The sweep and scope of the Laguna Art Museum’s extensive Tony DeLap retrospective encompass several remarkable elements, including the artist’s large hybrid constructions, which feature unusual juxtapositions of shapes and materials, and his curved standing and...
Two painting shows at Lora Schlesinger Gallery register as pensive pictorial journals of events both experienced and imagined. Including still lifes, figures, landscapes, and combinations thereof, the easel-sized scenes in Roberto Gil de Montes' show titled "Moments"...
The Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion has organized a long-overdue posthumous retrospective for Los Angeles artist Jim DeFrance. Grouped largely by artistic series, the exhibition encompasses nearly six decades of his career. Seen altogether, this surprisingly...
Buenos Aires artist collective Mondongo is a collaborative duo consisting of Juliana Lafitte and Manuel Mendanha. Their work doesn't disappoint curiosity engendered by their mysterious name taken from a stew. Following the rickety elevator ride to the age-old Bendix...
Light and Space Art, one of the few significant movements to originate in Southern California, conflates the forms of Minimalism with the use of light as the actual medium of the artwork. Yet, even with all of the recent interest in the legacy of So Cal art, we have...
Martin Soto Climent's exhibition at Michael Benevento is a meticulously orchestrated visual symphony of photos, videos and sculptures. The Mexico City based artist titled his show "Temazcal" after the type of ceremonial sudatorium that inspired this body of work. The...
Both love letter and indictment, “The Modernist,” Catherine Opie’s new photographic installation and short film, blurrily overlays real places and occurrences with imagined events, creating an alternate near-term history of Los Angeles. Known as a portraitist and...
Vija Celmins’ work is best when you are caught by surprise—don’t read the manifest, just board the ship. Sublime encounters open quiet pathways to deep consideration of the now-octagenarian artist, her times and her legacy. Celmins’ exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery...
“Fever Pitch,” Wendell Gladstone’s new collection of paintings, achieves that elusive characteristic in which the longer you look, the more you see. It may be the bright, cotton candy-colored palette that draws you in, but it’s the details that keep you looking. At...
Minimalism, as Robert Hughes remarked, was the last great “ism” in contemporary art. It was perhaps defined best in the writings of Donald Judd (who hated the term), and in a few of Judd’s interviews from the 1970s. What seem significant in these are his ideas...
Looney Toons, Leger, Lewitt, and Kandinsky battle it out for aesthetic prominence across these epic and absolutely eccentric new paintings and sculptures by Rives Granade. Abstract forms, deracinated texts, and schematic signifiers festoon the gestural grounds of his...
Nearly everyone is aware of the smartphone’s impact on photographic aesthetics. Once-novel styles engendered by the cameras embedded in these devices have become so clichéd that they might pose more of a burden than a boon to smartphone shutterbugs shooting for...
There is a lacerating wit in the work of Grant Levy-Lucero, a solemn shrewdness dressed in Bermuda shorts. He is playful but he is not playing around. His exhibition of crude ceramics at Night Gallery borders one wall of an otherwise barren chamber. Displayed upon a...
Just inside the entrance and visible through the plate glass window that leads in from the hallway, a bloated lozenge floats, supported from below, in an oddly visceral pink bulb. From one corner, a white tassel hangs. Conjuring both entrails and a soiled gown, the...
During his year-long residency at the American Academy in Rome, Michael Queenland roamed the streets. Rome is a beautiful city to walk in, filled with ruins and monuments, but like any modern city, it is also cluttered with trash. The detritus—what was thrown...
In the late 1940s, Abstract Expressionism developed as an aesthetically pure style, stripped of the political content of 1930s Depression-era art, memorably dismissed by Arshile Gorky as “Poor art for poor people.” That attitude persisted until a counter-reaction set...
The opening movement of “Soul Recordings” is a polka-dot revelry, a bedazzled wake-up call, a cymbal-clap altarpiece, a plastic-bead trumpet blast, and a monster of a skull-ringed, glitter-bombed orchestral chord breaking in fuchsia major. This is Ebony G. Patterson’s...
"Advertising fogs our daily lives less from its peculiar lies than from its peculiar truths," Daniel Boorstin declared in his 1962 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. Seemingly truer than ever in our post-truth era, this notion offers an apt point of...