In 2008, Michelle Obama commissioned Mickalene Thomas to paint her official portrait, the first portrait of a First Lady who is a person of color. As a portraitist, Thomas knows that a pose is a performance—a deliberate, affected presentation of the sitter, their...
Allison Miller’s oeuvre is firmly and unequivocally rooted in the painting tradition, and yet is built upon a conviction, evident in her output over the past decade or so, to explore every inch of the possibilities, conditions and inherited clichés of painting. It...
In the darkened gallery, a single row of seats faces a large screen on which a series of images loop. These images run by in rapid succession with all of the characteristic flashes of light, scratches and stuttering of an acetate film. Transitions from one scene to...
In this era of information overkill, one may absorb endless volumes, yet the impact of each tale remains a solitary and private event, each word soaking in, one at a time, to imprint its distinctive mark on one’s being.A somber family legend took root in the mind of...
Even in December, the trees on Delancey Street have a coppery glow. It is not the glow of fall foliage, not on a Lower East Side thoroughfare better known for traffic than for signs of life. At least one gallery has bricked up its glass façade to keep out the sights...
Jordan Sullivan’s “The Divine Nothing” is clearly an indulgence in color and aesthetics, and it isn’t a bad thing. Sullivan’s work is strikingly painterly. The large format C-prints appear more like washes of watercolors than photographs, with their blissfully...
As 2016 winds to a close, a lot of us are looking back on the past year, and (with some trepidation) forward to 2017, and wondering how we managed to arrive at this particular time and place. ‘How could we have missed….?’ – fill in the blank. The short answer is that...
Doug Aitken sings the earth and cosmos electric in a mid-career retrospective that could be a Pick of the Year exhibition. The Geffen space, which has never looked better, was entirely made over for the show – an immersive odyssey to mirror Aitken’s own process with...
“Nkame,” the Belkis Ayón retrospective at the Fowler Museum, comprised of 43 collography prints, is about the Abakuá, an all-male secret society in Havana, formed by a group of slaves from southern Nigeria. However, there is another layer in Ayón’s body of work.The...
Matthew Rosenquist knows his way around the block. I mean that in every sense. He’s acutely attuned to a certain street culture and attitude in common circulation both in L.A. and elsewhere – a suburbanized (and slightly desperate) vernacular observed not only in...
Currently on display at Culver City’s Anat Ebgi gallery are the familiar, yet intriguing color field paintings of Texas-born, New York-based mixed-media artist Ethan Cook. Taking inspiration from abstract painters such as Mark Rothko and Agnes Martin, here Cook delves...
In Maria Lassnig’s career, we trace a continuously evolving negotiation between the conscious self and the alternately concrete and conceptualized other. The body of Lassnig’s work – evolving over the course of her long career from her first expressionist essays into...
Simone Leigh’s small but impactful show of new work at the Hammer Museum probes the construction of the black female subject within the historical context of the African diaspora. Her aesthetic influences are culled from traditional African and Caribbean visual art...
R. H. Quaytman’s Morning: Chapter 30 has an assertive, unrelenting horizontal presence, but it really represents a kind of constellation – coextensive with the larger universe of associations that populate Quaytman’s entire body of work. That constellation may be...
Paul Sietsema's works have an aesthetic and intellectual dimensionality and the path through his exhibition is an invitation to put together the pieces of a sophisticated puzzle that juxtaposes the digital and the handmade with a semi-nostalgic nod toward objects from...
Jud Fine and Barbara McCarren’s And/Or show at the University Art Museum, Cal State University Long Beach channels us toward Keats’ notion of negative capability, or a fertile surrender to paradox and uncertainty, by way of two colliding currents. One induces...
Jeffrey Vallance was already something of a legend when I first became acquainted with his work – an ‘interventionist’ style of conceptual art in which the performance became a kind of deconstructed cultural inquiry. My first impression came by way of captioned...
If you missed this artist’s 2014 “Light Invisible” installation at LACMA, “Golden Ratio,” a new show at Peter Blake Gallery presents the opportunity to view Helen Pashgian’s colorless elliptical columns. In this exhibition of Pashgian’s continued exploration of light...
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