Ceramics are all the rage these days, and certainly it’s a tradition richly steeped in ceremony, especially as it applies to Japanese ceramic work. Art star Takashi Murakami has assembled a group of artists who not only push the boundaries of possibility within the...

"States of Being" currently on view at Torrance Art Museum examines the nature of existence not so much as a physical inevitability, but more as a phase or process by which each of the artists included, expose themselves through their work at pivotal moments of...

Red-on-red is difficult to pull off, yet James Hayward makes it work beautifully in his most recent survey entitled "At Last" at Roberts & Tilton where an entire room is painted red to showcase his very dense red paintings. And that's just the side gallery....

Chris Goennawein is an artist who “theorizes” painterly surfaces and the underlying structures that support them. His first exhibition at c.nichols project explores various notions of place wherein the signification of an object wrestles with the process by which it...

Sarah Awad’s paintings are large-scale and meditative—images that exude a sense of “place” and attitude, a timelessness as it were, even as they remain powerfully contemporary. Awad has chosen to paint gates and with that choice comes an entire visual history of...

Who doesn’t love David Bowie? Some would argue that Ziggy Stardust was Bowie at his best, and at Taschen Gallery on Beverly Boulevard one can experience the “Bowiesque” 1970s in all their weirdness and colorful splendor. Noted photographer and bandmate Mick Rock...

Comic-book artists are sometimes dismissed as just that—common “drawers” as it were rather than fine artists. This recent retrospective of Jack Kirby’s graphic work currently on view at Cal State Northridge’s Mike Curb Gallery sets the record straight and proves that...

Noah Purifoy made it his life long duty to seek art everywhere in everything, and to do so with tremendous poise and discernment. The retrospective Junk Dada on view at LACMA is breathtakingly inventive and, if nothing else, speaks to the unending seductiveness of the...

Deedee Cheriel’s work feels akin to falling headlong into a rendition of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream while drinking a pint of Buffalo Trace Bourbon on a hot New York summer night in Chelsea. Her mostly small paintings of animals reenacting human activities...

Gertrude Stein once famously wrote, “A rose is a rose is a rose,” and Jose Rodolfo Loaiza Ontiveros, whose exhibition "Wonder Pop," consisting of Disney characters and well-known Pop cultural figures drawn in bright colors and recast with gay themes, might respond...

Entering Joseph Holtzman’s recent Hammer Project feels akin to entering a child’s sacred imaginative landscape, one where all the imaginary friends can not only be seen, but also deeply witnessed on a visceral level. Not all these friends are indeed friendly and some,...

"The Slick & The Sticky," a group show co-curated by Vanessa Place, insists adamantly on its own dystopian themes, wherein the works in the exhibition deliberately obfuscate their own suggested meaning. Working off the premise that all language is inherently...

Not that this hasn’t been done before, the theme of “flatness” explored again and again in all its variations, but in its most recent incarnation at David Kordansky Gallery, artists like Tauba Auerbach transform the static spatial plane that is “flatness” into a...

Mark Bradford’s first solo exhibition "Scorched Earth" at the Hammer Museum is a stunner and not in the typical ways one might expect. These paintings, engendered equally by the 1992 LA uprisings as well as the AIDS epidemic, constitute a visceral visual experience...

Ann Chamberlin approaches painting like an alchemist approaches a vile of life-giving succor—with tremendous reverence and passion. The new paintings on view at Lora Schlesinger Gallery mine some of the same archetypal themes she has visited previously. However these...

Ochi Projects, a new gallery on Washington Boulevard. hit a home run this week with its first group show curated by Brian Wills and Lexi Brown. The horizon line has long been a symbol of infinite possibility, and all of the work in the exhibition speaks to this theme...

Michael Deyermond is an artist’s artist, making stuff that makes him happy, and us too, albeit for the fact that some of the sentiments here are darkly appealing and often self-reflexive. This is not art that begs to be loved at the expense of much needed content, but...

Hugo Crosthwaite’s newest exhibition is powerful and evocative, but more importantly, perhaps, it speaks to our human frailties, specifically, the ways in which we process grief and hope. Inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s poem Hymn and the recent abduction and murder of...