Since the 2012 opening of his eponymous Hollywood gallery, Perry Rubenstein has exerted considerable influence on the contemporary art world, while imbuing several exhibitions, such as his recent “The Humors,” with intellectual and symbolic perspectives that reference the human condition. At his sleek modernist structure on North Highland Avenue, this fit and debonair 59-year-old...
La Cienega Boulevard, as it traverses Beverly Hills, West Hollywood and Los Angeles, appears not to have changed much over the last few decades, until you hit Venice Boulevard. Trailing south into Culver City, the character of the boulevard shifts dramatically. What was once a gasoline alley of automobile repair and supply shops is now a vibrant gallery district. At Washington Boulevard, looking...
while a long wait line at an LA museum is a rarity, here in New York you could easily pass an hour chatting in the line for the Met or MoMA or merge with the crowds in Chelsea. Late spring, the visceral experience of looking at art together with so many other curious viewers was taken to a new level at the Guggenheim’s opening of “Gutai: Splendid Playground” (February 15–May 8, 2013). Not only...
“And there it is...” Sage Charles smiled as he deftly inserted the business end of a baseball bat into the supine body of Ron Athey as part of the initial preparations for “Messianic Remains,” the latest installment in Athey’s “Incorruptible Flesh” performance series. The series, begun in 1996 with Lawrence Steger (who died of AIDS-related causes in 1999), addresses Athey’s own HIV+, post-AIDS...
While sagas of personal transformation are a staple of recent nonfiction filmmaking—from U.N. peacekeeper Roméo Dallaire’s inexorable drift into despair (and back) in the CBC’s Rwanda documentary Shake Hands With the Devil, to crack-mom Kirk White’s unexpected ascent into rehab in the Dickhouse sleaze-fest The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia—two entries in the 2013 Los Angeles Film...
There’s no such thing as an alright abstract painting. They fall, without exception, into two categories: great and garbage. And for whoever’s looked at an abstract artwork, smugly harrumphed and muttered, “I could do that,” I’d...
How we balance our individual experiences within the larger scope of our lives in many ways determines who we are, and how we understand and relate to the world around us. Reflecting on the dense and often traumatic events of the past year, which included a global...
For the 9th edition of the Artes Mundi Prize, an international panel of jurors —made up of Cosmin Costinas (Executive Director and Curator of Para Site, Hong Kong), Elvira Dyangani Ose (Director at The Showroom, London) and Rachel Kent (Chief Curator at MCA,...
Everyone has a fascination with the more macabre parts of life. Not that everyone is John Waters, but there’s a reason we all slow down to look when we pass an accident. It’s just human nature to be transfixed by the dark and the deadly, to find it not only shocking...
It’s Vanessa Prager versus art history in this confounding and enchanting suite of oil on panel paintings, and her aggressive Impressionism-infused impasto is a knockout. Taking on the foundational figurative tropes of nude, still life, and landscape but proceeding...