Somewhere between warfare and entertainment, sports as a spectacle is deeply rooted in the ways modern societies organize, present and consume events and expectations. Pacing through "SECONDARY: commencement," there is a sense of nostalgia that belongs to a media...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Matthew Barney
OUTSIDE LA: Margot Samel New York “Thank you, I’m rested now. I’ll have the lobster today, thank you”
Two galleries have teamed up to co-present the group exhibition, “Thank you, I’m rested now. I’ll have the lobster today, thank you,” borrowing its title from Karen Kilimnik’s 2016 collage of a Siamese cat poised on a Rococo-style bed. Margot Samel from New York and...
OUTSIDE LA: Junior Art Exhibition Laguna Beach Festival of Arts
One of the most popular shows at the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts is the “Junior Art Exhibition,” featuring 400 art pieces by 200 Orange County students from kindergarten through grade 12. The show reveals the vast variety of artistic influences that students draw...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Francisco de Goya Norton Simon Museum
To see the work of Francisco de Goya in present-day Los Angeles is disturbingly pertinent, echoing the turbulent anxieties of our time with a wickedly sadistic smile. “Saw It: Francisco de Goya, Printmaker” at the Norton Simon Museum marks the first comprehensive...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Bruce Richards Sea View
For naïve or semi-initiated Los Angeles art-goers such as myself, a visit to “Soundings,” Sea View’s summer exhibition, might elicit two questions. Who is Bruce Richards? And why does the show’s concurrence with the Ed Ruscha retrospective at the Los Angeles County...
PICK OF THE WEEK: “Bruts” David Kordansky Gallery
In this group exhibition of 15 artists, Rashid Johnson splendidly arranges ablaze and brooding drawings, paintings and sculptures into a pristine playlist. From Huma Bhabha’s uneasy cork, wood and cardboard ancient being and Bill Traylor’s acutely simple and lyrical...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Gretchen Bender Sprüth Magers
In 1987, Cindy Sherman interviewed Gretchen Bender for BOMB Magazine, discussing the influence of her work on mass media. Bender denied the relationship between the two and instead described media as a ‘cannibalistic river without a conscience,’ invoking the image of...
PEER REVIEW Tom Knechtel on Thomas Antell
Tom Knechtel, a Los Angeles–based artist who shows with PPOW in New York and Marc Selwyn Fine Art here in LA—where his exhibition, “The Hare in the Studio,” just ended in June—is known for his intricate paintings and drawings, often depicting himself, animals and...
Claire Chambless Carlye Packer
Transformation in its most expansive and contradictory sense was at work throughout Claire Chambless’ exhibition, “Role Play.” Both individually and taken as a choreographed ensemble, the work—while clearly influenced by such abstract surrealists as Miró and...
Nick Angelo Sebastian Gladstone
A big pharma scion funded the Tolkien exhibition at Rome’s National Gallery of Modern Art to normalize drug dependency by suggesting its correlation to Bilbo Baggins’ obsession with the One Ring. Or, hear me out, Whiskey Pete’s casino operates a mind-control project...
Alicja Kwade and Agnes Martin Pace Gallery
The sprinklers of Pace Gallery’s immaculate lawn activated as I entered its courtyard for “Alicja Kwade & Agnes Martin: Space Between the Lines.” One of them was installed only a few inches from Kwade’s Jo’s Snow (Group 2) (2023), a forlorn patch of cast white...
Melanie Pullen William Turner Gallery
Images of violence are so prevalent in today’s media landscape that news commentators now prompt us to look away, while social-media clips of police misconduct or war-ravaged bodies are shared and reposted, implying that we might take voyeuristic pleasure in viewing...
30th Anniversary Group Show David Zwirner
On a murky day in May, the art cognoscenti made their way to a preview of gallerist David Zwirner’s newest addition to his burgeoning enclave in Los Angeles. Among the city’s unremitting attempts at reinvention, Melrose Hill—a longstanding, dense and vibrant...
Coco Young Night Gallery
Melancholy rendered in pools of soft, golden sunlight. Love and loss braided into fields of wildflowers. In the press release for “Passage,” Coco Young’s first solo show at Night Gallery, curator Martha Kirszenbaum compares the exhibition to Agnès Varda’s lush New...
pascALEjandro Blum
The nonagenarian artist Alejandro Jodorowsky is best known as a filmmaker, while his wife, the 40-something Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky, works as a painter, photographer and designer. Together, they operate under the name pascALEjandro, fusing their names as well as...
Simone Leigh LACMA and CAAM
Simone Leigh’s presence at the 2022 Venice Biennale was monumental: Her sculptural contributions to the main exhibition garnered a Golden Lion, while her solo show for the US national pavilion generated headlines around the world and lines around the block. In the...
PICK OF THE WEEK: Winfred Rembert Hauser & Wirth
A life lived in the midst of harrowing times of chain gangs, sharecropping and Jim Crow laws in the Deep South is the bullseye of Winfred Rembert’s exhibition, “Hard Times.” In hand-carved and debossed painted leather, the late Rembert creates striking patterns from...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Tony Cragg Marian Goodman Gallery
One of the most durable traditions in Modernism, organic form sculpture emerged in the first part of the 20th century in the work of Constantine Brancusi, Jean Arp, Alberto Giacometti and others. Particularly associated with Surrealism, the organic form was a kind of...