As we raked through ashes in California, reminded that we had already entered an anthro-obscene geological epoch, the most “important” of the Fall 2018 art auctions were already taking place, with records dropping every step of the way—Hopper, Hockney, Jack Whitten, Jacob Lawrence (with unusual drama), even our own Henry Taylor. But as any stand-up comedian or Sotheby’s own Amy Cappellazzo will...
Last year, even as LACMA Director Michael Govan was in the midst of storing the collection off site so that demolition of older buildings could make way for the newly designed museum, he took the time to curate an exhibition featuring Pictures Generation artist Richard Prince. The show was a new iteration of the Marlboro “Cowboy” series that made Prince famous. For the original series made...
“People I have great admiration for, people in my own circle, they just keep coming to Los Angeles. All the key people, and they just keep coming,” says art dealer Jeffrey Deitch at his Los Feliz home. “It never stops. And now we have reached critical mass. It’s no longer, ‘Wow, things are happening here.’ It’s now. It’s real.” We are in the kitchen of the house Deitch bought back in 2010, when...
A recent Barbara Kruger text mural adorns LAXART—accompanying the relaunch of their newly renovated space. The site-specific work debuted in June and extends until Spring this year. One might not have paid much attention to the building before, but Kruger’s signature Helvetica black text on white commands your attention. It just looks so good. Large fig trees surround the building as you enter...
Mention Blockchain and most people immediately think of Bitcoin. No surprise since Blockchain technology was invented to track transactions of the once-esoteric cryptocurrency. But Blockchain is being touted as a technology that will revolutionize our world, in ways that are unrelated to using Bitcoin or its competitors. Perhaps one of the most intriguing applications is its potential for...
Yunhee Min’s work at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects last summer follows an earlier body of work similar in style, “Movements” at her New York gallery in 2016. Both of them mark a strong new direction for her painting. The new series, entitled the “Wilde Paintings,” is so named because the generous natural light in her new DTLA studio—located on a street in the fashion district named for...
Vera Arutyunyan coats her canvases with pigment and passion. For much of her 25-year artistic career, the Armenian-born artist’s bold abstract oil paintings have been expressions of her complex emotions as an immigrant building a new life in the United States. Growing up in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, Arutyunyan excelled in both art and science. While studying geological engineering at...
On an old oak-lined Pasadena avenue, I’m standing before an imposing wrought-iron gate to a stately Tudor mansion. In dappled afternoon sunlight twinkling beneath breezy treetops, this mysterious setting feels like the beginning of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Sprawling far beyond, the colossal estate, which I recognize from a video in Ariana Papademetropoulos’ recent show at Wilding Cran Gallery,...
The paintings of Lenz Geerk are unprepossessing and quietly sublime, his figures poised inside singular moments of divine inscrutability as they consider the world around them, whether it be a dying flower or the pointed edge of a table. This sense of veiled mystery could be said to denote a distinctly German sensibility as there are obvious connections with artists like Ludwig Kirchner and...
In her Culver City studio on a late summer afternoon, encaustic painter, printmaker and educator Pamela Smith Hudson revealed the origins of her vocation as a “materials artist” dedicated to exploring the potentials of paint, clay, print and wax: “My dad was a cement mason,” she said, while surrounded by her liquid-looking charcoal, teal, rose and cream-white canvases. “Dad worked on the federal...
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...
Brandon Ndife's practice is grounded in vital materiality that considers matter as lively and metamorphic, bound to forces and encounters that push and pull, tumbling ceaselessly into rambunctious states of transformation. Biomorphic clusters of industrial and...
One half of Chicago’s famous corn cob buildings, formally known as Marina City, floats above a winding road in a mountain pass. It pierces a white void, which highlights the building’s delicate edges, the bite marks in its ocular facade. Below, light streams through...
Victor Estrada erupted onto the art world landscape with his confounding work in the 1992 Los Angeles MOCA exhibition, “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s,” along with other luminaries such as Harry Gamboa Jr., Megan Williams and Mike Kelley. What’s mystifying is...