Currently on display at the Center of Contemporary Art in Santa Fe is the 30-year survey of Mark Spencer’s paintings. Entitled "Beings," this is a rare and all too brief opportunity to experience an important artist. Some artists' practice is to work slowly and...
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon
The outdoor entryway to Various Small Fires is a narrow corridor often used for sound installations. This long passageway opens up into a large gravel back yard perfect for exhibiting sculptures. In "Variation in Mass 1-3," Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon creates an...
Kathleen Ryan
Kathleen Ryan’s second solo show at François Ghebaly, "Bad Fruit," is a masterclass in contemporary object-making. In her massive fruit sculptures, the duality of decay and the cycle of life is on display as Ryan combines the industrial with the natural, the glamorous...
Ave Pildas
The repetitive quality of the overall patterns in the grids in Ave Pildas' show at Tufenkian Fine Arts create an almost animated effect, a little like standing in one place over a long period of time and blinking slowly. The different figures traverse the space that...
Rina Banerjee Fowler Museum at UCLA
Rina Banerjee's assemblages are fantastical potpourris of color, texture and cultural references. The title of her 20-year retrospective, "Make Me a Summary of the World," encapsulates her ambition of laying bare the fluid interdependency of ostensibly discrete...
Los Angeles Area Scene Paintings
"Los Angeles is a city without a past," urban geographer Michael Dear once declared, referring to the city's penchant for effacing its own history. Yet an enthralling exhibition at the Hilbert Museum attests that LA does, indeed, have a past, one recorded in vibrant...
Evan Nesbit Roberts Projects
Both vibrant in color and visceral in texture, Evan Nesbit, now at Roberts Projects in Culver City here works on burlap, a continuation of the artist’s use of materials to pull viewers into the depths of his vivid palette. Nesbit’s abstract works deal in illusion,...
Lucio Fontana Hauser & Wirth
Lucio Fontana, the Argentine-born Italian artist best known for his slashed, punctured canvases and lumpy ceramic sculpture, had another less acknowledged side to his oeuvre- his “spatial environments”. Created in the last 20 years of his life, these ephemeral...
Jennifer West
Fragmentary castoffs and debris from the LA River texturize Jennifer West's current show, "Future Forgetting," whose title was inspired by Norman Klein's 1997 book The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, a treatise on how Los Angeles...
Gagosian Gallery
For Richard Prince, well known for his appropriationist works from the 1980s and 1990s, the discovery of Instagram opened a new window onto old methodologies. It was only after watching his daughter post to Tumbler that he came to understand the possibilities of...
Durden and Ray
As an exhibition I had intended to see on what should’ve been a busy night, Durden and Ray’s Another Dimension was high on my list. As things turned out, the show itself entered another dimension, in the limbo of closings-before-they-opened, as we practiced social...
Cameron
In life (1922-1995), Cameron's art was often overshadowed by her colorful bohemian persona as occultist and wife of Jack Parsons. But one need know nothing about her to appreciate her drawings and paintings, each of which exudes an intense bewitching presence. Some of...
Nicolas Party
Nicolas Party's imaginary world contains no wilderness, only bright graphic artifice based loosely on nature and historical art. In his depopulated landscapes such as Trees (all works 2020), tree trunks and branches are smooth cylinders whose leaves fall like confetti...
Tufenkian Fine Arts
The adventure of color in these paintings creates a wild conundrum for writing in that color is absolutely palpable in terms of its sensation and feeling, yet is nearly ineffable in terms of being translated into words. These paintings structure a wonderfully...
A+D Architecture and Design Museum
Codi Barbini's immersive six-channel video installation The Executive Condolence carefully montages excerpts from presidential addresses in response to mass shootings spanning the last thirty years. Barbini selects portions of clips from speeches by President Bill...
Lisa Adams & Kelly McLane
The economy is crashing; coronavirus and panic are spreading like wildfires; and political lines are being drawn in shifting sands. What better time to enjoy the near-apocalyptic visions of Lisa Adams and Kelly McLane? "Unreality," their first joint show, arrives at...
Fisher Museum of Art
Charles (or Chuck) Arnoldi has been a mainstay in Los Angeles art since the early 1970s, proposing a kind of material grittiness that is, if anything, the inverse of the finely tooled polish practiced by his finish/fetish friends. Arnoldi is, in fact, every bit as...
Gracie DeVito
Evoking life's inconstancy, little is certain in Gracie DeVito's paintings, which seem to shift in the blink of an eye from abstraction to representation and back again. Even the edges of her shaped canvases seem to sway, slump, wiggle and distend as though struggling...