Right from the start, “Zoe Leonard: Survey,” a career-spanning exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, establishes the artist’s role as an art-world renegade and provocateur. Now on view at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary site, the installation begins with a pairing of photography and sculpture in a narrow gallery where Leonard’s photographs made through airplane windows...
I rarely get out to galleries these days and often resort to Instagram for my visual fix. Like the internet itself, it’s a seemingly endless rabbit hole of memes, food porn, actual porn and hopeless narcissism. But occasionally some strange and inexplicable gems scroll on through, just waiting to be unpicked. Last year a friend shared a video by a user going by the handle of @mcdazzler. In it, a...
Los Angeles artist Diane Williams engages such historical hierarchies as male/female, human/animal, and self/other in works that focus on her identity as a non-binary immigrant woman. Born in the Philippines in 1973, Williams (nee Diane Doreen Briones) came to this country as a young teen. She attended high school and college here, graduating from Cal State Long Beach in 2013. Since that time,...
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...
Hard-edge painting has rarely been so romantic—or had such an enchanting soundtrack. Visual and musical artist Amadour’s exhibition of breezy architectural abstractions, "Echolocation" (even the name evokes a merger of sound and space), explores the recurring motif of...
Phillip K Smith III makes works that glow. His individual pieces and his installations share a kinship with California Light and Space artists like James Turrell, Robert Irwin and Larry Bell, as they are primarily about light and the nuances of shifting colors of...
Jim Shaw’s work has always moved, both performatively and analytically, between the quotidian space of individual consciousness, and collective and cultural spaces both conscious and unconscious. Since he began using film studio and theater backdrops as readymade...
A procession of wooden plinths hold aloft groups of idol-sized sculptures, stout bodies with the hallmarks of Mayan figurines, whose torsos sport schematic rib cages, hearts and organs, and are topped with faces rendered in a contemporary style—portraits of migrants...
Transformation is at the heart of Elizabeth Malaska’s paintings which operate like a story or a fairytale—a mythology of metamorphic processes that disrupt, shape-shift, alter and expand concepts of the self—employing a kind of magical thinking oriented around...
It is not unusual for an exhibition of Friedrich Kunath’s paintings to be accompanied by something outrageous and unexpected. In both 2012 and 2017 he carpeted gallery floors, transforming them into soft, colorful fields dotted with sculptures, couches, socks, giant...
Using a swirl of varied mediums, “Re•Iterate” is a fiery, highly textural exhibition curated by Lorraine Heitzman and featuring works by Heitzman, Raghubir Kintisch and Monica Wyatt. The viewer’s eye darts between textures, colors and patterns, finding a focus both in...
A meandering sun-bleached trek forms the exterior presence of Wardell Milan’s exhibition adjacent to the recently completed art museum at the oldest of the seven Claremont Colleges—an academic plantation that sprawls over 500 acres and eagerly sends clever children...
Luis Garza was a dedicated artist and visionary who helped advance Chicano culture and activism in the 1960s and 70s through his compassionate photos. Born in 1943 in the South Bronx, he moved to Los Angeles in 1965, searching for a lifestyle more amenable to his...
At Geary Contemporary, an exhibition pairing Lizzie Gill and Kristen Jensen, shows how nuanced, elegant and powerful the two-person format can be. At first glance, Jensen and Gill’s work have seemingly little in common. Jensen’s Warms (2021) sculptures are visually...