L.A. sculptor Kenzi Shiokava died June 18 at age 82. His passing was announced by the Japanese American National Museum. JANM featured Shiokava's totemic wood sculptures in the 2017 Pacific Standard Time exhibition "Transpacific Borderlands: The Art of Japanese Diaspora in Lima, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and São Paulo." The artist was an ideal fit for the show. Born to Japanese immigrant parents...
Salvador Dali has always had a troubled relationship with the Art World. His work embraced figurative representation during a century where deconstruction and reinvention were the mode du jour. His theatrics often upstaged his considerable talent. The amount of energy he expended playing the role of eccentric artist often distracted critics from the solid theories and concepts that underlie his...
Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, 2020 By Okwui Enwezor 264 pages Phaidon/New Museum, New York In a pivotal scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Godfather a Mafia don grieves over the body of his dead son. “Look how they massacred my boy,” the weeping father intones, and the audience grieves with him. A worldwide audience is moved by the pantomime death of a handsome...
No one ever “works” in Eric Rohmer’s movies—but they do read. By necessity, Rohmer’s setting is one of leisure, whether it’s the beaches of Biarritz or the shores of the French Riviera. His characters need ample time to read and to daydream, and for ennui, disturbed by the intruding object of desire, to ripen into an obsessive devotion. They are not attentive readers. Their attention is...
Rooting through used bookstores in Berlin in 2006, I discovered the minibuchs published in East Germany during the ’70s and ’80s. These tiny volumes, with their exquisite bindings and photos of happy children giving floral bouquets to returning cosmonauts, launched me into collecting miniature books. Over time I narrowed my focus to handmade books, books by artists and books that played with the...
The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance By Ross King 496 pages Atlantic Monthly Press “All evil is born from ignorance. Yet writers have illuminated the world, chasing away the darkness.” —Vespasiano da Bisticci Ross King has published several fastidiously researched and precisely articulated books of Renaissance art history. His...
Lover’s Eyes: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection, 2021 Ed. Elle Shushan; essays by Graham C. Boettcher, Stephen Lloyd, and Elle Shushan. Photography by Nik Layman. 280 pages Giles Ltd. Lover’s Eyes, a new catalog on eye miniatures, lets us peer at one of the most extensive private collections of these weird and wonderful 18th- and 19th-century works—most of which stare right back. Eye...
I met Mark Chamberlain in March 2003, a few days after the onset of the Iraq War. I visited a gallery in Laguna Beach to write a review of his recent work chronicling the potential horrors of that war. Mark had been mounting politically charged installations for decades. I also learned that he made his living as a fine-art photographer, and that he often brought environmental perspectives into...
NoLab By Richard Roth 232 pages Owl Canyon Press Being a voracious reader of contemporary fiction with a particular interest in mystery novels, thrillers and mysteries about artists and art thefts, I was excited to happen upon Richard Roth’s novel NoLab (2019) earlier this year. NoLab recounts the story of two artists hired to search for the collective, NoLab, that has mysteriously disappeared....
Sidewalk Champions By Suitcase Joe Burn Barrel Press In the wake of the unprecedented court decree issued in April by a federal judge ordering the city of Los Angeles to provide shelter for the 4,600 souls currently living in downtown skid row by this October, the work of photographer Suitcase Joe could not be more timely. His recently released book, Sidewalk Champions (Burn Barrel Press), will...
Vivid and broad brushstrokes streak across Nicole Wittenberg’s paintings currently on view at the newly opened Los Angeles gallery, Fernberger. The exhibition, titled “Jumpin’ at The Woodside,” marks Wittenberg’s first solo show in Los Angeles and the debut of her new...
Cristina Iglesias’ exhibition, “Ellipsis,” features otherworldly, large-scale sculptural environments crafted from materials such as casted aluminum, bronze, copper, glass, steel and various pigmented materials. This collection draws inspiration from Stanislaw Lem’s...
For their joint exhibition at John Doe Gallery, Marek Wolfryd and Michele Lorusso present a selection of sculptures and paintings embedded in their shared exploration into Mexico’s history of architecture, urban planning and design. The title, “A Collapsing...
They are dense forms, knots of entwined ropes and masses of clay, approximately the size of one of the larger internal organs. This suite of recent ceramic sculptures by Emily Ginsburg is presented on clusters of columnar plinths of corrugated cardboard that would be...
“January in the last extant stable society.” Joan Didion, “In Hollywood” (1973) — included in The White Album (1979) “You can get there from here,” was something like the thought rippling just beneath my immediate observations, coming upon several Jessie Homer...
One half of Moskowitz Bayse’s gallery is dedicated to “Impossible Apprentice,” a sublime inaugural solo presentation by Matthew Gallagher composed of intensely delicate and labored drawings made by fusing drafting film onto a molten wax surface. From a seemingly...
The Museum of Contemporary Art returns with its “Focus Series” featuring the first solo show of LA-based artist, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio. “MOCA Focus: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio” showcases some of Aparicio’s previous work of rubber castings and amber installations, while...
Especially in an era of infinite variability, the mirror motif can get pretty tired pretty fast, whether as a means of solving abstract compositional problems or finding meaning in figurative relationships. In his latest series of mounted, translucent, usually backlit...
A standout artist in 2023’s “Made in L.A.” biennial, Ishi Glinsky often plays with scale in his sculptures, paintings and drawings that reflect the customs of his tribe, the Tohono O’odham Nation. Fusing the past with the present, Glinsky examines pieces from his...
The Vincent Price Art Museum has mounted an ambitious and idiosyncratic survey of a little-known slice of Los Angeles art history. “Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art,” curated by Dr. C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz, sheds light on the...