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...
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...
“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...
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...
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...
“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”...
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...
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...
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...
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...
"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...
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...
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...
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...
Upon exiting the newest exhibition at the Norton Simon Museum, “By Day and By Night: Paris in the Belle Époque,” each visitor is invited to take a print of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Red-Headed Woman in the Garden of M. Foret. This print is especially fitting as a...
In the haunting group show The Nothing That Is, now at the Brand Library and Art Center, curators Yaron Dotan and Christine Rasmussen have shaped a powerful exhibition that takes as its inspiration a Wallace Stevens poem that suggests viewers behold “nothing that is...
At a distance, the paintings in Linda Besemer's show, "An Abundance of Errors," appear to be large-format prints of digitally derived geometric designs. Indeed, they were initially devised on a computer; but the paintings' true tactility manifests itself as you...
There are so many good shows right now at the Vincent Price Art Museum that it's impossible to choose just one. "Images of the Divine in Everyday Mexico" comprises retablo and ex-voto paintings from the early 19th to mid-20th centuries. Mostly wrought on small sheets...
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