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Byline: Annabel Osberg
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Ralph Allen Massey
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. Eighty-one artworks, one for each year of the artist’s age and nearly all completed within the last few years, are arranged in loosely thematic salon-style clusters. A feeling akin to rummaging through a grab bag unfolds as you peruse the prolific octogenarian’s easel-sized panels painted with deadpan realism; you never know what you might find among his irreverent concoctions of subjects culled from the animal kingdom, popular culture, art history and vintage memorabilia. Massey’s studied technical fineness lends weight to his antic portrayals touching on issues ranging from destruction of nature to societal thirst for spectacle. By way of devices such as shaped panels and trompe l’oeil frames, his best pieces, such as This Critical Industry (2018, pictured above) and Girl Before a Mirror (after Picasso) (2013), cleverly exploit painting’s inherent artifice. A major motif is popcorn, which may be interpreted as a commentary on the Hollywoodish theatricality of everyday life in a culture adept at squeezing bankable entertainment out of the most mundane activities. At the opening reception, guests were served popcorn—a playful tie-in reminder that gallery shows are spectacle, too.
bG Gallery
3009 Ocean Park Blvd.
Santa Monica, CA 90405
Show runs through Jun. 9 -
George Condo
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 becomes ever more absurd as a grotesque cartoon. I initially find it difficult not to laugh when confronted by his mixed-up monsters that so aptly emblematize life’s myriad follies. Although the effect is similarly humorous in small-scale reproduction, paintings such as Birdbrain (pictured above, all works 2018) must be seen in person. Blown up on immense canvases, Condo’s characters appear especially preposterous for their grandiose scale. However, upon closer examination, they aren’t so comical. Superficial levity evolves into gloom as one approaches any given painting and gets caught up in dark webs of expressionistic brushwork. Even the cartoonish crowds in Internal Network and What’s the Point? dissemble simplicity; yet trying to make sense of them could occupy a considerable interval. In an artist statement, Condo ruminates on post-truth themes and his own decision-making under the guise of this show’s rhetorical title, “What’s the Point?” The question needs no verbal answer; a sense of purpose emanates from his every painted passage.
Sprüth Magers Los Angeles
5900 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036
Show runs through Jun. 1 -
Heidi Hahn
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, sweep, picnic and scroll through their smartphones. In contrast to society’s usual preoccupation with women’s appearance, Hahn de-emphasizes her subjects’ physicality, leaving their identities generic in favor of accentuating states of mind. Obscurely rendered in moody, multilayered transparencies, the women in paintings such as Burn Out in Shredded Heaven 10 (2018-19) appear as specters inhabiting liminal realms where daydreams overlay dull realities. It’s difficult to determine exactly what Hahn’s figures are doing, or where they are; yet they exude potent emotion. In Burn Out in Shredded Heaven 6 (2018-19, pictured above), a girl leans on her broom during a pensive moment in the middle of sweeping a floor. Her short white garment could be a lab coat, janitorial smock or nightshirt. Is she a scientist, a maid, or a girl tidying up her house? It matters not, for this idle moment stolen from spring-cleaning drudgery now belongs to her—who could stand for anyone.
Kohn Gallery
1227 North Highland Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90038
Show runs through May 23 -
Sarah Wilson
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 of a society where everyday life has become so toilsome that maintaining one’s wellness seems a luxury. Addressing such issues with morbid satire, Sarah Wilson‘s first solo exhibition, “Self-Careless” at East Hollywood Fine Art, evokes surreal stresses of contemporary living. Four paintings feature an anomic female protagonist who lounges in dishabille about her domicile, donning sheet masks, chain-smoking, and contemplating her own mortality with only a sickly dog and swirling ghastly hallucinations for company. In Mouthfeel (2019, pictured above), she flosses her teeth while a disembodied arm emerges from a larger vision and coats her lashes with mascara even as her eyeball pops out. Suggesting a sleep paralysis dream induced by compulsively punching away on the internet, Shitpost (2019) stars a smartphone-wielding humanoid whose face sprouts a monstrous arm holding yet another phone for enhanced posting capabilities. Complementing these paintings are several sculptures, including Waiting Room (2018), a functional lamp whose ceramic base simulates body parts strung like beads alongside old tires. Augmenting the playful sense of apprehension, a bevy of grossly oversized multicolored cigarettes and a mammoth denim chair evoke the imminent presence of some insalubrious giant that might return any minute and put us mere mortals in our self-careless places.
East Hollywood Fine Art
4316 Melrose Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90029
Show runs through May 18
Limited hours; see gallery website for details -
Christina Quarles
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 Jus’ Tha Same,” portray gymnastically contorted figures melting, seeping and protruding into one another and their surroundings, often appearing engaged in carnal activities of indeterminate nature. In paintings such as Bless tha Nightn’gale (2019, pictured above), gesture and corporeal substance are so jumbled that it’s difficult to tell where one subject ends and where another begins. Severed and reattached limbs twist and turn like snakes; elongated digits writhe like worms. Deformed bodies lack key elements such as heads and are often denuded to bare muscle or bone. Such grotesquerie is counterpointed by the exuberant prettiness of Quarles’ cheery palette, lively patterns and floral motifs. Multiform congruence is her paintings’ most gratifying attribute; divergent brushstrokes, lines and textures dance in variegated harmony against bare beige canvas. The artist has spoken of her own experience with ambiguity as a queer mixed-race woman. Perhaps her unclassifiable figures do not represent separate individuals, but different versions of the same person coming to terms with conflicting facets of her own identity.
Regen Projects
6750 Santa Monica Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90038
Show runs through May 9 -
Sara Kathryn Arledge
Featuring over 60 works on paper and seven films, “Sara Kathryn Arledge: Serene for the Moment” discloses the brilliance of one singular artist who never should have been forgotten. This enthralling retrospective begins with a room of early drawings, archives and a timeline elucidating triumphs and traumas in the life of Arledge (1911–98), who was repeatedly institutionalized for psychological afflictions. Her apathetic husband once had her forcefully committed, which she poignantly detailed in her memoir, “Madness in Memory,” from which this show’s title is derived. Her only child died from suicide at 20. Transcending these personal tribulations, she created a substantial body of avant-garde work that stands staunchly on its own.
Though Arledge earned a Bachelor of Education in Art from UCLA and acknowledged her indebtedness to art history, her idiosyncratic imagery and philosophical musings attest a strong nonconformist ethos. “Our people are being herded into attitudes & subservient behavior that are in violation of their evolution or even survival,” reads one of her notes on display.
Undercurrents of social commentary on conventions and alienation permeate her films’ and paintings’ uncanny scenes, seeming to have originated from a fascinating private netherworld. Motifs of bizarreness and bodily distortion conjure notions of real-life isolation. Her most polished film, Introspection (1941/1946), is an eerie 6-minute phantasmagoria of disembodied limbs and torsos for which Arledge is credited with pioneering a choreographic genre called “cine-dance.” In the late 1940s, she developed her own technique of creating videos by painting on glass slides that were subsequently loaded into projectors and screened in abstract sequences. Luminous organic forms are accompanied by strange sound recordings in experimental films such as Interior Garden II (1978), evoking the feeling of inhabiting microscopic realms of mutating alien bacteria.
Sara Kathryn Arledge, What Do Two Rights Make?, (1983) Film, sound, color; 16 min. 58 sec. © All rights reserved, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive Arledge’s paintings are imbued with a peculiar visual ingeniousness. These feature evocative shapes and nebulous creatures that seem to sprout, dance and mutate as in her videos. A group of watercolors including Untitled (4 Dancing Figures) (1958) brings to mind ghastly mystical versions of Matisse’s dancers. Works such as Untitled (Woman floating) (c. 1956), Summer Night (1966) and Untitled (Abstract with Black, 2 figures on Red) (c. 1964) portray fetal forms, magical plants and fungus-like people that inhabit delirious dreamlike worlds limned in rainbow color. In lively movement and lone totemic forms, such paintings recall a Miroesque surrealism. Yet Arledge’s individualistic practice, like that of Florine Stettheimer, is all her own.
“Let’s not think of the paintings as abstract or surreal or by any other word. I think we can make more direct discoveries in a work of art if we don’t classify it while we are looking at it,” she wrote in 1978. Gentle eschewal of custom ingrains the spirit of her variously delicate and nightmarish oeuvre encompassing ogres, toothy Venus flytrap monsters, dignified chimera and serene abstract realms. Could Portrait of a Shaman (1970) symbolize the artist as a giant eye looking “to pierce through the hypnotic effect of the group of illusions we call conventions”? Perhaps society is finally catching up to Arledge’s intrepid conceptual refusal to settle into prescriptive molds.
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Morgan Mandalay
Morgan Mandalay‘s paintings of tainted jungle paradises are radiant with color and lush verdure, yet they bloom with inklings of mortality. Dead fishes hang amid the umbrage of burning orchards where cadaverous human arms emerge from lurid thickets. Figs and oranges putrefy on snake-inhabited trees thronged by swarms of insects. In Rotten Core (2019, pictured above), ruffled ravens querulously caw in apparent protest of some unseen interloper having just killed the man whose lifeless feet protrude into the scene’s right side. And as though none of this belonged to the real world anyway, toothy cartoon mouths frame scenes such as Uriel (2018), giving the impression that a band of roguish giants were on the verge of swallowing entire jungles. Mandalay applies biblical themes of Eden to more modern subjects of exile and colonial invasion. The artist has mentioned as an influence his grandfather’s first-hand tales of his Cuban motherland and the Castro revolution. Colonizing Paradise, a 2015 book by Jefferson Dillman, discusses various ways in which colonizers estimated Caribbean islands as Edenic gardens embedded with pitfalls—a fraught legacy recalled by Mandalay’s paintings of wonderlands gone wrong. Would walls demarcate paradise? If so, it certainly seems as though they would be comelier, or at least friendlier, than the tall dismal gray one in Tree of a Thousand Fruit (unfulfilled) (2019), which sprouts a bloodshot eye as though betraying a prying mind beyond its mortar.
Klowden Mann
6023 Washington Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
Show runs through May 4 -
Kayne Griffin Corcoran: : Ken Price
Fantasy and reality encroach upon each another in “Works on Paper 1967-1995” by Ken Price (1935-2012) at Kayne Griffin Corcoran. Twenty-eight deceptively straightforward pictures draw you into nuanced realms where familiarity gives way to strangeness. In Price’s prepossessing drawings, abstract sculptures seem eerily alive; ashtrays harbor windows to mini-worlds; jaunty cars pictured on billboards appear as palpable as if they could drive away; and blazing factory smokestacks exude stately dignity even as they cough black clouds over moody lagoons.
Ken Price, Picture Window (1994), Ink and Acrylic on Paper, 20 1/2 x 16 1/2 x 1 1/4 inches (framed). Courtesy the artist and Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles. Photo credit: Flying Studio Price’s most striking series of drawings in this show depict SoCal scenes in a graphic style reminiscent of comic books. These mid-90’s renditions of LA appear surprisingly contemporary, partly because their subjects are generic urban banalities such as freeways, apartment buildings and cramped interiors. Addressing such perennial topics as car culture, pollution and wildfires, the Angeleno artist cast a skeptically fascinated eye on his hometown, wryly insinuating prosaic commercial foundations of society’s ideals. Security, Domesticality, Leisure (all works 1994) encapsulates suburban pretensions in a pink tract house, complete with neat green lawn, sandwiched between a foreground of gray road and a background of smoggy skyscrapers.
Ken Price, Made in L.A. (1994), Ink and Acrylic on Paper, 20 1/2 x 16 1/2 x 1 1/4 inches (framed). Courtesy the artist and Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles. Photo credit: Flying Studio Price rendered smog with such delicacy that it seems an ironically beautiful enhancement to urban environs. In Made in L.A., LA’s imposing skyline shimmers fantastically, bringing to mind L. Frank Baum’s fictitious Oz. Just beyond rush-hour freeway traffic in Downtown, skyscrapers shrouded in golden light evoke an elusive fairyland.
Ken Price, Downtown (1994), Ink and Acrylic on Paper, 20 1/2 x 16 1/2 x 1 1/4 inches (framed). Courtesy the artist and Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles. Photo credit: Flying Studio Set off by blue sky and muted hues outside, the interior space in Picture Window is colorless, matching the blanched auto conspicuously billboarded nearby. Similarly, the billboard outside the window in With Everything Turned Off, is completely blank, as are the television, door, table and divan: Perhaps this home just isn’t complete with the TV off and no giant ad to adorn one’s view.
Ken Price, “Works on Paper 1967-1995,” March 23 – May 4 at Kayne Griffin Corcoran, 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90019, kaynegriffincorcoran.com
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Chris Trueman
The title of Chris Trueman‘s show, “After(image),” betokens the fleeting vivid impressions his paintings convey. Hovering between abstraction and representation, each of his nine vibrant works currently on view at Edward Cella embodies a wide array of marks, evocations and references. Drippy glowing washes are interspersed with luscious smears, brushy swatches, spray-painted spatters, and sinusoidal erasures within compositions whose calligraphic movement recalls Chinese and Japanese ink painting. In large paintings such as BCS (2019), faint suggestions of landscapes, figures and objects emerge from apparent nonobjectivity, only to quickly recede and then morph into other vestiges of representation, as though a surreal scenario by Roberto Matta were dissolving in a Gerhard Richter abstraction. Trueman paints on Yupo, a nonabsorbent synthetic substrate that allows him to readily wipe, carve and squeegee wet acrylic for unusual effects. It also enhances his palette’s intensity akin to LED screens or flower petals in the sun. The cyan swath in BEO (2019, pictured above) might appear as a waterfall or tattered denim; but it doesn’t matter what one sees, one simply wants to continue gazing.
Edward Cella Art + Architecture
2754 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034
Show runs through May 4 -
Graciela Iturbide
The black-and-white magic of Graciela Iturbide‘s photography is difficult to capture in words. Through her lens, quotidian moments acquire an iconic, spiritual quality as life’s dichotomies and death’s mysteries lyrically play out in light, shadow, pattern, and expression. Sparkling with sharp tonality and subtle verve, dozens of her photographs in “Hay Tiempo” at ROSEGALLERY transport you to various parts of Mexico where you vicariously attend carnivals and catch glimpses of goat slaughters, meeting along the way an array of intriguing people including beekeepers, street vendors, barflies, brides, and Zapotec matriarchs. Something about the distrait lady imbibing before a ghastly mural in Mexico DF (1972, pictured above) brings to mind José Guadalupe Posada’s cynically grinning skeletons. Could that woman represent an agent of death, a soon-to-be-victim, or neither? Such ambiguity embedded in striking symbolism is part of Iturbide’s work’s beauty. Providing context, several photos by her mentor, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, hang alongside hers, as do paintings by Francisco Toledo, at whose invitation she traveled to Juchitán, Oaxaca and took several photos featured in this show. The exhibition’s Spanish title translates to “There is time,” a maxim Iturbide absorbed from Bravo, who urged her to slow down, observe, and patiently wait for the right moment to release the shutter. Decades later, her shots’ captivating nuance offers viewers ample pause.
ROSEGALLERY
2525 Michigan Ave., D-4
Santa Monica, CA 90404
Show runs through Apr. 20 -
Cristian Răduță
“The Diamond Hunters,” Cristian Răduță‘s installation at Nicodim Gallery, places you in the midst of an army of animals cobbled from oddments. The Romanian artist’s menagerie of untitled 2019 sculptures encompasses myriad species fashioned from spray-painted wood, cardboard, mirrored garden balls, foam, duct tape, mops, toilet plungers, and various other less-recognizable substances. Just about any stripe of creature one might imagine is present, animatedly posed yet immobile like a taxidermy. A purple gorilla of rough old wood lumbers toward an avian with an absurdly large shiny yellow beak and long ski-like feet; a striped snake with strange wing-like protuberances sticks playfully out of the wall; a silvery chameleon hangs from a rafter, dripping its rope tongue over the floor in a knot entangling a ballpoint pen. Despite their playful affectation, Răduță’s bestial bricolages are more humanly bizarre than garden-variety toys, often bearing blatantly anthropomorphic or monstrous features. A sinking feeling develops as you realize that your surrounding rascals are not innocuous creatures, but chimerical freaks. Moreover, their tactical configuration seems confrontational, overwhelming as in a nightmare. Yet upon closer examination, individuals appear melancholy. Many are pained or impaled by bodily infringements such as plastic water bottles, pipes, or tools; while others are personified as though engaged in activities such as painting or drinking from straws. Răduță’s recycled mutants poignantly express the hidden horrors of our throwaway society’s perpetual undermining of other species. Are they the problem, or are we?
Nicodim Gallery
571 S. Anderson St., Ste. 2
Los Angeles, CA 90033
Show runs through Apr. 13 -
Pierre Picot; Stan Edmondson; Lou Beach
Craig Krull Gallery seems larger than usual for the quantity of intriguing work in its current trio of tandem solo shows. Pierre Picot, Stan Edmondson and Lou Beach each work in different mediums but overlap in their surrealistic sensibilities rooted in prior eras. With somber palettes and playful compositions, Picot’s paintings seem indebted to olden European painters including El Greco, de Chirico, Savinio and Dali. He jumbles landscapes and mundane items in strange, whimsical ways, educing from them a subtle bleak creepiness. Beyond a dismal smokestack in the right-hand corner of Untitled (4-16-17) (2017, pictured above), a meandering river transgresses tempestuous gray sky, overturning spatial reason. The black vase pouring into a mysterious hole portrayed in Picot’s Untitled (9-15-18) (2018) appears nearly identical to an actual vessel in Stan Edmondson’s nearby ceramic installation featuring an eclectic assortment of sculptures and paintings. Edmondson’s untitled clay pieces appear as painterly free-form reinterpretations of classical motifs, animals, and ceramic history. The influence of his father, abstract surrealist Leonard Edmondson, is palpable in his primal shapes. Lou Beach also portrays chimera and employs totemic forms in works such as Vortex (2019) and Lucky Bird in Magic Town (2018); but in contrast with Edmondson’s relatively roughhewn aesthetic, his ephemera collages appear so seamless that at first glance, one is liable to mistake them for drawings. Cartoonish faces and vagarious details spring from Beach’s intricate scenes with grotesque, sardonic humor recalling that of Dada and Art Brut.
Craig Krull Gallery
2525 Michigan Ave., Building B-3
Santa Monica, CA 90404
Shows run through Apr. 6 -
Lara Schnitger
With crafty charm belying provocative content, Lara Schnitger‘s textile collages strike a unique balance between daintiness and mordancy. One of the first pictures you’ll find in her show, “Victory Garden” at Grice Bench, is a portrait titled Judith (all works 2019), which portrays a smartly bedecked woman resting her hands primly on a grimacing severed head, presumably that of Holofernes. This picture’s blocky construction of patterned fabric only enhances its creepy effect. In order to access most of the show, you must pass through White Widow, an eerie spiderweb lattice of stockings stretching from floor to ceiling. Beyond this barrier lies a lair of looming 3D creatures cobbled together of wood, fabric and undergarments. Many of these recall Schnitger’s “Slut-stick” series of sculptures in “Suffragette City,” a feminist performance art parade she has spearheaded in numerous cities over the past few years. In this show, the sculptures seem as faceless, bodiless she-monster puppets about to move at any moment. In pieces such as I Am Evil, sticks act as skeletons for grotesquely overstretched lingerie underneath which no vestige of skin may be found, making a mockery of contradictory notions that shape popular societal conceptions of women. In humorous contrast with the sculptures’ rakish clunkiness, velvet pictures such as Last Night sport trim, elegant silhouettes. Brimming with cheeky connotations, Schnitger’s diverse forms and motley fabrics coalesce into a compellingly complex picture of femininity.
Grice Bench
3423 Casitas Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90039
Show runs through Mar. 31 -
Rona Pondick
Jewel-like translucency and vibrant hues set off the disturbing nature of sculptures by Rona Pondick at Zevitas Marcus, where luminous human heads are frozen in resin blocks or attached to freakish creatural bodies. Several pieces, such as Encased Yellow Green (2017-2018) and Magenta Swimming in Yellow (2015-2017), evoke cryonic corpses’ disembodied pates. Marked by anguished stillness, the somber miens are Pondick’s own. She acutely renders facial features, yet the cloudy rectangular solids that base or encase them recall Minimalist sculptures. Perhaps this tension between figuration and abstraction encapsulates a keen mind’s consternation inside an ailing body. Pondick once had worked primarily in stainless steel, but chronic pain necessitated a less taxing medium; she now employs resin, acrylic and modeling compound to striking effect. The artist was diagnosed with cervical spondylotic myelopathy in 2006, a debilitating disease that has affected not only her materials, but also the spirit of her work, whose fantasticality has been honed to a bleak essence. Self-portraits become commentaries on the human condition with all its maladies and existential dread. In Standing Blue (2015-2017, pictured above), a tiny headless anuran body rears on its hind legs as though struggling in vain to find Frankensteinan completeness with a human head, lying across a cobalt pool, that it can’t quite reach. With desolate beauty, such sculptures testify to Pondick’s resoluteness in overcoming obstacles to continue pursuing her artistic vision—a pursuit at which she continues to excel.
Zevitas Marcus Gallery
2754 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034
Show runs through Mar. 30 -
David Hockney; Alison Saar
David Hockney recycles work from one medium into another, reinventing his own methodologies in the process. His versatility is highlighted in his show titled “Something New in Painting (and Photography) [and even Printing]… Continued,” where landscape paintings, digitally manipulated photographic collages, and portrait drawings play off one another in strange ways at LA Louver. The show’s centerpieces are three large-scale digitally derived pictures, which Hockney terms “photographic drawings,” depicting groups of people idly sitting or standing around as though contemplating art or waiting for lectures to begin inside institutional rooms. These works’ mundane realism contrasts with the fantastic nature of colorful abstract landscape paintings adorning nearby walls. Yet the landscape paintings and photographic drawings have more in common than they initially appear: In both sets of artworks, Hockney employs sweeping compositional layouts marked by subtle perspectival distortions; for instance, the central composition of Viewers Looking at a Ready-made with Skull and Mirrors (pictured above; all works 2018) is remarkably similar to that of Three Vases of Flowers in an Interior. Paintings and photographic drawings converge unambiguously in Pictures at an Exhibition, which features likenesses of the landscapes. Among Hockney’s portrayed exhibition spaces, you become acutely aware of your own position within the actual gallery and begin to feel as though you’re in a mirrored funhouse, a meta-setup from which Hockney might derive yet another artwork. Before departing, don’t miss Grow’d (2019), Alison Saar‘s serene, slightly surreal sculpture in the courtyard upstairs.
LA Louver
45 N. Venice Blvd.
Venice, CA 90291
Shows run through Mar. 23 -
Laura Owens
Why, exactly, is Laura Owens’ art so compelling? This is a question I’ve been asking myself since I was in art school. Elusiveness seems intrinsic to her work’s magic, which in my mind boils down to two intertwined notions: possibility and freedom. Owens’ eclectic art exudes the liberating idea—perhaps not quite true for most painters but inspiring nonetheless—that a serious painting can depict any subject; a successful painter’s name need not become synonymous with a “brand identity” of executing the same things over and over.
Manifesting her oeuvre’s playful diversity, the LA artist’s mid-career survey at MOCA features about sixty paintings from the mid-1990s to the present. Since Owens often executes sets of related paintings with a mind towards how they will occupy a given space, the exhibition is organized less by chronology than around groupings of works that variably coalesce and contrast, such as a 2015 installation where five freestanding paintings align to form her son’s short composition beginning with the text, “There was a cat and an alien.”
On entering the show, one encounters a huge untitled 2014 painting (all her paintings are untitled) of a cartoon depicting a rope-swinging boy and his dog beside this bathetic sentence: “When you come to the end of your rope, make a knot and hang on.” In a classic Owens maneuver, the potentially deadening silliness of image and sentiment is rescued by visual intrigue: real collaged additions and phony trompe l’oeil ablations alternately accentuate and negate the painting’s flatness. Cutouts and drop shadows suggest shallow spatiality beyond the image’s surface, confounding the viewer’s notions of how this painting is formed and what it is supposed to depict. Jejunity is shattered.
A subsequent room harbors well-known 2002 and 2003 paintings inspired by 19th-century French decorative landscape painting. From afar, these pastel scenes of woodland creatures resemble textiles one might find in the children’s section at Ikea. Yet Owens’ mark-making is so intricate, her strange spatiality so complex, that such cutesy paintings can’t be faulted for lack of excellence.
Laura Owens, Untitled, 2001, acrylic, oil, ink, and felt on canvas, courtesy MOCA, © Laura Owens. The show’s layout imparts a sense of vagarious exploration; you never know what you’ll discover around the next corner. There are clever installations, monumental abstractions and alphabet paintings. Certain canvases incorporate real buttons, loops of yarn or even bicycle wheels. In one long gallery, a salon-style bevy portrays many denizens of fancy, some of which are floral textiles, pirates, horses, tigers and medieval soldiers. Owens isn’t afraid to come across as silly, girlish, decorative or unfashionable, yet her quirkily wrought paintings generally succeed.
Her unorthodox decisions often seem calculated to provoke reactions or elicit interactions. Throughout the gallery, the edges of drab gray museum benches’ upholstered seats are embroidered, at irregular intervals, with tiny vibrant motifs such as fruits and hearts; these are so inconspicuous that few patrons will notice. A 663-page exhibition catalog is ingeniously designed as a scrapbook archiving Owens’ personal ephemera, correspondences, influences and friendships. No two catalog covers are the same in an edition of 8,000 screen-printed in her studio. Such gestures read as the work of a relational artist as well as a painter, particularly in light of her interactive projects with 356 Mission.
The survey culminates in several recent sets of abstractions condensing the spirit of her earlier work’s stylistic pluralism. Much of her painting since 2012 is defined by heterogeneous juxtapositions of loops, squiggles, screen-printed enlarged ephemera, and abstract forms that appear digitally collaged, with drop shadows imparting illusions of shallow depth. Evoking the feeling of zooming in on random parts of some inexplicable grandiose digital scheme, these colossal works appear as metaphors for painting itself, which, at its most fundamental, is about creating or isolating specific elements among potentially infinite iterations.
Constantly walking a tightrope of paradox, Owens employs deceptive simplicity to capture life’s complexity. Chaos belies calculation; cartoonishness gives way to existential seriousness. Her eclecticism imparts the sense of freedom inherent to painting; yet her glib veneers of casualness are generated by technical rigor.
A most amusing denouement overlooks the show’s egress: High above the threshold hang two neat rows of small kinetic paintings doubling as real timepieces. In typical Owens fashion, these whimsical painting-clocks are charged with deeper symbolism: the passage of time is literally registered by the movement of paintings supposed to be timeless and still. Sporting whimsical images such as cats and clowns, it almost feels as though these clocks are laughing at you. Would their mirth be directed at your mortality, your departure, or at the fact that you take them so seriously?