It feels like Javier Peláez is working through something, the kind of profound human experience whose emotions formulate universal psychological archetypes. In a series of about a dozen substantial new oil on linen paintings, the Mexico City-based artist explores a...
Most people, when confronted with the mind-bending vastness and ubiquity of urban slums, experience some amalgam of shock, disorientation, fear, recoilment, sympathy and outrage. Witnessing a veritable sea of lean-to huts with house-of-card engineering expand into the...
A lot happens in the room at the Lowell Ryan group show Color Out of Space, so much that it seeps into more than one dimension. In large-scale mixed-media paintings and sculptures that take the very idea of mixed media to new places, five artists address not only...
For “Dreamhouse Vs. Punk House (plus Cat House),” nearly 200 artists made works averaging 4 x 4 inches to be shown in three thematic multi-story dollhouses. It may sound like just so much whimsy, but this delirious exhibition/installation hybrid is an impressive and...
It is not as simple as a pixels-for-brushstrokes exchange, but there’s no getting around how Petra Cortright’s new digital compositions are in a heated conversation with paintings. Yes, the gestures she enacts on her computer or touch-screen tablet function in the...
“People I have great admiration for, people in my own circle, they just keep coming to Los Angeles. All the key people, and they just keep coming,” says art dealer Jeffrey Deitch at his Los Feliz home. “It never stops. And now we have reached critical mass. It’s no...
Dynamics of style, technique, technology and authorship are at issue in an exhibition of new landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and abstractions by the painter KATSU. That’s not only due to the liberal citations of the Western art canon which feed his...
Ostensibly a presentation of individual large-scale mixed media sculptural works, Aaron Fowler’s current exhibition is more like a series of pocket universes. Occupying the entireties of two art galleries on opposite sides of the city, Fowler presents these monumental...
What does it mean to fall from grace? To really fall, from great heights, perhaps at first thinking you’re flying and only realizing too late that this was an illusion, probably induced by the drugs. That would explain why the world out there appears so eerie, so pink...
Michael Scott transforms conventional landscape motifs in his new show of five large-scale oil paintings at The Autry. In these works, traditions both bucolic and catastrophic are subverted, as depictions of several varieties of hot flame and icy mist offer views of...
A collection of paintings with a medieval, folk-inflected stylistic take on modern abstraction, “Everything Counts” presents nearly isolated elements of mostly interior and architectural scenes. Foregrounded single objects and components are rendered by the...
Positing achievements in the decorative arts as a viable window into any culture’s zeitgeist, Lari Pittman takes his flair for generating psychosocial motifs to a genuinely exciting new place in his latest collection. As the exhibition title hints, the installation...
Gertrude Stein wrote in English, but in a way, Eve Fowler is acting as her translator. For the last decade at least, Fowler has been orienting her work across collage, photography, video and text-based practices in response to Stein’s oeuvre. The beguiling aluminum...
Across a series of ethereal vignettes in Sophie von Hellermann’s new series, the petri dish operates as both a quirky formal motif and a sophisticated allegorical framework. Each of the mostly large-scale paintings (all acrylic on canvas, all 2018), display a picture...
Fairies, pixies, anthropomorphic animals, porn actors, newspaper ads, strange symbols, beings from outer space, and leering mystics inhabit colorful, dissolute settings in mostly small-scale works on paper and canvas. These mixed media paintings and drawings by E’wao...
A vague yet piercing look of confrontational horror animates the face of a woman, zaftig and underdressed, with piercing blue eyes, an exaggerated frown, and the upswept hair and ruddy complexion of a latter-day Vermeer milkmaid. Because of art history, and especially...
Rafael Cardenas is known for his high-contrast, high-drama black and white street photography, but in “Backyard Tableaux,” his new exhibition at the Vincent Price Art Museum, his color photographs of quasi-urban backyard parties evoke the artistry of historical eras...
Like many modern women, Marilyn Minter has a complicated relationship with beauty. Both her personal feelings and her luminous artworks are fraught with contempt and desire for the beauty-industrial complex, and animated by attraction and repulsion for our society’s...