Kinetic Art, like so many postwar movements, arose simultaneously in several disparate corners of the world, coalesced in the late 1950s and early ’60s, and derived from prewar tendencies whose revolutionary aesthetics and idealistic spirit seemed appropriate to a...
Brazilian artist Valeska Soares’ mid-career survey at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, her first solo museum exhibit in the western United States, seamlessly expresses the ephemeral qualities of love and longing, in harmony with and opposition to the weighted—and...
“Memories of Underdevelopment” is a sweeping exhibition composed of 400 objects from more than 50 artists from eight countries throughout Latin America. It shares its title with the 1968 movie directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea about the Cuban revolution and associated...
Right as you cross the threshold into Ahrong Kim’s show “Internal Voice” at the Clay Studio, you’re met by five pairs of eyes set into brightly colored teapots resting at eye level on plinths jutting from the wall. The eyes, embedded into fragmented faces, exposed...
Van Hanos' paintings parodizing partisan preposterousness would be utterly comical if they didn't so mordantly reflect our circusy cultural reality. Cynically dubbed "Late American Paintings," his current show at Chateau Shatto concentrates social discord, political...
In a letter to a fellow Argentine artist living in Paris, León Ferrari wrote, “We produce culture for our ideological enemies, and they gobble everything up, the pretty paintings and the protest paintings alike.” That is the continuing crisis for art that is built...
Nemesio Antúnez (1918-1993) possessed a remarkable talent for crystallizing the spirit of certain locations and scenarios. In his small but captivating pictorial selection currently on view at Couturier Gallery, the Santiago de Chile-born, Columbia-educated artist...
What do we have when those closest and dearest to us pass away and what do we do with the things that were once theirs? Richard Turner's installation Air Becomes Breath, 2017, takes that question on and has turned the clothing of his recently deceased wife, Sylvia,...
"Still Remains" is a small but provocative installation of twenty contemporary landscape paintings by Cody Norris in which the artist responds to the epic disfigurations and loss of wild nature due to extreme weather. Employing a neo-fumage technique, Norris’ work...
With salmon walls, magenta carpet and eccentric ornament, Ariana Papademetropoulos has transformed Wilding Cran into a life-size dollhouse where you are the doll and everything is slightly off-kilter. Her show's title, "The man who saved a dog from an imaginary fire,"...
Along a lonely stretch of Main Street extending from Union Station to the Brewery Arts Complex, largely defined by seafood warehouses and girded by railroad tracks, sits Werkartz, a co-working pop-up venue and production space aligned with a new gig economy in which...
Monique Prieto's new paintings radiate magnetic simplicity. The abstractions in her elegantly spare show, "Luster," glow as though lit from within. Each of the four diptychs currently on view at Chimento Contemporary features a pair of organic shapes, one on each...
Kajahl's paintings vivify ancient statues, presenting them as dignified, mysterious multicultural personae. Embodying Western clichés from bygone eras, the characters in his current show titled "Unearthed Entities" include alchemists, explorers and conquerors. While...
Linda Vallejo's show titled "Keepin' It Brown" affects an antique store atmosphere. Folksily arranged ceramic figurines stand atop pedestals. Walls are adorned with framed pictures of celebrities and pieces appearing as needlepoint. Embedded in this homey pop-culture...
In “line-of-site,” Joseph Dumbacher and John Dumbacher have crafted an installation about geometry and perception. It is minimal and simultaneously maximal, suggesting expansive possibilities with limited materials. The brothers (who are fraternal twins) have filled...
Sometimes a drawing is not a drawing. For example, when an artist transcends rendering and goes for something entirely more direct. In the case of Flora Kao and her unique, evocative architectural rubbings, her method of depiction is itself a tactile, durational,...
Lawrence Halprin (1916–2009) is renowned for his landscape architecture; but 28 drawings currently on view at Edward Cella indicate that he might just as adeptly have applied his creativity towards fine art. Executed between 1943–2006, these drawings, which seem...
It's amazing how much effort, skill and intellect Neil Raitt directs towards donning the ornate trappings of kitsch. Visitors enter his installation through a painstakingly contrived threshold whose tree-shaped outline resembles that of a rearview mirror air...
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