What is a blacksmith? Although the meaning is one who works in heavy metals that are heated in contrast to whitesmiths who beat gold or tin, experiencing the LA Blacksmith group exhibition at the California African American Museum (CAAM), guest curated by independent...
Käthe Kollwitz; Jean-François Millet
At the Getty, two exhibitions of works on paper examine process and technique while presenting disparate views of peasantry. The Getty Research Institute's "Käthe Kollwitz: Prints, Process, Politics" comprises over 50 prints, preparatory drawings and studies by...
“The Box Project”
Enchanting objects spill from tiny containers in "The Box Project," an unconventional show of 76 artists from three countries. These artworks were not originally intended for public display; rather, they were created as part of an esoteric correspondence between three...
Matthew Marks
Distributed across the otherwise empty gallery spaces (there is nothing on the walls) are carefully placed, custom-designed wooden tables. Atop each table is a specific arrangement of artist's books by the painter Laura Owens. The presentation is inviting as the books...
John Currin: My Life as a Man
The paintings in John Currin’s show at Dallas Contemporary, a non-collecting warehouse museum, widely induced a queasy, unsettling tension. A common response to the artist’s work, the visceral repulsion and simultaneous attraction result from an unresolvable friction...
Into the Deep We Go: Photographs by Thomas Joshua Cooper
Two weeks after the exhibition “Thomas Joshua Cooper: The World’s Edge” opened last fall at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The New Yorker magazine published a piece by Dana Goodyear titled “The Ends of the Earth: Thomas Joshua Cooper risks his life to...
Cynthia Daignault
“Elegy,” the title of Cynthia Daignault’s show, referenced Robert Motherwell’s 1948-1967 “Elegies to the Spanish Republic.” In contrast to his abstractions mourning the results of the Spanish Civil War, her representational portrayals lament the passage of time, with...
Luis Flores
Upon entering the gallery it is hard not to do a double-take. Seated, hunched over on the railing that parallels the entrance is a life-sized figure, the artist’s doppelganger. This crocheted replica dressed in his signature clothing— a blue t-shirt, black Levi’s...
Soft Schindler
Even in a white cube, there is always an element of architectural engagement to grapple with when laying out out an exhibition. But when the exhibition space is not a white cube -- and moreover, when the venue itself is a storied architectural landmark, such as the...
Ellen Sebastian Chang, Sunhui Chang and Maya Gurantz
“How to Fall in Love in a Brothel” offers a mix of the experiential and the conceptual, expressed as an interactive sculptural installation and an HD video. A collaboration between artists Ellen Sebastian Chang, Sunhui Chang and Maya Gurantz, the idea of a “brothel”...
Photography Beyond the Surface
Both literally and figuratively, it feels as if Photography Beyond the Surface serves as a portal to a new dimension in photographic art. The group show includes innovative, exciting work by eight photographers, including a survey of Melanie Pullen’s work, Joni...
Christopher L. Mercier
The art architects make we expect to mirror their architectural aesthetic, if not extend it seamlessly. It is a modernist trope — going back to the Baroque, in fact — that images and objects, functional and otherwise, further distinguish a notable space by integrating...
Tony Marsh
At his first solo show in Los Angeles in over 10 years, San Pedro based arist Tony Marsh presents eleven ceramic works from an ongoing series called Crucible and Cauldron. Some of the tankard-like objects appear to be bubbling over with one dominant color that is...
UCR ARTSblock
Ralph Ellison’s prologue to Invisible Man (1952) states “No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am invisible understand because people refuse to see me.” By contrast, Reflection Eternal: The...
“Morph”
"Celebrate the Bizarre," urges the header on postcards for "Morph" at Mash Gallery; and the 12 artists in this show surely do. More specifically, they revel in distorting human form for metaphoric and emotive effect. Heads are sundered, patched and obliterated; bodies...
Sprüth Magers: Gilbert & George
The British duo, Gilbert & George now in their 70s, have been collaborating since the late 1960s. They have worked together for more than 50 years, creating at first performance-based works (they declared themselves "living sculptures") and later large-scale...
Carolyn Castaño
Lush foliage abuts geometric abstraction in Carolyn Castaño's vibrant paintings bursting with tropical flair. The Colombian-American artist amalgamates motifs from Latin America and the U.S so harmoniously that it's often difficult to pinpoint the origin of any given...
Gerald Davis
The dotty surfaces of Gerald Davis' paintings seem to flicker like tangled strings of tiny lights, amplifying the visionary eeriness of his eccentric renditions of classical subjects such as bathers. The LA painter's expressionistic pointillism recalls a wide range of...