With her “Untitled Film Stills,” Cindy Sherman played with the idea of the Hollywood sex symbol; she disappeared into one role after another, showing how art and film noir convention could collude to create sex appeal from the trappings of innocence and repression—and from the beauty and implicit dangers of dark shadows, startling camera angles, the open road and the American city.Now a genuine...
THAT WAS THEN THIS IS NOW. Ed Ruscha’s lithograph and the banner image for his 40-year survey at Gagosian Madison Avenue says it all: it was a different art world when Ruscha arrived in Los Angeles in 1956. Now, he’s blue chip and according to my editor, a celebrity—the inverse to the James Franco phenomenon. We’re shuffling through the names of various uber-successful artists, attempting to...
Editor’s Note: With the highly-coveted Pritzer-Prize awarded this year to architect Shigeru Ban—known just as much for his disaster relief projects and elegant, temporary paper-tube architecture as for his commercial and institutional works—we asked Martina to weigh in on the redefinition of “star” architecture in our age of instability.At the 2008 Venice Biennale, starchitects Frank Gehry and...
The image of “the road” is one of the metaphors most deeply embedded in the American cultural landscape, perhaps most poignantly for the inter-war generation that produced both Dennis Hopper (born 1936) and Jack Kerouac (born 1922) among so many others.Beginning in the early 1960s, Dennis Hopper produced a rich body of photographic work that has garnered ongoing critical and scholarly attention,...
Contact: Melinda Machado Media Contact,National Museum of American History T: (202) 633-3129The National Museum of American History to Exhibit Artworks by Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and George W. BushThe National Museum of American History is pleased to present Presidential Pictures: Paintings & Drawings by Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald...
The "17th International architecture Exhibition of Venice" is one of the first international events opening in time of COVID-19. The open question that Hashim Sarkis, the artistic director of the current Biennale Architettura, articulates in his proposal seems to be a...
Lawrence Calver’s first US show at Simchowitz Gallery, “On the Off Chance,” is one of the most fascinating studies in material of any show in Los Angeles that I’ve had the chance to review. Calver is not a traditional fine artist; his background is in creative...
Two side-by-side paintings face the gallery's front door, awaiting visitors like sentries. They have all the elements that characterize Naotaka Hiro's "Armor" exhibition, namely colorful swatches and fervid mark-making that expands from a vertical center line. The...
Guy Yanai is irreplaceable. Not simply his vibrant, structured style (though that too is unique,) each of Yanai’s paintings carries an air of individuality and transience. Seeing them for the first time is a new wave crashing on the shore of your subconscious, dousing...
Takis is no exception. His sculptures necessitate a venue with high ceilings, and some level of separation as many of them flicker, vibrate, or spin. One sculpture consisting of two lime green and black half-spheres and an iron pole, Aeolian (1983), requires wind energy to operate, and thus can only be displayed outdoors. When exhibited together, these sculptures resemble parts of an eccentric assembly line, leaving viewers agape at their inventive mechanics. Takis uses a wide range of materials, as wires, poles, electric circuits, and electromagnets abound alongside lamps and found objects.