David Korty's early works called to mind the paintings of Alex Katz and Luc Tuymans as they flattened space, often depicting people in urban settings to imply narratives. More illustrative and interpretative than didactic or realistic, these works were an immediate...
Flora, Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler's enticing and enigmatic, double-sided film installation premiered at the 2017 Venice Biennale (in the Swiss Pavilion) and is currently on view at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (through April 7). In this presentation,...
Craig Krull Gallery seems larger than usual for the quantity of intriguing work in its current trio of tandem solo shows. Pierre Picot, Stan Edmondson and Lou Beach each work in different mediums but overlap in their surrealistic sensibilities rooted in prior eras....
With crafty charm belying provocative content, Lara Schnitger's textile collages strike a unique balance between daintiness and mordancy. One of the first pictures you'll find in her show, "Victory Garden" at Grice Bench, is a portrait titled Judith (all works 2019),...
The last time I was bowled over by an artist’s installation was Damien Hirst’s Theories, Models, Methods, Approaches, Assumptions, Results and Findings at Gagosian, New York in 2000. I have just seen and felt the bar raised again. The artist doesn’t live in New York...
For over a decade, Los Angeles artist Cathy Akers has tenaciously researched two experimental open land communes in Northern California—Morningstar and Wheeler’s Ranches, each historically located in West Sonoma County. Through the years the artist has built...
Jewel-like translucency and vibrant hues set off the disturbing nature of sculptures by Rona Pondick at Zevitas Marcus, where luminous human heads are frozen in resin blocks or attached to freakish creatural bodies. Several pieces, such as Encased Yellow Green...
The Stargazers show at the Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion in Costa Mesa, curated by gallery director Tyler Stallings to coincide with the opening of Orange Coast College’s state-of-the-art planetarium this month, interweaves scientific explorations of the cosmos with...
The 19th-century landscape painter Albert Bierstadt may have been a deer whisperer, able to corral an entire herd to pose for "Among the Sierra Nevada, California," but let's be real. The deer are fake. In Emma Webster's recent foray into landscape painting, she takes...
George Braque's simple act of stenciling the words “BAL” and “BACH” onto two of his Analytic Cubist paintings in 1911 launched a trend in modern and contemporary art so pervasive, there is no way he could have imagined the ramifications. The use of text in art has...
David Hockney recycles work from one medium into another, reinventing his own methodologies in the process. His versatility is highlighted in his show titled "Something New in Painting (and Photography) [and even Printing]... Continued," where landscape paintings,...
Why, exactly, is Laura Owens’ art so compelling? This is a question I’ve been asking myself since I was in art school. Elusiveness seems intrinsic to her work’s magic, which in my mind boils down to two intertwined notions: possibility and freedom. Owens’ eclectic art...
Cécile B. Evans’ stand alone installation, “Something Tactical is Coming,” generates a deliciously satisfying SciFi dystopian theatricality. The bulk of the installation at Chateau Shatto is comprised of a production set from the second episode of her three-part video...
It is not as simple as a pixels-for-brushstrokes exchange, but there’s no getting around how Petra Cortright’s new digital compositions are in a heated conversation with paintings. Yes, the gestures she enacts on her computer or touch-screen tablet function in the...
Helen Rae’s lavishly executed drawings, saturated with colors, patterns and prints, exemplify the power of mere visuals to communicate. Rae, who was born deaf and is nonverbal, speaks vibrantly and voluminously through her evocative drawings currently exhibiting at...
At first glance the passionately colored mandala-like images of June Edmonds and the softly nuanced black-and-white drawings on photographs by A.M. Rousseau couldn’t appear to be more distant from one another. Underlying both of these artists’ work however is an...
The term “Valley Girl” was introduced to popular culture in the early 1980s via a record by Frank Zappa and a film starring Nicolas Cage. It referred to young women from the San Fernando Valley who were portrayed as “ditzy,” “airheaded,” and committed to conspicuous...
Sara Gernsbacher’s wall works are not paintings. They are compositions of simple colors and shapes that suggest, rather than indicate, juxtapositions, combinations, interconnections, meldings and separations. Spray painted, trimmed and further layered, they evoke a...
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