Ages-old art historical forces of the sublime and the picturesque battle it out across a suite of abstract landscapes, in about 20 fabulously chromatic, profoundly emotional, large-scale textile-based mixed media works by Merion Estes. Picturesque, because her take on...
A lowrider’s charisma lies in its transmogrification from prosaic to fabulous: an ordinary old automobile becomes a sparkling iridescent marvel that bounces like a carnival ride, remaining street-worthy despite its head-turning ostentation. In his Royale Projects...
“Making Art Concrete: Works from Argentina and Brazil in the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros” makes for a companion exhibition to the Palm Springs Art Museum’s “Kinesthesia,” also shown under the rubric of the Getty’s PST: LA/LA initiative. It wasn’t intended as...
In a 1994 Paris Review interview, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe famously quoted an Igbo proverb: “Until lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.” In an exploration of the historical and contemporary complexities of the...
Ruben Ochoa’s “SAMPLED y SURVEYED” illustrates the artist’s penchant for transforming basic construction materials into structural installations charged with meaning. Primarily working in wood, metals and concrete, Ochoa’s referential works function as tools with...
The objects in the image seem preternaturally still, pushed off to the left side of the frame: a liquefied elastic globule seems to pull down or just barely rest at the very corner of a marble slab, above it there is a chunk of what looks like concrete with rebar...
Care for a pickled egg? How about a mayonnaise sandwich? Or maybe you’d prefer apple butter? With these questions and a simple spread of food with which to ply visitors, Michael Lewis Miller gently draws his audiences into his performances, which arise almost...
Known for her minimal interventions in public spaces, creating subtle shifts in environments, either visually or with sound, New Orleans-based Zarouhie Abdalian has garnered significant acclaim. With four components considering the concept of work, “To History”...
In his recent work, Jesse Benson uses appropriation to dismantle “appropriate” interpretation. But unlike other painters who might pursue this goal through dramatic, even offensive subject matter, Benson does something subtler, de-familiarizing recognizable, seemingly...
Emily Counts' sculptures appear suspended at an intriguing juncture of covetable fashion and female shamanism. Of motley materials and contrasting forms, Counts' esoteric abstract shapes evoke mystical amulets or dreamcatchers; while their candy-hued glossy surfaces...
There’s a lot to learn from Ellen Gallagher’s new exhibition. For example, it turns out Herman Melville was an Afrofuturist. And that the Atlantic Ocean is the original abstract expressionist. Also, that it is possible to make a map of something you can never see. On...
Each painting currently displayed at Zevitas Marcus evokes the satisfyingly voyeuristic sensation of Sarah McEneaney or Ann Toebbe allowing you to peer through a window or skylight into her studio or home. This show's compendious title, "Home Work," bespeaks...
Rallying against overwhelmingly white, male perspectives in art history, “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85” at the California African American Museum (CAAM) is not to be missed. The exhibition highlights the stylistically varied work of over 30...
The provocation of vulnerability has long been a mainstay of impactful art. Video and film media, given their reliance on the staging of exposure and emotional confrontation, are no exception. An exhibition...
In Andi Magenheimer’s “HpPy BRdDY,” a smiling and limbless dinosaur’s engorged human breasts graze the reflecting water below, imperturbably still while a rhododendron sheds its petals endlessly from the shore, the sunset curving into and around the creature’s...
It's unique to see a distant artist delving deeply into our obscure local lore. In his current show at Gagosian, New York-based painter Walton Ford travels far back in time to the land of the Natural History Museum and La Brea Tar Pits. The exhibition's title,...
Spiritual aspirations present this fundamental dilemma: we exist as physical beings in a material world of far more palpable empirical reality than anything incorporeal, with pragmatic demands inevitably more urgent than intangibles. Without surplus resources, how...
Lynda Benglis' sculptures are motley in makeup, manifold in their evocations of natural features and visceral gestures. Variously forged of steel, bronze, polyurethane, chicken wire, handmade paper, glitter and clay, her splanchnic forms droop, lean, ooze, peel,...