Articles

MALKA GERMANIA
Yael Bartana's Jungian Journey Into the Past and Present

In an age when so much gratuitous violence pervades our screens, the three-channel film Malka Germania presents a gentle Jungian perspective on the effects of the Holocaust on today’s German citizens. The film alludes to collective trauma about war and subjugation, while transforming that trauma into manna. Malka Germania (Queen Germania in Hebrew), created by Israeli native/Berlin resident Yael...

The Complex Stuff is the Best
Keith Haring at The Broad

by Tucker Neel

“Children know something that most people have forgotten.” —Keith Haring’s journal entry from July 7, 1986. In the spirit of Keith Haring’s retrospective, “Art Is For Everybody,” I decided to seek a child’s perspective on his work, enlisting my friend’s eight-year-old son, Oscar Forbes, to get his thoughts about the exhibition. After setting up tickets for our visit, the museum’s PR team emailed...

New Art in the Metro System

by Scarlet Cheng

With the opening of Metro’s Regional Connector on June 16, three new Downtown Los Angeles stations have site-responsive art installations by eight artists in them. The artists were carefully chosen through a multi-stage process, and their designs became integral parts of the station’s architecture—whether part of solid walls or glass panels. What I’ve found particularly interesting is that Metro...

THE BURDEN OF MISREPRESENTATION
Documentaries Trumped by Biopics

by Scarlet Cheng

Artists and the art world are a source of endless fascination for the movies. They seem inherently romantic or scandalous—or both—and in the past these movies usually featured white guys such as Michelangelo, van Gogh or Jackson Pollock in postures of tragic genius. Fortunately, we’ve moved away from the Great White Male Artist trope, especially as some neglected women artists have been...

GENOCIDE AND GENIUS
"Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History" by Benjamin Balint

by Reviewed by Barbara Morris

Bruno Schulz’s fantastic stories mesh familial dysfunction, metamorphosis and metaphor, complemented by a body of visual artwork filled with sexually charged imagery with a masochistic perspective. Benjamin Balint presents an impassioned narrative in Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History. Schulz may have been small in stature and unimposing in aspect, but he was...

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Reviews

Austin Lee
at Jeffrey Deitch

Austin Lee’s haunting soft-focus paintings are what I imagine my nightmares would look like if rendered in claymation and run through an AI algorithm. The artist’s digital/analog hybrids are creepy—a good kind of creepy, my kind of creepy. In the video Starers (2024),...

“signifying the impossible song”
at Southern Guild

At the entrance of the gallery, viewers are confronted by a massive wall work by Moffat Takdiwa, bhiro ne bepa (pen and paper) (2023), constructed from the detritus of late-stage capitalism and post-colonialist society. The artist embraces the texture and materiality...

Becky Tucker
at Steve Turner

I love seeing an artist push the boundaries of the medium. Becky Tucker does exactly that with stoneware creations that are —FIRE. They look like Clive Barker created the Cenobites from Hellraiser in a kiln lit by hell’s inferno. The most imposing pieces are a trio of...

Liz Larner
at Regen Projects

Liz Larner’s wall works evoke the weathered, mysterious exteriors of unearthed petrified wood. Suspended layers of obsidian, sage, amber, and indigo feel almost magnetized, capable of reshaping the viewer the way magnetic forces reshape landforms. The tautly stretched...

Julia Weist
at Moskowitz Bayse

Julia Weist’s “Private Eye” is like a neo-noir where the investigator investigates themselves and invites us along. The work traffics in suburban paranoia: messages on vanity plates and yard signs asking us to believe. Today, the taboo of surveillance has faded, and...

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