When Kai Loebach emigrated to Los Angeles 27 years ago, after a brief vacation during which he was blown away by the friendliness of the people and the “visual orgasm” of a clean-as-new supermarket in the San Fernando Valley, he knew no one, had no place to stay and didn’t know the language. Studying of any kind, especially English, was not on the top of his list. As a young man, he was...
Once a city on the margins of the art world, Hong Kong now sits center stage, boasting the world’s third-largest art market. A wealth of galleries, museums and art centers can be found on either side of Victoria Harbor, which separates the commercial center, Hong Kong Island, from the Kowloon Peninsula, notable for its colorful open-air markets. Exploring the city’s diverse art offerings, I’m...
If you have been in any number of major cities this summer across the U.S., you might have seen a billboard with the hashtag caption #ArtEveryWhere alongside a reproduction of a famous work of art. According to the tagline on the #ArtEveryWhereUS website, this is “A Very Very Big Art Exhibition.” Apparently, what looks to the uneducated eye like lackluster museum advertisements are actually art:...
One artist who is returning to his roots after spending the last several years working on massive projects is sculptor Charles Long. For his next major exhibition “Up Land,” at his gallery Tanya Bonakdar in Chelsea, Long is embracing his personal style of hands-on production, which made him popular years before any of HIS major projects.Working as Long’s studio manager through many of those...
The residential valley neighborhood wasn’t what I was expecting when I went to Chas Smith’s studio for our interview. Big shade trees lined the wide boulevards of modest houses and neat lawns. Smith has been Paul McCarthy’s main art assistant for over a decade, and for some reason I was thinking the area would be trashier, near a remote woodsy area. I guess I was already typecasting Smith in my...
“Sugar Houses” is another production that was stopped in its tracks last year by COVID, but fortunately REDCAT has managed to stage it as their first live production since the pandemic shutdown, if only for a week (July 8 -11). This kinetic piece of dance-theater is...
Her multilayered works encompass oil, watercolor, and collaged paper cut outs. The works exist in the Black Atlantis.
The gap between memory and history has never been more obvious than since the proliferation of photography. History presents a narrow view of our past: the highest achievements and the lowest atrocities – which can even be the same depending on the historian. What is...
Red is the color of extremes, especially the Cadmium Red Deep of Lygia Pape’s posthumous show “Tupinambá” up at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles. The same red as both Valentine’s Day ornamentation and oxidized blood—red represents birth, seduction, war, death and a...
I feel like most people would have a tough time imagining something more ideologically opposed to art than data analytics. Even the phrase sounds unartistic, more at home in investment banking than gallery houses. Art just feels too subjective to be encapsulated by...