I met Sheldon Figoten in San Francisco in the mid 1970s. We were just a couple of ambitious young artists from Los Angeles on sabbatical in California’s northern hemisphere at the time. After returning to SoCal, Figoten settled in Venice and over the years has become friends with many of its veteran abstract painters. Ed Moses, for one, is a longtime pal. Where Moses has had a storied career...
Propped against the wall of her second-story Hollywood Boulevard studio, three of Liat Yossifor’s gray paintings—each about seven feet by five feet—in various stages of completion sit perched on low wood supports. Yossifor’s high-ceilinged studio feels spacious, if rather austere; other than her paintings, supplies, a table with tools, and an old paint-stained leather sofa, there is little else....
The early 20th-century’s turn towards modernism in painting was a decisive shift in interest away from artistic representation of acts of witnessing. Abstract art—which now seems to dominate many visual demesnes including the decorative and graphic design, and sets the agenda for contemporary painting practice—is about a different kind of personal account, one not dependent on history or...
Technically, a grande dame is a highly respected elderly or middle-aged woman who has extensive experience in her field. Although gallerist Jane Chafin is certainly not elderly, she is highly respected and experienced in our art business. And she is building a Gertrude Stein-like community here in the outlands of Pasadena through fine exhibitions and intriguingly diverse cultural events at her...
On a clear sunny day there’s a press preview for the ambitious “@Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz” exhibition. Famous for its former use as a prison, with notorious inhabitants such as Al Capone, George “Machine Gun” Kelly and Robert “The Bird Man” Stroud, its layered history also includes dramatic political protests of 1969–71 when the island was occupied by Native Americans. Currently, the island...
For a museum that has torn down all of the buildings on its original campus, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has been putting up some pretty interesting exhibitions in one of only two exhibition spaces that are left. The two photography exhibitions I’m thinking...
This week, New York’s art scene is buzzing with events. With five major fairs and innumerable openings, the city is alight with a variety of options from the heavy hitting Armory Show to the relatively wallet-friendly Art on Paper Fair. I had the chance to preview the...
Ania Hobson’s women often look like they don’t want to be in the spaces they find themselves in: ready to leave the party, staring at wine to avoid a conversation, planning an Irish goodbye. Her characters are dressed cool and distinct in their clothes, expressions...
Step into “Intergalactix: against isolation/contra el aislamiento” at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and the first thing you’ll see is a largish, flattish, squarish stone smack in the middle of a white-walled room decked with wicker beds of tenon...
Not front of house, with its symmetrically billeted art objects reflecting in its polished concrete floor, these rawboned works by HK Zamani are arrayed deep in the back, in a brick and concrete garage, its loading dock and ramp illumined by dangling warehouse...