It’s been said that the first half of the 20th century was Picasso’s and the second half, Duchamp’s. The transition from modernist painting to today’s mixed-media conceptualism is in large part due to a 1963 Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum. The show...
Cultural anthropologists have traditionally brought assumptions of Eurocentric superiority to their studies of “primitive” societies, using language and presentations that cast the subjects in a dismissive light. Turning the tables on this practice, Michael Arcega,...
For more than 10 years, starting in 1998, Zoe Leonard photographed the ravages of urban life. From New York to Eastern Europe, Africa, Cuba and Mexico, she found shuttered storefronts and fallen marquees, makeshift signs and dated logos, obsolete computers and manual...
Space and architecture constitute, for Gaston Bachelard in his book, The Poetics of Space, a site for our memories, which become real and find a location through the geography of constructed space. These locations, which function as markers on the road of our...
Comic-book artists are sometimes dismissed as just that—common “drawers” as it were rather than fine artists. This recent retrospective of Jack Kirby’s graphic work currently on view at Cal State Northridge’s Mike Curb Gallery sets the record straight and proves that...
Noah Purifoy made it his life long duty to seek art everywhere in everything, and to do so with tremendous poise and discernment. The retrospective Junk Dada on view at LACMA is breathtakingly inventive and, if nothing else, speaks to the unending seductiveness of the...
When I enter the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive for the first time, I know that I have not viewed art in any space like it before. The venue bridges the gap between gallery space and archive —the exhibit’s content is displayed among boxes of materials, shelves of...
Deedee Cheriel’s work feels akin to falling headlong into a rendition of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream while drinking a pint of Buffalo Trace Bourbon on a hot New York summer night in Chelsea. Her mostly small paintings of animals reenacting human activities...
In 2013 artist Doug Aitken realized an extraordinarily ambitious art project, "Station to Station," a kind of continuous art performance on wheels. This one rolled coast to coast, populated with creative folk who got on and off, making music, making art, making...
Drawing a fine line between voyeurism and vigilance, Indian artist Abir Karmakar’s second solo exhibition "Uncanny Space” at Aicon Gallery continues with his preoccupation of seducing viewers to become surreptitious onlookers of his painted private spaces. Yet at the...
Gertrude Stein once famously wrote, “A rose is a rose is a rose,” and Jose Rodolfo Loaiza Ontiveros, whose exhibition "Wonder Pop," consisting of Disney characters and well-known Pop cultural figures drawn in bright colors and recast with gay themes, might respond...
Entering Joseph Holtzman’s recent Hammer Project feels akin to entering a child’s sacred imaginative landscape, one where all the imaginary friends can not only be seen, but also deeply witnessed on a visceral level. Not all these friends are indeed friendly and some,...
There are times when an art movement quietly documents the heart and soul of the much louder story of history that surrounds it. In 1966, LSD was legal. It was available to a large group of first adopters who found the drug to be “very sensational.”In 1967, LSD was...
"The Slick & The Sticky," a group show co-curated by Vanessa Place, insists adamantly on its own dystopian themes, wherein the works in the exhibition deliberately obfuscate their own suggested meaning. Working off the premise that all language is inherently...
The only quibble I might have with the Getty's excellent show, "Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography," would be that its title is too literal-minded. A show as exciting as this one is might have had a more adventurous title – say, "Back to the Future," or...
Straddling a fine line somewhere between sincere participation and ironic appropriation, Petra Cortright’s multimedia cyberspace art endlessly reflects and redoubles the medium from which it borrows. The Internet is Cortright’s vehicle and content, framed by...
Not that this hasn’t been done before, the theme of “flatness” explored again and again in all its variations, but in its most recent incarnation at David Kordansky Gallery, artists like Tauba Auerbach transform the static spatial plane that is “flatness” into a...
The Venice Biennale, founded in 1895, now includes 30-plus national pavilion spaces in the Giardini area, a mindboggling abundance of ancillary exhibitions (including especially the group show in the warehouse-like Arsenale), as well as a plethora of performance art,...
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