Articles

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

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...

Publication in the Age of Negation, Part V
A Tiresome Outpouring of Fribbling Expatiations

by John Tottenham

I don’t know how to create the impression of time passing. But it passed, weeks passed by, during which nothing much happened. The sense of futility engendered by these dealings with the literary establishment hung over other potential undertakings. There didn’t seem to be much justification for this ongoing expenditure of waste, otherwise known as literary endeavor. More than four years were...

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Reviews

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...

Coco Young
Night Gallery

Melancholy rendered in pools of soft, golden sunlight. Love and loss braided into fields of wildflowers. In the press release for “Passage,” Coco Young’s first solo show at Night Gallery, curator Martha Kirszenbaum compares the exhibition to Agnès Varda’s lush New...

pascALEjandro
Blum

The nonagenarian artist Alejandro Jodorowsky is best known as a filmmaker, while his wife, the 40-something Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky, works as a painter, photographer and designer. Together, they operate under the name pascALEjandro, fusing their names as well as...

Simone Leigh
LACMA and CAAM

Simone Leigh’s presence at the 2022 Venice Biennale was monumental: Her sculptural contributions to the main exhibition garnered a Golden Lion, while her solo show for the US national pavilion generated headlines around the world and lines around the block. In the...

PICK OF THE WEEK: Winfred Rembert
Hauser & Wirth

A life lived in the midst of harrowing times of chain gangs, sharecropping and Jim Crow laws in the Deep South is the bullseye of Winfred Rembert’s exhibition, “Hard Times.” In hand-carved and debossed painted leather, the late Rembert creates striking patterns from...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Tony Cragg
Marian Goodman Gallery

One of the most durable traditions in Modernism, organic form sculpture emerged in the first part of the 20th century in the work of Constantine Brancusi, Jean Arp, Alberto Giacometti and others. Particularly associated with Surrealism, the organic form was a kind of...

OUTSIDE LA: Rochelle Botello
Bakersfield Museum of Art

“Free Fall,” Rochelle Botello’s solo exhibition at the Bakersfield Museum of Art, affords an incredibly rich and evocative visual experience. Botello’s organic and sometimes strangely discomfiting sculptures suggest an amalgam of associations; looking at these works,...

GALLERY ROUNDS: Jim Isermann
Miles McEnery Gallery

When I stepped into Jim Isermann’s spectacular show “Wrapture” presented by the Miles McEnery Gallery and the Pacific Design Center, my first thought was, “It’s 1967 again,” — and I don’t mean in a self-conscious, retro-chic way. Isermann’s super-saturated bright...

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