Through images of Satan and Darth Vader, and references to the politics of the 1970s, Matthew Brannon will unexpectedly break your heart. His show at David Kordansky Gallery mirrors the sensation of biting the pit at the center of a peach: a bitter core beyond what...
Brushing my hair as a girl, I remember my hand growing heavier with each stroke as I entertained the wicked urge to unearth every girlish tendril in one fell swoop. The manic, menacing quality of Yoo's strange architecture reminds me of these early manifestations of...
The slapdash brushwork of Gabriel Madan’s work suggests a personal but ultimately fleeting investment in his subjects. The style and content are both Pop but not too Pop - an oddball mix of semi-famous celebrities and obscure kitsch. By loosely hand-painting...
Some shows suck, and some shows barely avoid sucking. Austin Lee seems capable of great things while failing by a long mile. The paintings depict brightly hued, crying, Gumby-like cartoon figures. They are clearly intended to be emotive but fail to elicit emotion; the...
Mojotech is Betye Saar's abbreviation for the "magic of technology" and the title of her large-scale installation from 1987 on view at Roberts Projects. Standing at the horizon of Saar's trailing altarpiece, I'm reminded of the language of trees and how they...
This show feels like something that I would have walked in and out of quickly about twenty years ago. The paintings—hazy process-based geometric abstractions—artfully avoid the conventions of painting without actually saying anything. The pink prints look like...
Juicy larvae play amongst feral grasses. Slugs laze on velvety pillows of tufted lichen. Cornucopias of ripened fruits germinate in tendrilled verdant habitats. I can’t help but delight in Piper Bangs’ paintings, resonating with my love of dirt and belief in the magic...
Known for her life-sized stained-glass sculptures of intertwined lawn chairs, Kelly Wall uses sculpture and time to explore perspective in different ways, turning familiar objects into something uncanny and almost disorienting. In her recent outdoor show at Various...
There is something inherently contentious about an exhibition juxtaposing the work of a contemporary artist with another whose work has some place within the art-historical canon, more particularly one of the most resonant antecedents of the late 19th- and early...
If you’ve read any of Bernard Cooper’s books, you know about the care with which he constructs his sentences, how he gives each detail its own breathing room. (If not, Maps to Anywhere [1990] and his 2006 memoir The Bill from My Father are especially recommended.)...
In The Head in the Tiger’s Mouth (2021), the first composition in Kyungmi Shin’s kaleidoscopic exhibition, my eyes immediately landed on the luminous collection of swirls and stripes suggesting the calligraphic form of a tiger before catching on the colorful tableau...
Incessant texts and social-media alerts are inescapable facets of contemporary life, and artist Chris Eckert attempts to make sense of this glut of seemingly endless data. Eckert has successfully melded backgrounds in the fields of mechanical engineering and...
A church is a grand gesture to the community it serves and sustains. At its best it’s a hub, as well as a display of worship, tradition, sacrament and humility. A chapel by contrast is a modest little space—distinguished from the former by its size more than anything...
As part of her career-spanning 2022–23 survey, “Peripheral Vision” at the Getty, and in honor of the museum’s 20th anniversary, the German-American photographer Uta Barth presented an expansive commission entitled “…from dawn to dusk” (2022). Twice a month for a year,...
California amusement parks like Disneyland are multi-layered entertainment fantasies, offering created environments for escapism and joy-filled distraction. These tourist sites entice visitors with adventurous rides, performances and tantalizing food. Similarly,...
The meeting of Covey Gong and Monique Mouton at Bel Ami is like watching the contact of two elements transforming one another. While their respective works are satisfying on their own, together, Mouton’s mixed media on paper and Gong’s tactful sculptures, spotlights a...
If—in the next couple days—you are keen on communing privately with melancholic beauty (or “tough joy,” as the artist might have it), visit Christopher Culver’s latest suite of charcoal and pastel drawings on paper at Michael Benevento Gallery. Never mind the...
In his journals from his first expeditions in the Sierra Mountains, John Muir wrote, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” The interconnectedness of our world stretches beyond our innate abilities and into...
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