Category: Pick of the Week

Two shows at The Pit delineate visionary worlds of wacky flourish and dazzling variegation. “Venusian Weather,” the title of Laurie Nye‘s show, suggests the second planet from the Sun as well as the Greco-Roman ideal of female beauty. The paintings therein reflect Nye’s personal ecofeminist cosmological mythos inspired by classical mythology and popular science fiction. Nye, an eccentric colorist with a flair for scumbling and layering transparencies, contrives her pictures as though she were an alien well versed in earthly painting. Her fanciful scenes impressionistically suggest glowing, flowing-haired humanoids floating before hallucinogenic trellises overgrown with otherworldly vegetation. Paintings such as Cloud Migration 3001 (2018) exude airy ethereality and feverish luminosity. By way of a shaped canvas that frames viewers between its prongs, Venusian Weather (2018) symbolically brings extraplanetary weather into the gallery. Next door in The Pit II, Mindy Shapero‘s psychedelic installation (pictured above) vivifies the alienness of Nye’s painted world. As you step inside, it seems discourteous to tread upon the meticulously hand-embellished floorcloth of reflective foil within Shapero’s dystopic funhouse that queasily unravels your sense of orientation. Three sculptures are the only entities appearing solid. The carnivalesque claustrophobia induced by Shapero’s kaleidoscopically striated walls redoubles sculptures such as Broken Head from the Other Side (2018), which is as intriguing inside as out; and Lover with Two Ear Socks (2018), a cartoonishly doglike creature catatonically gazing into a rainbow target in the corner. While this totemic creature appears endlessly suspended in mesmeric awe of its surroundings, you have to leave before you get seasick.

The Pit
918 Ruberta Ave.
Glendale, CA 91201
Shows run through Jun. 10

Eastern concepts meld with Western painting methods in Thai artist Kamol Tassananchalee‘s mystical abstractions currently on view at LA Artcore. This transnational painter, who maintains a studio in Chatsworth, received his MFA from Otis in 1977, was titled National Artist of Thailand in 1997, and represented his motherland in the 2015 Venice Biennale. His most original works in this exhibition are from “The Four Element” series inspired by the Buddhist principles of earth, air, fire and water as the four elemental constituents of existence. In this series, calligraphically fluid brushstrokes loosely swish and swirl over distinctively shaped wooden boards and swaths of unstretched canvas, intermittently coalescing into eccentric arcs and mysterious orbs. Tassananchalee’s abstract forms sometimes seem tenuously anthropomorphic, evoking lips, eyes, tongues, and primordial human figures. Anthropomorphism is corroborated by the fact that his wooden surfaces were originally screens for nang yai, a Thai tradition of shadow puppetry. The show also features “Under the Western Sky,” a watercolor series that Tassananchalee, an honorary artist in permanent residence of the Navajo Nation in Arizona, painted en plein air while escorting fellow Thai artists around Southwestern desert countryside. Depicting cows and horses running in roads and gulches, these romantic landscapes testify to the enduring international fascination with the American West.

LA Artcore Union Center for the Arts
120 Judge John Aiso St.
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Show runs through May 27

“Testament of the Spirit” at Pasadena Museum of California Art encompasses over 60 paintings that Eduardo Carrillo (1937-1997) produced over a 40-year period. While traversing this engrossing retrospective, one feels as though perusing an eclectic panoply of peepholes into the quotidian life and imaginary worlds of the Chicano painter, whose practice spanned a wide array of subjects, genres and media. For all its diversity, his work unites in idiosyncratic stylization, emotive luminosity, and invocation of spiritual and cultural symbolism. Instead of a tight chronologic progression, the multifarious show is organized around groupings of related paintings. Not knowing what to expect results in felicitous surprises. Progressing through the show, you gather how Carrillo’s early emulation of Old Masters and visionary European painting transitioned to his later, more straightforward figuration exuding the influence of Mexican vernacular styles. Among his late work, Tio Beto on the Wall (1988) casts a bricklayer as heroic giant. Most impressive are his visionary scenes, many of which equal the skill and creativity of Surrealist predecessors while presaging edgy contemporary painting. It’s hard to believe that Las Tropicanas (1972-73) is nearly fifty years old, so modern it looks alongside Testament of the Holy Spirit (1971) and Woman Holding Serpent (1975, pictured above), two contemplative scenes featuring snakes amid radiance. The exhibition culminates in its magnum opus, Chicano History (1970), a huge, captivating panoramic mural executed in collaboration with three other artists. Displayed for the first time since 1991, this piece alone makes the show worth attending.

Pasadena Museum of California Art
490 E. Union Street
Pasadena, CA 91101
Show runs through Jun. 3
Admission fees apply

A diverse trio of shows by significant artists is soon to close at Hauser & Wirth. If you haven’t attended, and only have time to visit one gallery this week, you might try this three-for-one-special where discrete exhibitions by Mark Bradford, Geta Brătescu and Louise Bourgeois are loosely united by themes of societal ills, cultural lore and individual pain. Bradford, in his new paintings focusing on cartoons, builds on his signature practice of layering paper scraps found on Los Angeles streets. For his canvases’ monumental size, collaged comics don’t come into focus until one is inches away. The contrast between Bradford’s abstract, textured painting compositions and his figurative, text-interlaced cartoon details sets up an interesting dissonance that resonates with his master-planned chaos of brushwork and composition. The composition of I heard you got arrested today (2018, pictured above), titled after a tiny speech balloon it contains, brings to mind a network of freeway overpasses while also evoking a flayed body. Brătescu‘s show, reviewed in-depth in Artillery’s current print issue, offers an expansive survey of the Romanian conceptualist’s playful oeuvre. And Louise Bourgeois‘ “The Red Sky” is exquisitely poignant, presented as a poetic series of sanguine images and snippets of handwriting that sequentially build upon one another. Bourgeois’ crimson arabesques often evoke landscapes of layered skin and blood. Elegant yet piercing, her drawings resonate unexpectedly with Bradford’s gouged, incised paintings.

Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles
901 East 3rd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013
Shows run through May 20

Christopher Page‘s paintings appear as windows into neon voids. “Opening” at Baert Gallery comprises five trompe l’oeil abstractions whose geometric compositions appear flat from afar but disclose illusionistic shading as one approaches. Flashy color fields are bordered by plain trompe l’oeil frames painted to the nines with highlights, reflections and shadows. Yet the realistic borders seem paradoxical, for nothing is in the center but vacantly glaring yellow, orange, red, green or blue so garish they arrest one’s eyes. Eliciting a disconcerting sense of emptiness, the fluorescent fields in Not-All (all works 2018), Program and Ground are Rothko-esque in effect; however, Page’s painted expanses, clinically smooth for his airbrush and roller application, lack the personal touch generally associated with Color Field Painting. As one stares into the vacuous expanses of artificial hue, subtle differences in tonality dissolve in ocular fatigue and play afterimage tricks on surrounding white walls. In Opening (pictured above) and Close, shadows improbably infringe luminous panes. Like shallow yet tangible computer screen facades belying potentially infinite combinations of colored light, Page’s opaque yet glowing tableaus seem deceptively hollow, as though hiding some elusive unfathomable. Sometimes, it seems that instead of softening reality’s edges, effulgent technologic marvels flaunt the bleakness of the human condition, underscoring the fact that all our wonderful inventions can’t save us. These five screens into dazzling nothingness succinctly encapsulate such a feeling.

Baert Gallery
2441 Hunter Street
Los Angeles, CA 90021
Show runs through May 12

Lightning, volcanoes, geysers and ice floes possess hellish glory whose terror is facilely reduced to quaintness. Depicting these comely but deadly natural forces, Kelly Berg‘s artworks illustrate humans’ relationship to the earth’s crust as a labyrinthine blend of fascination and repulsion, preservation and destruction. Each of her pieces in “Unknown Horizon” at Craig Krull is a rectangular panel encrusted with sculptural protuberances in high relief. Three-dimensional components made of fabric, plaster, mesh and paint resemble lava, snow, gold and copper. Assuming fashionable metallic panache like framed mirrors, bracelets and necklaces, Berg’s prickly sculpture-paintings such as Before the Gold Rush (2017) bring to mind the ironic violence of how precious stones and metals are shatteringly evulsed from terrain to be cut, polished, set, and treasured as fetishes. In Mysteries of Inner Earth (2018) and Golden Plume (2017), gold glass spikes emanate from cavern-painted canvases like brilliant rays of light, poking outward as though to protect the enhaloed painting, but also jabbing inward, as though to skewer the stalactites and stalagmites within. Such pictures, which evoke spelunkers’ or miners’ lucid glimpses beyond limestone curtains, convey how caves and rock formations are visited and vaunted even as they are excavated and destroyed by people and natural forces. Most impressive, Rift (2016) and Edge of the World (2018, pictured above) exalt the infernal mystery of Earth’s periodic magma ejections. Counterpointing Berg’s plutonian diadems, the vivid abstract paintings in Ned Evans‘ adjacent show portray cubistic manmade manifolds suffused with meditative textural subtleties. Paintings such as Lubad (2018) evoke interiors overlaid with mindscapes and digital fabrications. Though his compositions congeal from afar, Evans’ surfaces requite close attention.

Craig Krull Gallery
2525 Michigan Ave., # B-3
Santa Monica, CA 90404
Show runs through May 26

As 356 Mission prepares to shutter, two unorthodox shows whet regulars’ regret for the singular gallery’s imminent finis. Closing April 22, Charlemagne Palestine‘s plush extravaganza is apposite to new artist Alake Shilling‘s outlandish show that will remain through April 29. Shilling’s installation, “Monsoon Lagoon,” transports viewers into a delirious Lisa Frank-enstein dystopia where glitter, vibrancy, and creativity fail to counteract disquiet. A narrow, worn staircase descends to a basement lair of kitschy, brooding ceramic animals whose cavelike domain is vaguely reminiscent of a thrift store or a girl’s bedroom. Here, Lisa Frank’s rainbow world is reinterpreted as a discombobulating scenario where, instead of being cheered by vibrant, friendly creature accessories, you have been lured into the animals’ midst, perhaps to solace their existential angst. Insects loll and amphibians perch upon mossy boulders. Ceramic sculptures are decked from front to back with unwieldy clay curlicues and unsettling flowers. Walls are painted in mauve that should be appealing but isn’t. Foam-overlaid paintings, with wavy boundaries matching their painted-on messiness, melt and splotch in defiance of their rectangular forms. In these grotesquely bedizened pictures, anthropomorphic bears, frogs, cats and ladybugs helplessly bulge and liquefy. Several paintings, such as Little Rocky Bubble Bath (2018) appear in the snakelike process of shedding peeling skin. Shilling’s protagonists, bearing scars of creation in the form of clay dents and paint scabs, appear frozen in awkward states of effacement or transformation. Creepy, demented, yet sympathetic, her fauna seem trapped in ungainly inanimate shells, paralyzed but inwardly trembling in dread. 356 Mission closes as Shilling emerges.

356 Mission
356 S. Mission Rd.
Los Angeles, CA 90033
Show runs through Apr. 29

“Lorser Feitelson: Figure to Form” at Louis Stern Fine Arts is a small but insightful survey of the noted painter’s transition from Post-Surrealism to Hard-Edge Abstraction. Including nine paintings Feitelson (1888-1978) completed between 1945 and 1962, this show progresses sequentially backwards, with his later minimal abstractions of 1951-1962 leading to cubistic surrealism of 1945-1950. The exhibition concludes with Flight over New York at Twilight (1935-36, pictured above), a much earlier and more overtly representational masterwork recalling traditional Madonna and child painting with a surrealist twist. Manifesting the classical roots of Feitelson’s later phase deemed Abstract Classicism, echoes of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, Piero della Francesca and de Chirico reverberate through this highly stylized scene of a woman and child floating among manifolds of ambiguous space. Embedded in this painting’s surrealistic dreaminess, geometrized human anatomy and superfluent spheres and triangles betoken Feitelson’s growing interest in abstracting spatial configurations. Having seen Flight over New York at Twilight, you can almost synesthetically sense its levitation and overturned gravity in his later paintings. Retracing your steps, it becomes apparent how the anthropomorphic geometry of Magical Forms (1945) and Untitled, Magical Forms (1947) led to his abandonment of shading and horizon line. Untitled, Magical Forms (study) (1950) links surrealism to abstraction. Finally, forms are stripped to essence in juxtapositions of pure color. With stark expanses of violet enveloping cobalt, buttercup against cream, and aqua astride gray, Feitelson’s mature paintings posit arcane distillations of indefinite reality.

Louis Stern Fine Arts
9002 Melrose Avenue
West Hollywood, CA 90069
Show runs through Apr. 21

Ben Sanders envisions paintings and completes drawings while sitting in church. It sounds as though the pictures yielded by this arrangement would be moralistic, maudlin or mocking; but instead, he transfigures personal and religious narratives into open-ended metaphors for the human condition. Sanders is a commercial illustrator with a penchant for collecting secondhand Teleflora vases. The influence of these practices is evident in his quirky, vibrant pictures that flirt with tackiness without going overboard. His current show at Ochi Projects, titled “I Come to the Garden Alone,” features bold paintings downstairs and quietly emotive drawings upstairs. Surrogate self-portraits reflect Sanders’ own anxieties under the lens of spiritual themes and current events. A recurring protagonist is a personified vase embodying a certain sympathetic cartoonishness. This character’s accessories, contents and surroundings offer clues to each picture’s larger significance. Suggesting police brutality, The Weight (2017) stars a vessel as a disguised protestor shackled to a blue baton. Symbolizing the artist’s fear of self-isolation, The Know-It-All (2016-2017) features a vase marooned in a desert of cracked earth. In other works, Sanders introspectively ruminates on the peculiar irrationality of religious faith. Mammon (2016) and The Seraph (2017, pictured above), for instance, assume whimsically improbable morphologies engendered by lack of empirical knowledge. Contrasting with such incorporeal notions, Sanders edges his painted panels in outré veneers of Himalayan pink salt, swimming pool noodles and industrial diamond plate that anchor his paintings in the material world as flamboyant totems to insecurity.

Ochi Projects
3301 W. Washington Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90018
Show runs through Apr.14

Alison Petty Ragguette‘s sculptures voluptuously incarnate equivocal tensions between nature and artifice. Evincing Ragguette’s versatility in ceramics and sculpture, “Visceral Bandwidths” at Launch LA debuts her new “Melanin” series alongside examples from recent bodies of work. These elegant but slightly uncouth hybrids of porcelain, glass and rubber evoke biotechnological experiments gone precariously awry. Each sculpture appears as a polished bibelot that gradually betrays unsavory facets upon inspection. Hairlike threads stick to the surface of an ungainly form resembling a candied, bugle-legged roast turkey in Hot Air (2016). Glaze trickles over white pedestals. Emanating from a chrome pipe in Double Trap Spill (2015), slimy jade seepage engulfs plastery conchs, pooling into a chartreuse glaze puddle that perspires deliquescent lemon globules. Entropy counters restraint; sinuousness circumvents rigidity; matte translucence contrasts with gloss. This interplay occurs most concisely in her “Melanin” hanging wall sculptures embodying cleaner silhouettes and a more subdued palette of ombré cream to chocolate. Here, splanchnic rubber drops drip from calcareous porcelain pipes, channeling protoplasmic issues. As you gaze, spouts become bonelike, the fleshy gobbets they exude resembling bulbous bird toes or grotesquely deformed human appendages. But everything is mutable; nothing is quite as it appears. Unassumingly inscribed on the side of the conduit in Melanin #1 (2018, pictured above), “Go Girl” apparently denotes the brand of female urinal from which it was cast. Ragguette is inspired by biomimicry, which, some argue, assumes an inherently arbitrary anthropocentric attitude segregating people from other creatures. In an increasingly populated world, Ragguette’s sculptures propound this question: Where does synthetic end and natural begin?

Launch LA
170 S. La Brea Ave., upstairs
Los Angeles, CA 90036
Show runs through Apr. 7

Two painting shows at Lora Schlesinger Gallery register as pensive pictorial journals of events both experienced and imagined. Including still lifes, figures, landscapes, and combinations thereof, the easel-sized scenes in Roberto Gil de Montes‘ show titled “Moments” range from mundane to momentous. Their initial semblances of conventionality ensconce stirring evocations. With commensurate delicacy he materializes bloodied faces and vases of flowers. There are funerals, weddings, and parties. Celebrations invariably seem more grave than convivial. In Wedding (2017, pictured above), a bride stands alone on a beach, phantasmal against a brilliant scarlet sky peppered with an avian pyrotechnic. A plethora of artistic legacies coalesce into Gil de Montes’ creamy veils of paint, evoking a mixture of Surrealism, southern California plein air, Bay area figuration, and Chicano muralism alongside Mexican retablo and ex-voto traditions. In works such as Post-Fiesta (2017), the curious unease underlying festivity connotes disquieting current events in the U.S. and Mexico while evoking the timeless, placeless sense of disheartening following any holiday. In the smaller gallery, dreamy darkness and Latin American life also permeate Ann Chamberlin‘s show whose title, “Around and Around,” betokens the serpentine movement and manifold perspectives of her absorbing M.C. Escher-like spaces populated by painters, carnies, nudes, sailors, and mermaids. Works such as Butterflies Flap their Wings (2017) and Bitchy Mermaids (2014) recall Judith Linhares and Katherine Bradford; but Chamberlin’s painterly voice is singular. Gallery walls seem to expand under the imaginative intricacy of these two shows.

Lora Schlesinger Gallery
2525 Michigan Ave., # B5b
Santa Monica, CA 90404
Shows run through Apr. 7

Buenos Aires artist collective Mondongo is a collaborative duo consisting of Juliana Lafitte and Manuel Mendanha. Their work doesn’t disappoint curiosity engendered by their mysterious name taken from a stew. Following the rickety elevator ride to the age-old Bendix Building’s top floor, a routine gallery visit leads to an otherworldly scene seeming all the more unforeseen beyond Track 16‘s empty foyer. Thick dark curtains open a captivating setting for some sort of occult ritual. Moody landscapes lavishly wallpaper the gallery, evoking the feeling of having stumbled into bosky scenery in an eerie dream. Amid the portentous music-permeated gloom, small canvases depicting fires appear as luminous red-orange lanterns against an arboreal background. The centerpiece is a huge mass of naked babies in the shape of a Gothic altarpiece. The influence of Lafitte’s exorcism-inducing evangelist parents is palpable. Most disturbing, A descent into the maelstrom (2018, detail above) depicts two ships sinking into an unforgettable vortex. Like a grim mishmash of fairytales gone wrong, this installation feels as though you’re not supposed to be there—unless to be sacrificed. Employing slick iconography and materials like Plasticine, Mondongo skirts kitsch by virtue of their talent for distilling the psychic import of notions and imagery haunting popular culture. Their installations and performances channel the spooky spectacle of Halloween mazes and interactive theatre into something more meaningful. Argentina’s fraught political legacy is an inevitable allusion—the babies, for instance, connote children that disappeared during the 1976-1982 junta—but their timeless existential issues resonate universally.

Track 16 Gallery
1206 Maple Avenue, #1005
Los Angeles, CA 90015
 Show runs through Mar. 31

Martin Soto Climent‘s exhibition at Michael Benevento is a meticulously orchestrated visual symphony of photos, videos and sculptures. The Mexico City based artist titled his show “Temazcal” after the type of ceremonial sudatorium that inspired this body of work. The ancient Aztec and Mayan temazcal ritual involves a small volcanic stone hut heated for therapeutic or spiritual purposes. Accordingly, Soto Climent’s installation unfolds as a loose narrative sequence insinuating spiritual progression. The show begins with Temazcal (2018), a 9-minute black-and-white slideshow projection featuring a shaman named Don Pedro. The rapid replacement of still photos evokes a dreamy sense of temporal dislocation reminiscent of the 1962 French film La Jetée. Like a photo essay, Temazcal elicits the shaman’s mysterious yet surprisingly avuncular personality alongside scenes of his larger milieu: jungle-entangled mountains, a large beetle crawling up a wall, a dog sleeping on the floor of a humble abode. In rooms beyond, a photo-collage and diminutive sculptures abstractly echo the slideshow’s contemplative mood via restrained palette, crisp outlines, precise detail and biomorphic evocations. Wrought of leather, charred wood, ripped tights, desiccated cactus, creatures’ wings and broken glass vitrines, Soto Climent’s multimedia juxtapositions recall Surrealist and Post-Minimalist sculpture. Entered through a blackened passage, the show’s final chamber is illuminated by La Puerta (2018), a hypnotic video of burning wood. Nearby, emerging from the scorched ligneous surface of Inolvidable (2018, detail above), a delicate pair of butterfly wings that quiver at the viewer’s breath is an elegant metaphor for life’s fragility.

Michael Benevento
3712 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90004
Show runs through Mar. 17

“Advertising fogs our daily lives less from its peculiar lies than from its peculiar truths,” Daniel Boorstin declared in his 1962 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. Seemingly truer than ever in our post-truth era, this notion offers an apt point of departure for considering William Powhida‘s paintings critiquing the status quo reflected in Artforum ads. Titled “After ‘After the Contemporary,’” this show at Charlie James incarnates a futuristic 2050 retrospective of Powhida’s fabricated “Contemporary Period” of art history encompassing 2000-2025. One hundred twenty 15″x 15″ watercolors portraying Artforum ads are hung in a salon-style grid evoking a candy-colored columbarium for bygone blue-chip exhibitions. The period from 2000 to now depicts actual ads; the rest are predictive figments of the artist’s prescient fancy. Powhida’s sardonic prognostications emerge seamlessly from the past. Perusing the future, we see that monopolistic corporations continue co-opting art; entertainers and politicians show at celebrated galleries; radical becomes mainstream. By contriving his show around an intercalary period, Powhida slyly parallels the insidious slippery-slope mixture of reality and fiction pervading advertising, the art world and society overall. Even the show’s title echoes the era-centric linguistic absurdity of terms such as “post-modern.” Hyperreality has devolved into post-truth. “As never before in art, it has become easy for the great, the famous, and the cliché to be synonymous,” Boorstin observed over 50 years ago. Powhida’s timeline ends with a parody of Bruno Bischofberger’s pastoral ad that appears on every Artforum back cover. Some things never change.

Charlie James Gallery
969 Chung King Rd.
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Show runs through Mar. 3

Did you know that PST isn’t quite over? A few shows remain. If you missed key offerings, your best redress might be at Commonwealth & Council, whose main gallery Beatriz Cortez and Rafa Esparza have metamorphosed into a futurological forum for meditation on Latino culture and postcolonial identity. The show’s Spanish title, “Pasado mañana,” means “day after tomorrow.” Having built on their collaboration at UCR’s “Mundos Alternos,” Cortez and Esparza here imagine an idealistic future rooted in Mayan history. This installation’s environment is invitingly bizarre, with quotidian items emanating singularity. Appearing as a steel capsule for time travel, Cortez’s centerpiece sculpture, Argonaut (after Pakal) (2018), evokes Mesoamerican mats and the sarcophagus lid of Pakal, the longest-ruling Mayan king. In vases and a makeshift greenhouse replete with hydroponic plants, water lilies symbolize Pakal’s headdress iconography as well as immigrant agriculture and gardening. On the floor, Esparza’s packed dirt and tan adobe chunks accentuate the whiteness of gallery walls and the brightness of sculptures suspended from the ceiling and resting on earthen substrate. To complete their collaborative vision of hereafter, the headlining duo invited six young queer artists to contribute works: Fabián Guerrero, Sebastián Hernández, María Maea, Rubén Rodríguez, Gabriela Ruiz, and Brenzy Solorzano. Ruiz’s Reflexión (2018, above left) is an acrid yellow dresser and chair coated in spray foam. Nearby, Maea’s piece (above right) features human faces hanging from a floating orange tree branch. As the Getty’s initiative winds down, this installation brims with possibilities.

Commonwealth & Council
3006 W. 7th St., Ste. 200
Los Angeles, CA 90005
Show runs through Mar. 3

Given the fact that most spend their lives swathed in textiles, it’s amazing how dismissively cloth is viewed. Concern for one’s apparel is frequently considered a frivolous feminine purview; garments are treated as utilitarian throwaways to be manufactured in foreign factories. In a fascinating inversion of this paradigm, Takako Yamaguchi meditates on her own raiment via laboriously realistic painting. Representing five years of focus on portraying attire, each of nine paintings in her show at As Is is a cropped, enlarged close-up of a section of her clad body. Small portions of skin peep detachedly from her starring ensemble. Together as an overall installation, Yamaguchi’s pictures enfold the visitor in shrine-like simplicity. Yet larger than life and oddly truncated, each painting appears confrontational, with the artist demanding self-acknowledgment via her frontal posture while entreating the viewer to contemplate the abstract magnetism of fabric in all its geometric minutiae. Echoing their canvas surface, her depicted threads suggest stretched canvas as garments enveloping a human body. Born in Okayama, Japan, a historic hub of textile production, Yamaguchi received her MFA from UC Santa Barbara in 1978. Compellingly interweaving Eastern and Western ideals, Yamaguchi’s compositions embody the Japanese aesthetic of shibui, a kind of understated elegance, while adhering to American principles of abstraction. Fellow painter Catherine Murphy has an adage: “All abstract painting is representational, and all representational painting is abstract.” Familiarly representational and soberingly abstract, Yamaguchi’s paintings succeed on both fronts.

As Is
1133 Venice Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90015
Show runs through Feb. 24