Virginia Broersma’s exploitation of wet-on-wet painting is not simply self-indulgent, it is lavish, extravagant, and delirious, amplifying what is already a relatively excessive technique into an over-the-top visual experience, at once ecstatic and excruciating....
Kim Schoenstadt’s approach to visual art conflates two and three dimensions, crawling up the wall and on the floor, gelling into freestanding objects even as it elaborates on a kind of drawing-in-space that seems at once to leak from and to enmesh the sculptural, even...
The series of relatively small digital photomontages Clayton Campbell has assembled under the rubric “Wild Kingdom” satirize social habits—on more than just the most evident levels. The images, all horizontal, consist of wildlife dioramas, the kind that fill corridor...
Carol Es has long drawn upon two major factors in her personal history—factors that she recognizes that she shares with many others, but perhaps not in quite the same way. Strongly identifying as Jewish, Es has emphasized the cultural and historical aspects of her...
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...
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...
Mark Steven Greenfield has been something of a fixture on the Los Angeles art scene since the 1970s, better known as an administrator and arts advocate than as an artist. Greenfield has not bowed out of high-profile art-related activity altogether, but he is now able...
The concentric circle, or target, has been one of the predominant motifs in American abstract painting for the last half-century or more, and, as a result, to wring unexpected changes from it has become increasingly difficult. Gary Lang has made the multi-orbital...
The overt theme of “Damage Control: Art and Destruction since 1950,” curated by Terry Brougher and Russell Ferguson, is the presence of destructive force(s) in art since World War II—a trajectory of investigation whose origins in the war (especially its nuclear finale...
Small municipal museums are hard pressed to coordinate their programming into coherent wholes; if a local museum doesn’t fill its walls with a single exhibition, its variety of shows comprise confusing, sometimes clangorous gallimaufries. Lancaster’s MOAH has devised...
Elizabeth McCord’s Big Pink (1951) was the only painting featured in LACMA’s Pacific Standard Time exhibition “Living in a Modern Way,” a sweeping survey of mid-century design. The painting jogged old-timers’ memories and tantalized a younger audience. A recent...
Through a process of intellectual, historical and geographic research, Alex Slade makes evident, and critiques thereby, the social forces that shape the American landscape. Landscape-oriented American photographers have been preoccupied with this issue since the...
Some artists make Masterpieces. Others compile Oeuvres. Still others live Lives; if they (and we) are fortunate, those Lives are lived at the center of their times, or at least their times’ artistic practices. Like most Europeans of his time, the Berlin-born Hans...