In her installation Alchemy Tunnel, now at Radiant Space, artist Laurie Shapiro has created a literal and figurative cave of wonders. Using fabric, foil, sequins, and water-based paint, Shaprio’s inventive fantasy environment glitters and beckons. A distinct floral...
Sayre Gomez extracts strangeness and cultural significance from prosaic architectural facets of Southern California. The life-size paintings in his current show evoke banal intersections between commerce, fantasy and nostalgia: strip mall facades are romantically...
In his installation Vessels, Andrew Schoultz has transformed the gallery space into a fantastical and playful environment. He presents sculptures, paintings and works on paper in his signature style, using an array of concentric lines that define shapes and objects...
Few artists crisscross high-low categories as deftly as Kenny Scharf, whose whimsical work inhabits a gallery as strikingly as it does a street. Just down the road from his tire-shop mural, the exterior of Honor Fraser is currently festooned in a tacky crown of...
Analia Saban’s overall practice enacts recurring variations on a kind of populist materiality, in which she invents ways to explore the physical qualities of commonplace stuff like concrete, wet paint, plastics, and the entropic effects of time. She both demystifies...
At first glance and from afar, Nathaniel Mary Quinn's imagery appears to be photo-collage, but upon close viewing, the works are actually painted. What immediately comes to mind is the work of Francis Bacon, Romaire Bearden, Deborah Roberts, and the Surrealist parlor...
Like unruly creatures, Dona Nelson's double-sided paintings defy convention; they stand free, hang from ceilings and incorporate quotidian materials in bizarre ways. Titled "Painting the Magic Mountain" in wry reference to Thomas Mann's 1924 novel, this show contains...
Moffat Takadiwa mines Zimbabwe's landfills for materials. These landfills contain boundless amounts of plastic trash which Takadiwa collects, cleans, sorts and then uses in the creation of his magnificent assemblages. Prominent in his woven wall-based works are bottle...
Informed by her religious upbringing and her love of Renaissance painting, Naudline Pierre re-interprets devotional painting traditions with maverick imaginativeness, devising phantasmagoric scenes where humanoid figures radiate colorful nimbi and commune with winged...
Disruption! Art and the Prison Industrial Complex, a group exhibition currently on view at Pitzer College Art Galleries, brings together artists directly impacted by the prison system and those that address it in their work. Curated by multidisciplinary artist,...
It's difficult for paintings of female nudes in bucolic landscapes to transcend historic tropes of voyeuristic escapism, but Deborah Brown succeeds in positing hers as self-reflective meditations on contemporary femininity. The 11 paintings in her show at The Lodge...
After success and critical acclaim, Philip Guston somehow bravely abandoned his signature style. His transition from abstract expressionist to neo-expressionist (before there was such a category) was heretical. In ab-ex lockstep he had been part of the American...
In tandem shows at Roberts Projects, two figurative painters' allusions to contemporary anomie are animated by skeptical drollness. Celeste Rapone's bloated female protagonists contort and distend as though awkwardly striving to fill the expansive canvases they...
Offal, a group exhibition featuring 45 Los Angeles-based contemporary artists at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, works at finding how the metaphor of offal (which usually describes the parts of an animal that are discarded and not eaten) could be turned into a...
Dark humor pervades provocative works by Jesse Draxler, Jordan Weber and Mark Mulroney in "Don't Just Do Something, Sit There" at NO Gallery. These artists hail from different regions yet overlap in their hard-bitten manners of exploring mortality and contemporary...
At Marc Selwyn a year ago, "Jay DeFeo: The Texture of Color" included small paintings on paper from 1982-86. Those works imparted an inventive sense of discovery while also showcasing the artist's formidable expressive talent. The same is true for her current show,...
Los Angeles-based artist Mary Corse is known as one of the few women involved in the 1960s and 1970s West Coast Light and Space Movement, but in her later incarnations, she should also be known for creating a bridge between the “action painting” of Jackson Pollock and...
No conversation about the history of ceramics in art, especially about works created by female artists, would be complete without mention of Betty Woodman. The artist, who recently passed at age 87, shifted the conventions of ceramics—that of functional objects to be...
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