In his short video Tales from the Wig Museum (2017), on view at Blum & Poe gallery, Jim Shaw appropriates the style of the opening narration from Rod Serling’s television series The Twilight Zone. In this piece, a wig-wearing narrator delights in relating alluring...
There are a number of emotional responses to walking through a graveyard: firstly, satisfaction that one is walking at all and not an insensate resident; another, for those seduced by death and rejected by the quick, is the camaraderie of obliging, complementary...
Culled from five different series of Naida Osline’s photographic work since 2007, “Florescence” examines an arc of her practice that is focused on taxonomies of flora and fauna. The exhibition title, drawn from her photographic series of the same name, can be taken to...
Roughly four years ago, Paul McCarthy opened the sprawling installation “WS” at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, platforming (and rupturing) the domestic fantasy at the center of Disney’s Snow White fairy tale while playing out a vivisection of its narrative on...
Generally, rubbish is quickly dispatched and secreted from public consciousness—or at least ignored. Constance Mallinson, however, revels in discards’ improbable pulchritude while questioning society’s prodigious dispersion of throwaway images, ideas and sundries. In...
Peter Alexander’s true subject has always been light—both in his earlier, luminescent cast-resin sculptures, which he abandoned for several decades for health reasons, and in these captivating LAX series paintings from the 1990s. In the first half of the galleries...
Monet’s haystacks, Baldessari’s discs, Warhol’s everything—there are a number of artists who have worked in series specifically plotted as “the same picture in different colors” throughout art history, for diverse reasons—phenomenological comparison, critique of...
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Permanent Collection of Arms and Armor is one of the most encyclopedic in the world. Not only does it house more than 14,000 objects that range from the Fifth through the 19th century, but it’s the Museum’s most visited gallery with...
In Kafka’s “The Cares of a Family Man,” we meet a small, strange creature lurking on the narrator’s stairway and in his foyer. No animal, but a spool affixed to wooden crosspieces and trailing bits of thread, it’s a “broken-down remnant” composed of scraps, an...
Curated by Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, and inspired by Anthony Kwame Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006), the loosely Africa-centric, two-artist exhibition at Richard Taittinger Gallery, “Ethics in a World of Strangers: Nirveda Alleck and...
We are accustomed to sight as an experience of things coming into clearer focus the longer we look at them. Images seem fuzzy, we stare, maybe squint a bit, and they sharpen up. One of the special features of paintings by Peter Lodato is that they enact the opposite....
Straddling all sorts of categories, Nick Lowe's pictures are defined by their byzantine intermediacy between stretched canvases and works on paper, paintings and drawings, fanciful dreamscapes and pedestrian scenes. Lowe possesses an uncanny knack for agglomerating...
Group shows are like parties: overarching themes can help ensure memorable experiences; but sometimes the most engaging are those where unexpected connections form fortuitously among diverse invitees, rather than being engineered. "Hot Time, Summer in the City"...
With three distinct exhibition spaces within its massive Boyle Heights gallery, Ibid Gallery has reserved its smallest space, a jewel box of a venue, for the most engaging work on view, an exhibition entitled “slow relief” (the title of this show and all of the works...
In timeless spirit and simple form, Julia Haft-Candell's ceramic sculptures recall the mystical austerity of primeval petroglyphs, carved totems and cave paintings. Yet their painted embellishments and surface textures are unmistakably modern, evoking graphic novel...
Abstract but character-driven, tertiary and bright, super flat and deeply funny, the paintings and sculptural installations in Andy Kolar’s “Easy now.” speak to conceptual and material concerns in a uniquely satisfying, engaging dialect of modern color theory. The...
I walked into the Resnick Pavilion and into the swirling world of color and fantasy that Marc Chagall created for the theatre and remembered again what made me want to live. Much of the work exhibited in this show was actually made in New York. But it’s...
Alluding to the postmodern architecture of her Polish homeland, Monika Sosnowska’s first solo show at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles is comprised of six structural installations, which despite their rigid physicality and mass, are warped with drama, yet seem...