Rina Banerjee's assemblages are fantastical potpourris of color, texture and cultural references. The title of her 20-year retrospective, "Make Me a Summary of the World," encapsulates her ambition of laying bare the fluid interdependency of ostensibly discrete...
"Los Angeles is a city without a past," urban geographer Michael Dear once declared, referring to the city's penchant for effacing its own history. Yet an enthralling exhibition at the Hilbert Museum attests that LA does, indeed, have a past, one recorded in vibrant...
Fragmentary castoffs and debris from the LA River texturize Jennifer West's current show, "Future Forgetting," whose title was inspired by Norman Klein's 1997 book The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, a treatise on how Los Angeles...
In life (1922-1995), Cameron's art was often overshadowed by her colorful bohemian persona as occultist and wife of Jack Parsons. But one need know nothing about her to appreciate her drawings and paintings, each of which exudes an intense bewitching presence. Some of...
Nicolas Party's imaginary world contains no wilderness, only bright graphic artifice based loosely on nature and historical art. In his depopulated landscapes such as Trees (all works 2020), tree trunks and branches are smooth cylinders whose leaves fall like confetti...
The economy is crashing; coronavirus and panic are spreading like wildfires; and political lines are being drawn in shifting sands. What better time to enjoy the near-apocalyptic visions of Lisa Adams and Kelly McLane? "Unreality," their first joint show, arrives at...
Evoking life's inconstancy, little is certain in Gracie DeVito's paintings, which seem to shift in the blink of an eye from abstraction to representation and back again. Even the edges of her shaped canvases seem to sway, slump, wiggle and distend as though struggling...
Perusing the 37 paintings by various Ghanaian artists in “Praise Portraits from Ghana: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly...!” feels like peering into an exotic parallel dimension of popular culture. At a glance, these depictions of mostly American actors, singers,...
Farrah Karapetian's current show, "The Photograph is Always Now," is a touching rumination on the loss of her father, who died of cancer last year. Furthering her ongoing exploration of photography's potential for semi-fictionally recasting bygones into the present,...
Entering Nonaka-Hill feels like stepping outdoors into a Japanese rock garden. Plant matter and sculptures populate a white-pebble substrate. Evoking sky or water, deep blue walls contribute to a sensation of tranquility. The parking lot outside seems a world away....
"Photography is dead," Christopher Russell declares in the statement for his current show, arguing that with the ease and popularity of digital manipulation, "there is no longer a belief that the captured image is anything more than a record of personalized fictions."...
At the Wende Museum, "The Medea Insurrection: Radical Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain" spotlights 33 artists that lived in Eastern Bloc countries during Soviet rule. This provocatively themed survey includes familiar names such as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Geta...
Irvine-based painter Francis DiFronzo has a knack for capturing the eerie desolation of the Mojave Desert. The title of his show, "Proof of Life," speaks to the fact that his paintings are devoid of people, yet replete with signs of civilization and the desert's own...
Floral, terrene, celestial and human elements coalesce to form otherworldly realms in Kristy Luck's paintings suffused with mysterious symbolism. Evoking subconscious vistas, the Los Angeles artist's scenes are reminiscent of abstract landscapes by Modernist painters...
At the Getty, two exhibitions of works on paper examine process and technique while presenting disparate views of peasantry. The Getty Research Institute's "Käthe Kollwitz: Prints, Process, Politics" comprises over 50 prints, preparatory drawings and studies by...
Enchanting objects spill from tiny containers in "The Box Project," an unconventional show of 76 artists from three countries. These artworks were not originally intended for public display; rather, they were created as part of an esoteric correspondence between three...
The LA art world has seen an exceptional year. Even as big-name artists and galleries prevail amid the booming market, previously unrecognized artists are being shown more widely than ever; and sociopolitical issues are driving much of the critical discourse. Of the...
“Elegy,” the title of Cynthia Daignault’s show, referenced Robert Motherwell’s 1948-1967 “Elegies to the Spanish Republic.” In contrast to his abstractions mourning the results of the Spanish Civil War, her representational portrayals lament the passage of time, with...
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