The New Objectivity was an art movement in Germany established between the end of World War I and the Nazi rise to power. Artists like Otto Dix, Christian Schad and Aenne Biermann among others recognized the darkness of the times in which they lived and celebrated it...
While Dan Hernandez was standing in front of the Leonardo Annunciation a few years ago at the Uffizi, he recognized similarities between the painting and the classic arcade game Street Fighter II. Leonardo has the Archangel Gabriel leaning in toward the Virgin with a...
Whitney Bedford’s newest exhibition “West of Eden” at Susanne Vielmetter, is compulsory viewing for anyone who thinks they know anything about painting. Mind you, Bedford’s elegantly crafted oils on canvas of mostly landscapes, flora and fauna and the like, are...
Entering James Hyde's show at Luis De Jesus, one immediately wonders: What sort of pictures are these? At first glance, it is difficult to determine whether the expansive images are manual or mechanical, painterly or photographic.Materially, they are hybrids. Each...
Carol Es’ first solo exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery, "Rock and Refuge," is a testament to precision and detail and color and space. Her paintings, largely mixed media materials including meticulously cut bits of fabric on birch panels, are both whimsical and...
Multiples mostly bore me. That said, there are exceptions and Sean Townley’s second exhibition at Night Gallery in Downtown Los Angeles is one. The show consists largely of one image: three cast aluminum lions sculpted from a 3D scan of an ancient Greek funerary lion....
Matt Wedel’s is not a “peaceable kingdom” but a kingdom of fruit that happens to be strangely and miraculously at peace, and quite astonishing indeed. Over two dozen wall-mounted and free-standing sculptures comprise this densely imagined tundra, encompassing Wedel’s...
Paul Thomas Anderson took the stage at the the Ace Theatre last Sunday before the LA premiere of his new music documentary, Junun, to welcome the audience and apologize in advance for being an “asshole” for not participating in the “mandatory Q&A” that seems to...
The idea that abstract painting can be a direct conduit to the unknown, or a means by which artists struggle to understand their own mortality and relationship to God, etc., is certainly not a new concept, yet "Remains," a group show at Durden and Ray, attempts to...
To be a truly outstanding ceramicist one must possess a love of nuance and detail. Kathy Butterly’s exhibition titled "The Weight of Color" at Shoshana Wayne Gallery is more than a mere testament to these attributes, but an all-engrossing visual experience not to be...
Filmmaker and installation artist Maureen Selwood has turned her attention to the tactile world of sculpture and drawing in her first solo exhibition "Sounding the Note of A" at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, and are we lucky to witness it. Extrapolating on gestures of...
Gazing out of a window or peering into a painting: both imply curiosity, perhaps driven by a sense of longing, for what is beyond. John McAllister’s paintings self-reflexively allude to this, highlighting their own window-like rectangularity while presenting snapshots...
“A Cold War,” Jamison Carter’s current solo exhibition, and his second with Klowden Mann, revisits dichotomous themes introduced in his 2013 solo exhibition with the gallery, in which he explored the tensions that exist between man’s pervasive desire for advancement...
The series of relatively small digital photomontages Clayton Campbell has assembled under the rubric “Wild Kingdom” satirize social habits—on more than just the most evident levels. The images, all horizontal, consist of wildlife dioramas, the kind that fill corridor...
One measure of a contemporary artist’s success is that he or she allows us to view the world, our history, or ourselves differently; Candice Lin is notable for doing all three. Her mixed-media work upsets epistemological meta-narratives, conflates binaries and revels...
Contrary to certain art historical narratives, painting has never waned, but only been ever more rigorously interrogated—usually by the artists engaged with the medium. Chris Barnard is one of those artists mining and turning over the modernist tropes of figural...
John Baldessari once said that art should make you stop and look as you’re crossing through a museum. Mark Jenkins’ sculpture-installations certainly break one’s forward momentum. On entering the gallery you’re confronted with a clothed leg and shoed foot growing from...
he beasts of burden in Cynthia Minet’s conceptually and politically astute project include an elephant, pack dogs and birds of prey (vultures/falcons/raptors). Internally illuminated by LEDs and created from recycled and repurposed plastic fragments of all shapes,...
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