The Impressionists, at the end of the 19th century, turned away from traditional muses and academies and became chroniclers of their contemporary era. They were described as flaneurs, self-styled spectators of modern life and people in leisure. But throughout their...
Pick of the Week: Amy Sherald
OUTSIDE LA: Eric Shaw The Hole, New York
In a year when art sales floundered and galleries around the world quietly scaled back their operations, the announcement from New York’s The Hole, that they were celebrating their 10th anniversary by opening a second gallery, felt like a collective sign of hope. To...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Shockboxx Gallery "Dude Unmute Yourself" at Shockboxx Gallery
“Dude, Unmute Yourself” is a sprawling group exhibition of Shockboxx Gallery regulars that the pandemic-smart title reflects the need, particularly in these times, to speak out through art. A few highlights are in the backroom where Randi Matushevitz offers two...
Pick of the Week: Patrick Wilson Vielmetter Los Angeles
There’s no such thing as an alright abstract painting. They fall, without exception, into two categories: great and garbage. And for whoever’s looked at an abstract artwork, smugly harrumphed and muttered, “I could do that,” I’d...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Brenna Youngblood, “The LIGHT and the DARK” Roberts Projects
How we balance our individual experiences within the larger scope of our lives in many ways determines who we are, and how we understand and relate to the world around us. Reflecting on the dense and often traumatic events of the past year, which included a global...
OUTSIDE LA: Artes Mundi 9 National Museum Cardiff, Chapter and g39
For the 9th edition of the Artes Mundi Prize, an international panel of jurors —made up of Cosmin Costinas (Executive Director and Curator of Para Site, Hong Kong), Elvira Dyangani Ose (Director at The Showroom, London) and Rachel Kent (Chief Curator at MCA,...
Pick of the Week: Alissa McKendrick & Diane Kotila de boer gallery
Everyone has a fascination with the more macabre parts of life. Not that everyone is John Waters, but there’s a reason we all slow down to look when we pass an accident. It’s just human nature to be transfixed by the dark and the deadly, to find it not only shocking...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Vanessa Prager
It’s Vanessa Prager versus art history in this confounding and enchanting suite of oil on panel paintings, and her aggressive Impressionism-infused impasto is a knockout. Taking on the foundational figurative tropes of nude, still life, and landscape but proceeding...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Evita Tezeno Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
As the planet enters the beginning of a post-pandemic, post-Trump administration era, it was wonderful to be baptized in optimism from Evita Tezeno’s exhibition, “Better Days” at the Luis De Jesus Los Angeles gallery. One sweeping taste of these works results in a...
Pick of the Week: Caitlin Keogh Overduin & Co.
With spring just ahead, we are on the precipice of a momentous transition. Rays of hope are beginning to warm the cold landscape of our world, as they have again and again throughout humanity's existence. Caitlin Keogh explores this cyclical nature of history (and our...
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at Tate Britain "Fly in League with The Night" at Tate Britain
A man sits center frame, drowned within an interior sea of red hues, arms spread as he pensively gazes against our direction into the distance of the frame. A woman laughs cross-legged on a stool, mouth wide open as if paused mid-speech or laughter, as a grinning fox...
PHOTOGRAPHING PUNK ROCK Review of Michael Grecco's New Photography Book
If you wanted to get an indoor photo during the first wave of punk rock, you needed a camera that you could adjust the settings on, and you had to learn what the settings were. That didn’t really change until the advent of digital photography, which makes photographs...
Pick of the Week: John Waters Sprüth Magers
Sprüth Magers is currently exhibiting two shows by two of the most notable creatives of the last forty years: Cindy Sherman’s "Tapestries" and John Waters' "Hollywood’s Greatest Hits." Though, if you’re anything like myself, one will leave you elated, and the other,...
Gallery Rounds: Ulala Imai Nonaka Hill
Although "Amazing" is the first exhibition of Ulala Imai's works in Los Angeles and the United States, she has quite a following in Japan. Imai is a prolific painter as the presentation of over thirty paintings at Nonaka Hill demonstrates. She successfully combines...
John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres Charlie James Gallery
“The Bronx Comes to LA” features artworks from the larger body of work set up in Bronx storefronts by John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, dating from 1990 to 2020. The life casting process for making the figures is fairly complicated, but even more importantly, requires...
Fu Site Kylin Gallery
“Fictions in Fragments,” the latest show by Fu Site at Kylin Gallery in Beverly Hills, is an adventure not to be missed. Mixing ghostly characters and cracking lightning with influences stretching from modern architecture to baroque drama, Fu’s paintings alternately...
Karen Carson GAVLAK
The title of Karen Carson’s show of new "bas relief" paintings, exhibited alongside some of the zippered canvas works that marked her debut into the Los Angeles art world almost half a century ago, “Middle Ground” is a kind of conundrum, consistent with the kinds of...
Hamishi Farah Chateau Shatto
Portraiture is almost certainly the artistic genre in which power and privilege imprint themselves most legibly. To "represent" can mean to depict, but also the right to speak on behalf of a group. The tension between these two meanings is at the heart of Hamishi...