prevalent themes, motifs and inspirations, drawn from the fields of literature, film, music, science...
Jim Morphesis
To walk into the Jim Morphesis exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of California Art is to be flooded by rich, intense waves of color. The tsunami of red, blue, black and white is matched by roiling surges of thick, densely textured impasto. Only after the initial...
Brenna Youngblood
Revealing a neglected and deliciously beautiful world from which we get only a handful of 72” x 60” snapshots—monochromatic yet stippled with smears, cracks and drips—Brenna Youngblood’s eight massive canvases, all mixed media, narrate a fall from grace. Titles...
Al Payne
This survey of Al Payne’s work goes back a half century and spans his entire career, establishing the late artist as an assured painter and colorist, no matter what his subject matter or his style: figurative or abstract, conceptual or retinal. That is, the survey...
Sadie Benning
Artists known for their breakthrough projects or a specific style often have difficulty changing directions. Fortunately, Sadie Benning has resisted this conundrum, moving successfully between mediums and subjects. Her early works were confessional videos created with...
Zhao Zhao
Chinese dissident artist Zhao Zhao is inevitably associated with Ai Weiwei, both because he worked with the renowned older artist and because he has experienced the same persecution at the hands of the Chinese government—arrest, travel bans, confiscation of artwork....