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'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 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...
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, 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...
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...
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...
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...
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'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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The urgency of revisiting an archive is found in challenging its presumed objectivity and totalizing vision, thus exposing cracks, biased ideologies, contradictions and gaps to make way for fracturing, reinterpreting, enlarging or otherwise revising our understanding....
Perusing the 37 paintings by various Ghanaian artists in “Praise Portraits from Ghana: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly...!” feels like peering into an exotic parallel dimension of popular culture. At a glance, these depictions of mostly American actors, singers,...
Whitney Bedford’s landscapes and oceanic vistas were emotional, elusive, uncommon, sometimes based in story, or sweetly teetering on the verge of collapse. Her relationship to the paintings—and by extension ours—was both dualistic and deeply personal. Precisely drawn...