The Seattle-born painter, sculptor and graphic designer Cleon Peterson has created a true battlefield experience with his new exhibit “Blood & Soil,” satirically making use of the 19th-century German slogan that expressed an idealization of racial identity and...
With relations between Russia and Western liberal democracies strained to the point of rupture, the rise of nationalistic fervor and anti-democratic forces on all sides, and notions of dissent and finding a viable way forward taking on greater urgency with each...
Gertrude Stein wrote in English, but in a way, Eve Fowler is acting as her translator. For the last decade at least, Fowler has been orienting her work across collage, photography, video and text-based practices in response to Stein’s oeuvre. The beguiling aluminum...
The Wilshire district gallery of Sprüth Magers is physically separated from a certain Southard’s Carwash in Galesburg, Illinois, by 1,969 miles. It is in this Los Angeles gallery directly across the street from the LACMA campus where the latest iteration of Stephen...
In the mixed-media works of his exhibition “Neo-American Transcendental,” Michael Maxwell employs materials ranging from the prehistoric to the digital. Clay, natural mineral pigments, plant dyes, wheat paste, quartz crystal, silver and gold leaf, beeswax, encaustic,...
Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) is popularly epitomized by her monumental masterwork The Rose (1958-66), whose counterpart, The Jewel (1959), is on permanent display at LACMA. It's rather misleading, for her diverse oeuvre encompasses far more than just those heftily textured...
Three abstract painters converge like an artistic Venn diagram in "Intersecting at the Edge" at the Claremont Museum of Art, where paintings by the late Karl Benjamin, a principal figure of the California Hard-edge painting movement, are displayed alongside...
Rosha Yaghmai’s installation in a sideroom of its own, Slide Samples (Lures, Myths), is immediately visually striking. With the soft low light, the room is quiet with abstract shapes cast from a slide projection filling all the walls. As your eyes adjust to the...
Aftermath of Puerto Rico flooding looms large in the backgrounds of Jonny Negron's psychically charged scenes. Indoors and outdoors, water is everywhere. Resembling graphic novel or zine illustrations, Negron's eleven gouache-on-paper paintings in "A Small Map of...
The practice of selling art presumes severability. To sell a work from the white walls of a studio or gallery promises a degree of independence: this piece will appeal in another room, at another time. In this way a gallery is an anti-ecology. Its elements do not...
Michael Queenland’s installation in Made in L.A. 2018 at the Hammer Museum conjures up images of a post-apocalyptic future, where humans have gathered up their last resources— boxes and boxes of cereal—and rationed them for their imminent escape to outer space....
Watch out! Don't tread on the dead rats; they're part of the show. "Macrosolutions to Megaproblems" is a small but captivating assortment of quirky pieces by Sam Davis and Josh Mannis at M+B. At first, you might be so distracted by Mannis' attention-grabbing paintings...
Wobbly hot pink letters pasted above the threshold of the interior gallery of Walter Maciel spell "Short Stories," the title of Greg Mocilnikar's exhibition. Appearing more like a literary heading than the title of an art exhibition, this seemingly minor gesture sets...
When I walked into OURCHETYPES (2018), an installation by Jade Gordon and Megan Whitmarsh at the Hammer Museum’s biennial exhibition “Made in L.A.,” I felt as though I had entered a bubble. The soft purple carpeted floors, the ambient voices emanating from the video...
Just as sordid episodes leak bit by bit from grand American narratives, a morbid sense of truculence stealthily emerges from Joshua Hagler's bright palette and superficially quaint old-time imagery. His show "The River Lethe" at the Brand Library encompasses two...
Across a series of ethereal vignettes in Sophie von Hellermann’s new series, the petri dish operates as both a quirky formal motif and a sophisticated allegorical framework. Each of the mostly large-scale paintings (all acrylic on canvas, all 2018), display a picture...
Contorting harlequins bow and sprawl over pastel chairs, rugs, walls and potted houseplants in Sara Berman's paintings. Are these mysteriously leotarded people lost in reverie, engaged in awkward stretching exercises, or merely lolling indolently? It's impossible to...
Imagining an art object made entirely without thought and therefore completely physical is a fascinating exercise. On the other hand, trying to imagine as art something that was entirely wrought by thought without a physical trace (and therefore practice) is equally...