Articles

BEYOND PORTRAITURE
Danie Cansino: Seeing LA Through Her Lens

High drama and Baroque chiaroscuro meet tattoo art in Danie Cansino’s elaborate paintings of Los Angeles and Chicanx culture. The artist and educator draws from her own life—family, friends and the neighborhoods she knows best, including East LA and Boyle Heights. Raised in Montebello, Cansino says information sharing is a crucial part of her work. “I want to be able to give the knowledge that I...

ACCESS TO ABSTRACTION
Anne Libby and Anna Rosen Find Freedom in Collaboration

by Tara Anne Dalbow

Communal and collaborative art practices have long appealed to artists as a means of disrupting the patriarchal mythology behind the solitary creative genius, and escaping the art-market matrix of competition and authorship. For the two Los Angeles–based artists behind Libby Rosen, Anne Libby and Anna Rosen, collaboration afforded them not only freedom from the ritual of production and...

THE HERE AND NOW OF IT
Acaye Kerunen Finds Purpose and Community in a Scarred Landscape

by Ezrha Jean Black

You’re in an otherwise familiar room or space, struck by how unusually airy and refreshed it seems. At the same time, wafting through the interior that constitutes your “mind’s eye,” you’re struck by a sense that, in one way or another, you’ve been here before. The art itself is like nothing you’ve ever seen before; but again, oscillating and permeating through it all is the sense of something...

THOUGHTFUL SPECTACLES
Made in L.A. 2023: ACTS OF LIVING" at The Hammer

by Shana Nys Dambrot

They say how a person does one thing is how they do everything, and the most recent edition of the Hammer Museum’s biennial, “Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living” (its sixth), put the axiom into practice. Curators Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez, along with Luce Curatorial Fellow Ashton Cooper, proceeded from the intriguing perspective of selecting artists whose work deal in some essential way...

ILLUMINATIONS WITHOUT LIMIT
"William Blake: Visionary" At the Getty

by James Cushing

William Blake embodies a wild paradox in Western cultural history. The only great poet who was also a gifted painter, Blake was a barely educated autodidact whose ideas anticipated Freud, Marx and Einstein. Never published in his lifetime, The Tyger (1795) is now the most frequently taught lyric poem in American and British high schools and universities. His lifetime (1757–1827) dates him with...

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Reviews

Shirazeh Houshiary
at Lisson Gallery

Houshiary's mesmeric abstract canvases depose our human perception of scope and scale, engaging the macro and microscopic; they connect a single breath to the breadth of the sea, carbon's molecular structure to the structural integrity of a star. The intricate pencil...

Plugged In: Art and Electric Light
at Norton Simon Museum

Grouping art by medium is always too obvious, even when the medium in question has the pizzazz of electric light. This exhibition focuses on the years 1964-1970 but does not, otherwise, establish a clear throughline. Experiments with electric light were, indeed,...

Kevin Brisco Jr.
at albertz benda

Most figurative painting is terrible but these are surprisingly good. Brisco’s restrained brushwork produces a flat clarity that recalls Alex Katz but with harsh moody colors and lonesome figures which echo Edward Hopper’s sadsacks. Suburban homes appear as...

Meg Lipke
at SHRINE

These paintings have a slight hamfistedness, which suggests distance from their alternately whimsical, mystical, Modernist, and Premodern sources. The allusions and references here—like Lipke’s interpolation of Neolithic-era petroglyphs into Kandinsky-esque painting –...

Larry Madrigal
at Nicodim

With scraped knees, tangled sheets, and yesterday’s discarded clothes strewn across the floor, Larry Madrigal’s new evocative paintings at Nicodim showcase the artist at his strongest. In moments where his fluid and textured style strives to move beyond the sexual...

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