This year, the veteran LA gallery ltd los angeles marked the start of its 10th season. In some ways, the gallery’s program looks more like that of a nonprofit than a commercial gallery. They don’t represent artists, per se. Instead of having a roster of 12 to 20 artists who rotate solo exhibitions, with a few group shows sprinkled in between, ltd los angeles works with a broad range of artists,...
Outsider artists, or untrained artists, have been variously labeled Primitive, Naïve, Visionary and Self-Taught. One of the things I like most about such artists is their distinct and fully-imagined worldview, a consciousness that exists without being overly precious or self-conscious. After all, they did not produce art with a market or a collector in mind; they did so to please themselves or,...
By the time my studio visit with Francesca Gabbiani is winding up, the conversation has turned to Griffith Park. We talk about our respective walks, and various neglected areas of the Park—the depleted bird sanctuary and abandoned spaces and cages near the Zoo—and the spirits that haunt those spaces. Gabbiani became obsessed with the dark history of the Park’s benefactor, Griffith J. Griffith....
After experiencing Frieze LA at Paramount Studios, I've got some super exciting ideas for everyone to consider and some fun activities you might want to do to make your experience even better than mine. I would have done the following, but I was there as a member of the press and, well, this is not what press should do. BUT YOU CAN! 1) Sneak YOUR art INTO the fair. It's not a publicity stunt....
Emily Fromm’s solo exhibition currently on display at 111 Minna Gallery, “No Vacancy,” is the painter’s comic-book style depiction of bustling corners of San Francisco. The exhibition shows over 40 works from the California native painter who studied at San Francisco State University. Large canvases display Fromm’s characteristic graphic animation cityscape paintings. These works use thick, dark...
"Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings," is a deeply satisfying survey exhibition of the photographer’s work which has traveled from the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. to the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts and is currently at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. While attending the press opening, I had a chance to discuss the exhibition with the Curator of the National Gallery of...
Jane Brucker’s work has often revolved around memory and how it resides in objects, especially objects that have been worn or used by people we have known. Incorporating notions of ephemerality and decay, her work has a poignancy that touches on our sense of loss. On the heels of her retrospective at the Long Beach Museum of Art, “Fragile Thoughts: Jane Brucker” (which closed Jan. 6), she...
To coincide with this year’s fourth edition of the FOG Design+Art Fair, the Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture invited pioneering multimedia artist Joan Jonas to present two live performances at the center’s Cowell Theater. In the work, titled Moving Off the Land, Jonas gave a fact-based art/science lecture as performance, integrating her signature live drawings and interactions with video...
“Freedom Cannot Wait”. “Deport ICE”. “Para Todos Todo, Nada Para Nosotros”. “Everything for Everyone, Nothing For Ourselves”. These are not slogans pulled from defiant posters in one of many protests happening regularly across the United States, as American society becomes even more divided between the haves and have nots; those who speak English, and those who do not. These phrases are...
I make no claim as to the comprehensiveness or objectivity of this selection. Nevertheless, to the extent that it reflects personal priorities, I believe most artists, if not the entire art community, both local and international, acknowledge the existential criticality of the moment. In one way or another, each of these exhibitions has engaged this moment as it intersects with a specific place...
Depicting the passage of time and light through the color of a repeated landscape, Whitney Bedford’s “Vedute” immerses viewers in a stunning but haunting forested world. The landscape in each large-scale work depicts the same scene mid-morning, mid-afternoon, and...
A series of diaphanous shelves hover with a brooding, eerie sense of stillness that charms and terrifies. Patrick Jackson's exhibition “Liquid Clay” presents two separate but related sculpture-based installations. Occupying most of the gallery space is a series of...
Elliott Hundley's creations have always been superabundant. His dense canvases are usually filled with thousands of small cut-outs—shapes, figures, snippets from advertisements—pinned to the surface of the works and extended out at different heights to turn the...
River Styx, curated by Brandy Carstens and Sara Lee Hantman, brings together a range of artists whose work is concerned with the interior and emotive forces of landscape that are spiritual, mythological, and metamorphic. Featured in the show include artists such as...
The nuance of intimacy is the focal point of James Cherry's solo exhibition at NOON Projects. Entitled "Fraternal"—a nod to both Cherry being a twin and to relationships amongst men—the exhibition presents as an exploration of relationships, specifically queer ones,...
Alison Saar’s diasporic deities are gestures of remembrance that honor the resilience of Black women. Reconfiguring and reclaiming the image of the Sable Venus, Saar depicts a series of women as spiritually charged warriors that are full of agency. This reclamation is...
Sometime during one of those unremarkable post-Christmas pre-New Year’s days I was scrolling Instagram endlessly. In between sponsored health food ads, I came across an installation image of one Adam Higgins’ hyperreal salad paintings at Chris Sharp Gallery. My...
Captivated by the spiritual and vibrational aspects of the natural world, Agnes Pelton renders the invisible forces that surge through life. While Pelton is not the only artist included in LACMA's survey exhibition "Another World," she is the most compelling and...
Creating large-scale figurative watercolor works is somewhat unique in contemporary Los Angeles art. Lena Moross is an exception, painting evocative portraits and full figures in this format. “Forgive and Forget” is a beautiful numbered series of 13 works using a...
Thirteen modestly-sized paintings comprise Chicago based artist Brad Stumpf's exhibition Shadow Plays. The paintings are beautiful, personal and intimate. Formally, Stumpf combines thickly applied paint that defines spaces—walls, desks and objects—with more sparsely...