An interview with Paris Photo LA’s new director, Florence Bourgeois, and the new artistic director, Christoph Wiesner, was the first thing on my agenda for the fair this year. I wanted to get from Bourgeois and Wiesner a sense of what changes or innovations they hope to bring to PPLA. Because this is the third year of the three-year commitment Paris Photo had made to be at Paramount Studio in...
Prestidigitator, composer, engineer and conceptual artist Nahum hails from Mexico City, has lived in London for many years after a degree from Goldsmith’s College, but really, he belongs anywhere. Recently he and eight other Mexican artists, along with a Mexican scientist, spent a day floating above our planet in zero gravity on a parabolic flight. Russians flying the huge Ilyushin 76 MDK...
IN THE BEGINNINGThere is something about abstraction. The concept of the non-pictorial, non-mimistic image is unique in art, and in the world. Sometimes it seems to me that there is abstract art, and then there is everything else. This is what Ad Reinhardt meant when he wrote that “Art is art-as-art and everything else is everything else.” It is an intriguing concept. Everything in the world...
Los Angeles painter James Hayward taught a USC graduate seminar in 1987. That was my introduction to him. He wasn’t much of a teacher, but he sure was a talker. He sat in a chair front and center in the classroom with his legs stretched wide open. When he would get excited by his own tall tales (which was most of the time), his long skinny legs would begin to flap back and forth wildly in rhythm...
Think about the differences between the long-standing practices of painting and sculpture, and clichés persist: Painting is “flat,” sculpture is not; paintings go on a wall, sculptures do not. In contemporary art these separate paths often intersect; some notable mid-20th century examples being Jasper Johns’ encaustic and plaster paintings, Lucio Fontana’s stabbed canvases, Robert Rauschenberg’s...
I’ve written a lot about Los Angeles and how it’s mistakenly known as an “ugly city.” And while before I’ve been willing to blame that mistake on biased reporting, I’m starting to believe that the call is coming from inside the house. Truthfully, we have only...
“All men are gay,” reads the cover of a newspaper from Bøssehuset (The Gay House). The newspaper is part of the exhibition Psychopathia Sexualis at the art space Overgaden in Copenhagen, which displays a combination of archival material and contemporary art—the former...
It is hard not to wonder if Hanna Hur's paintings were made explicitly for Kristina Kite's gallery space or if it is pure coincidence that the black and white checkerboard floor so perfectly complements the geometric patterns within the paintings. The way the space...
As an omnipresent symbol across the history of humanity, the ocean assumes many roles. It is a healing force, and is immensely destructive; it is divine and earthly. The ocean encompasses the myriad of natural and mystical forces which have captivated our imagination...
Paper is a flexible medium. It is unconstrained frames and backings, untethered by nails or staples, and has become essential across countries and centuries. Still, in the canon of western art history, the primacy of canvas painting has pushed works on paper aside,...