This survey of Al Payne’s work goes back a half century and spans his entire career, establishing the late artist as an assured painter and colorist, no matter what his subject matter or his style: figurative or abstract, conceptual or retinal. That is, the survey...
Artists known for their breakthrough projects or a specific style often have difficulty changing directions. Fortunately, Sadie Benning has resisted this conundrum, moving successfully between mediums and subjects. Her early works were confessional videos created with...
Chinese dissident artist Zhao Zhao is inevitably associated with Ai Weiwei, both because he worked with the renowned older artist and because he has experienced the same persecution at the hands of the Chinese government—arrest, travel bans, confiscation of artwork....
Originally from the East Coast, San Francisco-based artist Richard Hoblock displays a palpable joy in the process and materials of painting, his second career. Previously immersed in the film and arts communities of Los Angeles, he obtained an MFA in 1998 from UCLA’s...
“Songbook,” Alec Soth’s current exhibition of documentary-style black-and-white environmental and ensemble portraiture at Sean Kelly Gallery is compellingly complicated in the aggregate, ultimately pointing to a deeply American dilemma of how physical and social space...
Kianja Strobert makes abstract painting the old-fashioned way, with surfaces to die for. Her powdery blacks recall the days when artists ground their own colors—and her gold when nothing else would do. Pigment presses to the edge and then some, as an extension of her...
Even mountains deserved to be loved. I don’t mean literally of course, but metaphorically the mountain represents a force to be reckoned with, and hopefully, if not scaled, then appreciated. Jacci Den Hartog, in her newest exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery has...
The second edition of the Kochi Muziris Biennale held on the Malabar Coast of Kerala, South India, kicked off with great fanfare. Thunderous music at the opening ceremony from a traditional ensemble of drums, cymbals, pipes, and horns normally used before evening...
In his first solo show in the U.S., French artist Benoît Maire includes a video presented on a MacBook showing an image of another MacBook showing a video of the artist watching a video of Foucault on YouTube (on a MacBook). Foucault is shown praising Gaston Bachelard...
Anish Kapoor is a master in “organic monumentality.” Working with literal organic matter including pigments and earth as well as nonorganic substances including resins and silicone, Kapoor has forged yet another series of complex and visually challenging sculptural...
Jason Yates is preternaturally disposed to emulate, extrapolate and thoroughly and passionately investigate anything that relates to pop culture, therein creating his newest foray into the simultaneous realms of sculpture, paintings, installation and collage at C....
Poet Wallace Stevens, in his seminal poem “Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction,” eschews a literal interpretation of anything, vying instead for a Greenbergian-like approach to art, indeed to life itself, privileging purity in abstraction over narrative. This recent...
Offering a more complete picture of the artist than the one beloved in popular imagination, “Keith Haring: The Political Line,” at the de Young in San Francisco illuminates a more radical and shamanistic side that seems to be fuel and lifeblood for the playful and...
First of all, soda and gardeners don’t usually go together; that’s not to say that all gardeners must abstain from soda or that soda doesn’t sometimes yearn for the garden, but it’s an unlikely alliance, yet Jason McLean’s exhibition at Wilding Cran is a playful and...
Monique Prieto’s newest exhibition aptly titled Hat Dance, on view at the brand new LAM Gallery on Highland Avenue, charts like the banned Mexican dance it was named for: a kind of radiant courtship between the artist and the painting, and further still between the...
I was generally sympathetic to the examination of remote machinic vision on display at XPO Gallery, with their presentation of a Brooklyn-heavy group show that is weirdly shut to the public: HIKE, HACK, HIC et NUNC. Interestingly, it coincided with the punch of...
The opening night of the LA Art Show offered the usual enticements—free food and drink, opportunities for schmoozing and networking, celebrity-gawking—but it also happened to have a great deal of impressive contemporary art on display. Here, in no especial order, are...
Max Presneill has broken through to the “other side” and by this I do not mean he’s cavorting with spirits, but simply that he has in his second exhibition at the Garboushian Gallery in Beverly Hills created a stunningly rigorous body of work that even the dead would...
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