At the Wende Museum, "The Medea Insurrection: Radical Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain" spotlights 33 artists that lived in Eastern Bloc countries during Soviet rule. This provocatively themed survey includes familiar names such as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Geta...
Irvine-based painter Francis DiFronzo has a knack for capturing the eerie desolation of the Mojave Desert. The title of his show, "Proof of Life," speaks to the fact that his paintings are devoid of people, yet replete with signs of civilization and the desert's own...
Floral, terrene, celestial and human elements coalesce to form otherworldly realms in Kristy Luck's paintings suffused with mysterious symbolism. Evoking subconscious vistas, the Los Angeles artist's scenes are reminiscent of abstract landscapes by Modernist painters...
At the Getty, two exhibitions of works on paper examine process and technique while presenting disparate views of peasantry. The Getty Research Institute's "Käthe Kollwitz: Prints, Process, Politics" comprises over 50 prints, preparatory drawings and studies by...
Enchanting objects spill from tiny containers in "The Box Project," an unconventional show of 76 artists from three countries. These artworks were not originally intended for public display; rather, they were created as part of an esoteric correspondence between three...
"Celebrate the Bizarre," urges the header on postcards for "Morph" at Mash Gallery; and the 12 artists in this show surely do. More specifically, they revel in distorting human form for metaphoric and emotive effect. Heads are sundered, patched and obliterated; bodies...
Lush foliage abuts geometric abstraction in Carolyn Castaño's vibrant paintings bursting with tropical flair. The Colombian-American artist amalgamates motifs from Latin America and the U.S so harmoniously that it's often difficult to pinpoint the origin of any given...
The dotty surfaces of Gerald Davis' paintings seem to flicker like tangled strings of tiny lights, amplifying the visionary eeriness of his eccentric renditions of classical subjects such as bathers. The LA painter's expressionistic pointillism recalls a wide range of...
At a distance, the paintings in Linda Besemer's show, "An Abundance of Errors," appear to be large-format prints of digitally derived geometric designs. Indeed, they were initially devised on a computer; but the paintings' true tactility manifests itself as you...
There are so many good shows right now at the Vincent Price Art Museum that it's impossible to choose just one. "Images of the Divine in Everyday Mexico" comprises retablo and ex-voto paintings from the early 19th to mid-20th centuries. Mostly wrought on small sheets...
Titled "The Sick Rose" after William Blake's 1794 poem and engraving, LA painter Laurie Nye's current exhibition is like a garden of botanical specimens evoking romance and malady. Describing a rose afflicted by the pernicious love of an invisible worm, Blake's...
What we take as concrete reality often seems as changeable as a hologram: a door appearing orange in the morning looks yellow in afternoon light; former familiars refashion their characters beyond recognition. Inklings of such slipperiness with regard to perception...
Sayre Gomez extracts strangeness and cultural significance from prosaic architectural facets of Southern California. The life-size paintings in his current show evoke banal intersections between commerce, fantasy and nostalgia: strip mall facades are romantically...
Few artists crisscross high-low categories as deftly as Kenny Scharf, whose whimsical work inhabits a gallery as strikingly as it does a street. Just down the road from his tire-shop mural, the exterior of Honor Fraser is currently festooned in a tacky crown of...
Like unruly creatures, Dona Nelson's double-sided paintings defy convention; they stand free, hang from ceilings and incorporate quotidian materials in bizarre ways. Titled "Painting the Magic Mountain" in wry reference to Thomas Mann's 1924 novel, this show contains...
Informed by her religious upbringing and her love of Renaissance painting, Naudline Pierre re-interprets devotional painting traditions with maverick imaginativeness, devising phantasmagoric scenes where humanoid figures radiate colorful nimbi and commune with winged...
It's difficult for paintings of female nudes in bucolic landscapes to transcend historic tropes of voyeuristic escapism, but Deborah Brown succeeds in positing hers as self-reflective meditations on contemporary femininity. The 11 paintings in her show at The Lodge...
In tandem shows at Roberts Projects, two figurative painters' allusions to contemporary anomie are animated by skeptical drollness. Celeste Rapone's bloated female protagonists contort and distend as though awkwardly striving to fill the expansive canvases they...
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