Ornately grotesque, Aaron Johnson's paintings, on display at Stux & Haller Gallery, are vibrant, densely packed expositions on sex and death. According to Johnson the effect he’s after is the erotic intensity of two bodies merging together and two individual...
Claudia Parducci currently has three stunning paintings up at Sloan Projects at Bergamot Station, paintings that straddle the chasm between landscape and psychological terrain, works that are as much about evacuation as they are about prescience. Works like Doomed...
Cole Case is a gem of an artist who, in his most recent exhibition at Western Project, has demonstrated tremendous sensitivity of the finer elements of life. He is a master of seeing – dead birds, Iberian hounds with pink legs, the variegated lines and shadows that...
Curated by Laura Hoptman and on view at MoMA through April 5, “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World” attempts to identify a distinctly current impulse to select and recombine styles, materials, iconography and other references from a broad...
I had never heard of Lancaster, let alone gone there, before I drove up the 405 and the 14 last November to see “Being Here and There” at the Museum of Art and History. It was “worth the trip,” as the Guide Michelin says of exceptional destinations. Almost all the 26...
“To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was,” wrote Walter Benjamin. “It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” Dexter Dalwood, a previous nominee for the Turner Prize, examines in this new...
The first ever retrospective of Pierre Huyghe’s work presents 50 works spanning 20 years which, like flicking through a scrapbook, provide a montage of Huyghe’s most prevalent themes, motifs and inspirations, drawn from the fields of literature, film, music, science...
To walk into the Jim Morphesis exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of California Art is to be flooded by rich, intense waves of color. The tsunami of red, blue, black and white is matched by roiling surges of thick, densely textured impasto. Only after the initial...
Revealing a neglected and deliciously beautiful world from which we get only a handful of 72” x 60” snapshots—monochromatic yet stippled with smears, cracks and drips—Brenna Youngblood’s eight massive canvases, all mixed media, narrate a fall from grace. Titles...
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...
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