reviews
DUELING REVIEWS: ALAKE SHILLING
MARINA STERN at Bel Ami & CW American Modernism
All of Marina Stern’s work is weighty. The objects in her intensely matte, sleek oil paintings and densely packed graphite drawings receive an egalitarian touch. In contrast to often airy and delicate subjects—paper, string, and flowers—Stern’s quality of paint is...
CANDICE LIN at Whitechapel Gallery
At first, the installation in London’s Whitechapel Gallery seems childish: flimsy cardboard walls covered in forests, foliage and animals, all painted with loose brushwork, like set design the adults painted for their kids’ school play. In Candice Lin’s world of...
RADICAL PRINTS: Chicano Prints from the Smithsonian American Art Museum at The Huntington
The Smithsonian, the nation’s cultural voice established by Congress in 1846, is under attack. Financially seeded by Englishman James Smithson, who was ostensibly enamored by the great American Experiment, it has since morphed into the world's largest museum,...
JAKE SHEINER at Tyler Park Presents
The title of this exhibition, “Disappear Here,” is a reference to Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Less Than Zero. It alludes to the reality of anonymity in a city in which fame and glamour are the reigning myths. However, the works on hand only reflect these themes in a...
LILY CLARK AND ASH ROBERTS at François Ghebaly
At the center of “Dew Point,” the current exhibition at François Ghebaly, hangs artist Lily Clark’s Inyo (2025), a sculpture of much poetry and power. Clark suspends a large hunk of alabaster from the rafters where water drips from the rock, filling up a steel basin...
ART’S BIRTHDAY: The Anatomy of a Celebration at Marciano Art Foundation
“Thus time goes by,” Robert Filliou writes at the end of Whispered Art History (1963), the short document in which he declares January 17th the official birthday of art. In Filliou’s telling, art begins not with genius or mastery but with an ordinary gesture made...
SANDRA VASQUEZ DE LA HORRA at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Few exhibitions make the gap between the United States and the rest of the world’s art capitals so blatant than “Sandra Vásquez de la Horra: The Awake Volcanoes” at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Pegged as the artist’s solo debut in the US, the exhibition...
ZOE KOKE at Wolfpack HQ
I saw the sun saved and erased at the same time. In Zoe Koke’s recent paintings, oil becomes a way of holding sun. Here oil paint behaves like a desert light fixed in place, absorbing rather than illuminating. In one of her new paintings, Rainbow (2026), the desert...
Amelia Lockwood (quick review) at Morán Morán
Amelia Lockwood’s ceramics push up against the natural constraints of their medium in novel ways. Rather than the earthbound, closed forms associated with this medium, we get vine-like, open lattices, expanding outward from a central axis. These echo Rococo decorative...
Terry Powers (quick review) at Guerrero Gallery
Powers’ paintings—which range from landscapes to still lives to paintings of mechanical detritus—recall Impressionism, albeit in its most restrained instances: more Pissarro than Monet. That is, there’s a withholding quality towards light and a painterly restraint...
Zoe Alameda (quick review) at Cheremoya
The centerpiece of this show is From Here On Out (2025): a large, ramshackle, free-standing, scrap-wood armature supporting two plexiglass panels, embedded with four small assemblage-paintings, themselves containing collaged, miscellaneous photographic imagery...
DUELLING REVIEWS: MARILYN MINTER at Regen Projects
R. CRUMB at David Zwirner
R. Crumb’s “tales” (even filtered through psychedelics and cannabinoids) weren’t always so paranoid—though they were frequently calamitous. The street-hip graphic domain Crumb freely improvised during the 1960s and 1970s across densely cross-hatched black-andwhite...
MOSIE ROMNEY at Sebastian Gladstone
I felt dizzy at mosie romney’s show “every Spiral has its law” at Sebastian Gladstone. I could chalk it up to external factors (fatigue, harsh gallery lighting), but I suspect that the work itself was the incubator of disorientation. My previous visits to the space,...
TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK & PHILIP GUSTON at Skirball Cultural Center
Entrusted to the sprawling Skirball Cultural Center in Brentwood by New York’s Jewish Museum, “Draw Them In, Paint Them Out” presents a handful of Philip Guston’s depictions of cowled Ku Klux Klan figures, alongside Trenton Doyle Hancock’s ambitious, mixed media...
MONUMENTS at MOCA Geffen & The Brick
150 years after the Civil War, it seems American art institutions are finally ready to discuss Confederate statuary. Seizing this opportunity, curator Hamza Walker (along with co-curators Bennett Simpson and Kara Walker) has gone to unusual lengths in his sprawling...
FLORA YUKHANOVICH at Hauser & Wirth
Ah, yes, the front room at Hauser & Wirth: the room you usually walk past on the way to the better shows in the back. There’s a certain type of painting one expects here: Blue Chip filler, the type of young artists who get mentioned in Vanity Fair articles. Where...
