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...
As noted in an Artillery Pick quite recently, portraiture is the oldest form of ‘identity art’, and moreover, representation itself. It is ‘naming’ in the largest sense – placing, identifying, classifying, narrating, and implicitly conceptualizing, though without...
Collectively, the works that make up “Interstitial,” now on view at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, read like the detritus one might find in an abandoned time capsule. Curated by John David O'Brien (a regular Artillery contributor), the exhibition houses an...
We read history for perspective on advancing and collapsing civilizations and their impacts on planetary life and (hopefully) an understanding of historical cycles and a sense of where we might all be headed (besides other planets). Art exhibitions, historical and...
Only one visitor enters Alejandro Iñárritu’s installation CARNE y ARENA at a time. If you’re lucky enough to get a ticket, you’ll begin in a startlingly cold room lit by hard fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. Beat-up sneakers and water bottles lie underneath metal...
The title of the show is as ironic as it is aspirational. Most of us find ourselves in a place far more culturally fractured than we imagined less than a year ago, and pressing forward into an ever-more dystopian reality. Which is why it is as important as ever to...
The strategic manipulation and disorientation of material: concrete, paper, ink, and fiber, link the four distinct series displayed in Analia Saban’s “Folds and Faults.” As the exhibition title alludes, each work either weaves these materials together or ruptures them...
Not more than a year ago, I was writing about a show at LACMA with a transcendental dimension – not merely transcending its materials, approach and style, but whose visionary qualities might potentially carry the dedicated viewer to a place of transcendence. Only a...
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