Mike Kelley was a ruthless investigator, of everything from Mother Mary, to rainbow afro wigs to stuffed toys to the complex mechanism, which was his own mind. The works that comprise this retrospective are alternately humorous and aggressive, quietly lurking and...
Nathan MabryI can think of nothing as “fiercely alluring” (literally) as the open-mouthed skull of a T-Rex, and one with a luscious bronze patina to boot! Nathan Mabry delivers another provocative and mythologically charged visual opus at the Cherry Martin Gallery....
The rigorous simplicity of Alice Aycock’s early architecturally-based land art, as well as the exuberant complexity and cosmological grandeur toward which she has steadily moved, were both well represented in “Alice Aycock Drawings: Some Stories are Worth Repeating,”...
When Pouya Afshar was a young boy in Tehran, his grandfather gave him a gun and told him to kill the crow that was eating the fruit off the trees in the garden. The young boy did as he was told. Later his grandfather told him the crow might have been a mother feeding...
Panoramic history paintings depict all encompassing views, often creating a cinematic effect, and require active participation from the viewer, who is surrounded by the imagery. Meleko Mokgosi’s much lauded, multi-panel paintings exhibit a technical mastery that he...
With 21 new photographs in her second solo show at Angles Gallery, Augusta Wood resumes where she left off in her 2010 body of work, “I have only what I remember,” by delving deeply into personal history. Wood constructs her photographs from multiple images selected...
The Los Angeles Museum of Art is a DIY structure approximately 100 square-feet situated in the corner of a paved yard in Eagle Rock. Founded and run by the artist Alice Könitz, LAMOA continues in the long line of LA-based artist-run spaces that crop up regularly but...
Death becomes her, there really is no better way to describe Andra Ursuta’s first solo show in the US. Ursuta’s work has been dark, conceptual, sexually-charged and fueled by a death obsession; now fear is the impetus for creating a fictional graveyard in the Hammer...
While painters are often primarily concerned with light effects and the visual, Berkeley-based Judith Belzer’s work also resonates with a haptic sense. Her imagery is felt in the body, in the hands and feet. Recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, Belzer explores...
“Rainbow Girls” at Cheim & Read continues Ghada Amer’s inventive strategy of using thread as paint, and needle as paintbrush, but with a marked difference. Bold embroidered stenciled text covers her canvas. Women’s rights and Amer’s stance are as forthright as her...
The overt theme of “Damage Control: Art and Destruction since 1950,” curated by Terry Brougher and Russell Ferguson, is the presence of destructive force(s) in art since World War II—a trajectory of investigation whose origins in the war (especially its nuclear finale...
John MillsJohn Mills’ recent exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery is compositionally complex and visually challenging. As the title suggests, High On Signs represents the artist’s love affair with line and shape and more importantly perhaps, the iconographic...
John TottenhamJohn Tottenham, who regularly graces Artillery’s pages with his near orgasmic wit and verbal subterfuge, is a fantastic artist, though in typical self-deprecating style, he might in fact tell you otherwise. “The Indifferent Sublime” is, well, truly...
Koi No Yokan IIImagine meeting someone, and knowing that you will one day fall madly in love with that person, and you have mastered the Japanese concept of Koi No Yokan. Love is not immediately activated, as in the American sense of “love at first sight,” but becomes...
“The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988” at MoMA showcases more than 300 pieces by the groundbreaking Brazilian artist Lygia Clark whose ultimate emphasis was on the sensorial experience of art. Altering the viewer’s perception and experience of her objects permeates...
Celebrity can be problematic. In fact, celebrity is one of the most poisonous influences on individual and collective human psychology at work in contemporary society, undermining the concept of individual creative autonomy as it unilaterally erases millennia-old...
Luke ButlerI can see Luke Butler hanging out with Montgomery Clift and Liz Taylor, sipping daiquiris by the lake-house with not a care in the world, but then all great movies must come to “an end.” Butler specializes in these two powerfully evocative little words...
Materially Defined All art has corporeal form, and must be “made” of something, and in the case of “Materially Defined,” at CMay Gallery, the literal materials themselves dictate the greater metaphorical meaning of the individual works in the exhibition. Macha...
Subscribe to our weekly Gallery Rounds Newsletter for new Reviews, Art opps, Art Events, & More every week!