In a 1994 Paris Review interview, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe famously quoted an Igbo proverb: “Until lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.” In an exploration of the historical and contemporary complexities of the...

Jill Mulleady’s new paintings offer an experience akin to tumbling down a rabbit hole into a mad and decadent party orchestrated by the Surrealists (is that a cheetah sitting at the counter? A policeman fighting a green coyote?) and attended by reveling sinners,...

The vast, empty expanses of the southern California landscape, whether desert vistas or sprawling webs of highways, have long fascinated artists. John Divola photographed a moldering beach house in Zuma and an “Isolated House” series of desert abodes while Ed Ruscha...

Perhaps it is a bit cliché to read Julie Beaufils’ French nationality into her work, but there is certainly something undeniably chic, irreverent and casually erotic about her work. Her new paintings and drawings at Overduin & Co. filter desire through cool...

Like a modern-day Ishmael, Steven Hull spent the last few years sailing and seeing the watery part of the world. Hull’s enthusiasm for his new hobby unmistakably influenced his current exhibition of painting, sculpture and sound installation at Rosamund Felsen. The...

While it would not be incorrect to say that Kenton Parker’s work primarily deals with nature, it would be rather misleading. There are no polite painted landscapes or photographs of waterfalls or mountain ranges. Cement, cars and trash are just as common as flowers...

One measure of a contemporary artist’s success is that he or she allows us to view the world, our history, or ourselves differently; Candice Lin is notable for doing all three. Her mixed-media work upsets epistemological meta-narratives, conflates binaries and revels...

Shana Lutker’s exhibition of new work at Susanne Vielmetter is best understood in the context of her wider oeuvre, which of late has been singularly concerned with the 1920s Surrealists. Each of Lutker’s “chapters” juxtaposes her spare, minimal and conceptual visual...

Romanian painter Adrian Ghenie’s work is clearly indebted to that of his artistic forbearers. Not since Anselm Kiefer has a painter dealt so explicitly with the heavy, fraught history of 20th century Europe, and like Francis Bacon, his visages are rendered as...

At first, Andrew Dadson’s newest exhibition at David Kordansky, “Painting (Organic),” seems to lack cohesion, with medium and mood shifting frequently. There are three very distinct types of works on display: a collection of photographs hung in a grid formation; six...

The philosophy of the sublime was first manifested in art through 19th century Romantic painters’ vast and awe-inspiring landscapes that emphasized mankind’s diminutiveness in the face of God’s treacherously beautiful creation. It was updated in the mid-20th century...

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...

For many centuries, the wunderkammer model of organizing collections of art and objects of curiosity was de rigueur. The earliest wunderkammer, or cabinets of curiosity, were the private collections of wealthy Europeans, including Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, Ole...

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....

The opening night of the LA Art Show offered the usual enticements—free food and drink, opportunities for schmoozing and networking, celebrity-gawking—but it also happened to have a great deal of impressive contemporary art on display. Here, in no especial order, are...