Articles

Miami Art Week Artillery Report: Day 1
Art Basel Miami Beach

Artillery is back in Florida for another round of Miami Art Week. As always, the days will be packed with fairs, exhibitions, parties, and events that showcase the biggest names in modern and contemporary art alongside emerging artists and rising stars of the industry. Throughout the week, I’ll be sharing behind-the-scenes details of some of the many activities going on from Miami Beach to...

Publication in the Age of Negation, Part VIII
Laying a False Trail Across the Visceral Ether

by John Tottenham

Nobody is reading this. No sooner have I started to write a sentence than I’m plunged into bitterness and despair. Sitting down to write has become too great a test of my moral and spiritual strength: I am immediately mystified as to why it is so difficult to get my work out there when others, whose works are bereft of conviction, vitality, originality or purpose, who have nothing new to say and...

Our Bodies, Our Business
More Fodder for Michele Pred in a Post-Roe Era

by Barbara Morris

Oakland-based Swedish-American artist Michele Pred achieved notoriety in the early 2000s for her conceptual sculptural installations of items like Swiss Army knives and manicure scissors confiscated by airport security. Pred’s witty and dramatic work, with a strong Pop-inflected emphasis on bright colors and geometry, clearly hit a nerve. In 2014, she was inspired to shift to vintage purses as a...

Moon Raker
Michelle Stuart's Conversation With Time

by Ezrha Jean Black

Monumentality is not the point of Michelle Stuart’s work. “Connection” doesn’t exactly sum it up either, although it’s always there. Transit or transition would be closer to it—although it would have to be understood within a post-Einsteinian view of the universe and its moving and multi-dimensional aspects. I wanted to trace those connections and transitions in Stuart’s work to that connective...

Fire and Water
The Beautiful Tragedies of Calida Rawles

by Scarlet Cheng

In 2004 Calida Rawles moved from New York to Los Angeles, and she found an art scene brimming with life. Trained as an artist, she longed to become part of that world, and asked herself whether she would become a collector or a painter. She decided to give herself the chance to be a painter and made an agreement with her husband that she would take a year to find her way, without any...

Decorum and Decay
Watching Astra Huimeng Wang Watching You

by Julie Schulte

On a sweltering September afternoon, I visited artist Astra Huimeng Wang as she was in the final stages prepping for her first solo show of paintings at Make Room LA. Her studio is nestled above a discount clothing store in LA’s Fashion District, where crowded shop windows are filled with children’s pajamas that double as Disney costumes. I paused before an outdoor rack of candy-colored tulle...

Keeping the Animal Alive
Chasing the Ephemeral with Samuelle Richardson

by Genie Davis

Samuelle Richardson is a sculptural textile artist who began her career as a painter. Her painting itself evolved from studies in anatomy, for which she made 3D skeletal models. But by chance—or fate, when her painting studio became unavailable 10 years ago—she switched to her current technique in sculpture. “You might say that my work has come full circle,” she says. While her fabric sculptures...

More Women
Six Profiles

by Allison Strauss, Betty Ann Brown, Donasia Tillery, Jody Zellen, Lauren Guilford, Shana Nys Dambrot

We can never cover all the deserving women artists in one issue, so in a modest gesture, we asked our writers to pitch a woman artist they’d like to champion in 200 words, to squeeze in just a few more. Gala Porras-Kim The sprawling, splintered and paradoxical poetics used to describe Los Angeles are evoked in the work of Gala Porras-Kim, each bubbling with alternatives ripe for excavation....

Publication in the Age of Negation, Part VII
Sex, Drugs and Bad Writing

by John Tottenham

I hadn’t sent the novel out in a while. In fact, I hadn’t sent it out in months. What was the point? Even if they loved it, they didn’t want it. At this point I was too dispirited to send the work out or describe the ensuing demoralization. But I needed to send it out in order to have some fresh rejection to write about. Otherwise I had nothing to say, and with these exaggerations and...

OUTSIDE LA: Nicole Eisenman
Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles

by Shana Nys Dambrot

It’s one thing to engage in a discourse about the influence of art historical movements on contemporary painters, and another still to analyze a particular artist’s specific set of influences, such as Nicole Eisenman’s robust relationship with the European Impressionists at the advance of the 20th century. But leave it to an art museum in Arles to organize an extensive embodiment of this...

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Reviews

GALLERY ROUNDS: Francisco de Goya
Norton Simon Museum

To see the work of Francisco de Goya in present-day Los Angeles is disturbingly pertinent, echoing the turbulent anxieties of our time with a wickedly sadistic smile. “Saw It: Francisco de Goya, Printmaker” at the Norton Simon Museum marks the first comprehensive...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Bruce Richards
Sea View

For naïve or semi-initiated Los Angeles art-goers such as myself, a visit to “Soundings,” Sea View’s summer exhibition, might elicit two questions. Who is Bruce Richards? And why does the show’s concurrence with the Ed Ruscha retrospective at the Los Angeles County...

PICK OF THE WEEK: “Bruts”
David Kordansky Gallery

In this group exhibition of 15 artists, Rashid Johnson splendidly arranges ablaze and brooding drawings, paintings and sculptures into a pristine playlist. From Huma Bhabha’s uneasy cork, wood and cardboard ancient being and Bill Traylor’s acutely simple and lyrical...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Gretchen Bender
Sprüth Magers

In 1987, Cindy Sherman interviewed Gretchen Bender for BOMB Magazine, discussing the influence of her work on mass media. Bender denied the relationship between the two and instead described media as a ‘cannibalistic river without a conscience,’ invoking the image of...

PEER REVIEW
Tom Knechtel on Thomas Antell

Tom Knechtel, a Los Angeles–based artist who shows with PPOW in New York and Marc Selwyn Fine Art here in LA—where his exhibition, “The Hare in the Studio,” just ended in June—is known for his intricate paintings and drawings, often depicting himself, animals and...

Claire Chambless
Carlye Packer

Transformation in its most expansive and contradictory sense was at work throughout Claire Chambless’ exhibition, “Role Play.” Both individually and taken as a choreographed ensemble, the work—while clearly influenced by such abstract surrealists as Miró and...

Nick Angelo
Sebastian Gladstone

A big pharma scion funded the Tolkien exhibition at Rome’s National Gallery of Modern Art to normalize drug dependency by suggesting its correlation to Bilbo Baggins’ obsession with the One Ring. Or, hear me out, Whiskey Pete’s casino operates a mind-control project...

Alicja Kwade and Agnes Martin
Pace Gallery

The sprinklers of Pace Gallery’s immaculate lawn activated as I entered its courtyard for “Alicja Kwade & Agnes Martin: Space Between the Lines.” One of them was installed only a few inches from Kwade’s Jo’s Snow (Group 2) (2023), a forlorn patch of cast white...

Melanie Pullen
William Turner Gallery

Images of violence are so prevalent in today’s media landscape that news commentators now prompt us to look away, while social-media clips of police misconduct or war-ravaged bodies are shared and reposted, implying that we might take voyeuristic pleasure in viewing...

30th Anniversary Group Show
David Zwirner

On a murky day in May, the art cognoscenti made their way to a preview of gallerist David Zwirner’s newest addition to his burgeoning enclave in Los Angeles. Among the city’s unremitting attempts at reinvention, Melrose Hill—a longstanding, dense and vibrant...

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