“We’ll play to 700?” John Tottenham asks, but really it’s more of a demand than a question. It’s my second week of trying to combine an interview with him on his drawings of the Manson girls (as he insists, “You don’t have to focus on that series”) and our weekly game of gin rummy. This week there are too many people in the bar and we have to wait half an hour standing around, something that...
Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you to see what you’re looking at more clearly. The image is passing through you in a physiological way, into your brain, into your memory—where it stays—it’s transmitted by your hands. —Martin Gayford, A...
Don Bachardy found his lifelong metier at the movies—he was drawn to the larger-than-life faces on the silver screen, especially those of actresses, and began drawing those faces, copying their likenesses from popular movie magazines. Later, when he moved in with Christopher Isherwood—yes, that Christopher Isherwood, the celebrated author of The Berlin Stories—it was the older man who encouraged...
If one were to Google Canadian artist Eli Langer, most of the results would reference a convoluted legal case against his first show (held at Toronto’s Mercer Union Gallery in 1993) that proclaimed the subject matter not simply to be pornography but child pornography—Canada’s version of the late-’80s Jesse Helms morality and censorship cluster-fuck. The paintings and sketches, only glimpses of...
Laurie Lipton’s supremely detailed large-scale graphite drawings document the haphazardness of modern life as well as the darker more sinister underbelly of consumerist culture. Looking at these images, one can’t help but be reminded of how the proletariat is controlled and all human freedoms are denied in Orwell’s 1984. Lipton’s sardonic content connects with today’s bleak and unsettling...
Gerardo Monterrubio marks his ceramic sculptures with his memories and experiences as an Oaxacan immigrant. Free-flowing drawings upon his pottery relate engrossing autobiographical narratives interlaced with cultural commentary. His work recalls a vast historic spectrum of pictorial clay: cave paintings, Greek amphoras, Mesoamerican vessels and Grayson Perry vases. Monterrubio’s early...
The image on the wall delivers a message of warmth and messiness. Amanda Charchian calls it 7 Types of Love, Agape, and it presents a disembodied pair of female lips floating against a soft sea of pink, a cloud of blood seeping from the red lipstick. As a photograph, it’s torrid and abstract, expressing female sexuality in ways both subtle and direct in “Future Feminine” at the Fahey/Klein...
2017 has been a brilliant year for the movies. And they were good in so many ways, let me try to count them: They offered novel subject matter, woman falls in love with fish-man in The Shape of Water; a despised ex-athlete gets her cinema redemption in I, Tonya; a younger man falls heads over heels in love with a washed-up movie star who is played for sexy and seductive in Movie Stars Don’t Die...
All weekend, the Westside was ablaze with art. StART Up Fair, located at The Kinney (no relation to our editor!) Hotel in Venice, featured over 67 artists in a series of terrific and eclectic motel-room installations. At Friday’s opening, performance artist Guta Galli prowled the halls in a walk-through of 61 pounds, in which the artist carried the titular weight of red yarn and the essences of...
Traversing pre-history, Mesoamerican cosmology, and sexually free interplanetary-futurism, The Formaldehyde Trip, a live performance with video and songs, creates alternate realms for the overlooked casualties of colonialism. Dedicated to the memory of Bety Cariño, it not only envisions a realm in which Cariño is reborn, but foresees a radically feminist world, where according to the lyrics “you...
Chucking traditional curatorial norms out the window, Wolfgang Tillmans presents a show like it’s a site-specific installation, clustering images together—some wondrous, others just plain blah—hanging framed photographs alongside unframed prints, with the occasional...
Diego Rivera’s artistic oeuvre is so connected to our collective unconscious that touring this exhibition of 150 paintings, frescoes and drawings, feels like a homecoming. The show also includes film projections of murals that the artist created in Mexico and the US...
Water flows ceaselessly through the arteries of Robert Gober's solitary faucet, as if it were a trickling monument to the Sisyphean impossibility of cleanliness. Originally made in response to the AIDS crisis, Gober's handcrafted sink is recontextualized in the age of...
The Norton Simon Museum exhibition opening on October 20 featured just two paintings: Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres’ Madame Moitessier (1856) and Pablo Picasso’s Woman with a Book (1932). The latter is a response to the former and, though made seventy-six years apart,...
The Los Angeles-based painter Rebecca Morris is an obsessive abstractionist. The grid serves as her compositional playground where shapes and colors frolic and meander. The 21-year survey exhibition "Rebecca Morris: 2001-2022," at the Institute of Contemporary Art...
The spirograph galaxy of Rhythmic Inquisitions, an exhibition of works by June Edmonds at the Riverside Art Museum, unmercifully hypnotizes. Expanding boundaries, this 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship Recipient injects Aretha Franklin’s Respect (1967) into Abstract...
Abe Odedina’s “You Give Me Fever” embodies the spirit of a universal human emotion: desire. In his Los Angeles solo debut on view at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, the architect-turned-painter considers desire with a kaleidoscopic gaze, depicting deep-seated longings for...
Just across the Ohio River from downtown Cincinnati is The Carnegie, a former library in Covington, Kentucky constructed in 1904 one of over 2,500 worldwide funded by Andrew Carnegie. Now a theater and exhibition space, the center serves the local and surrounding...
Prunella Clough's paintings glitch, sneeze, and itch in states of spaghettification. Observational renderings culled from the everyday–seemingly subtle yet tidal and awkwardly beautiful–Clough discombobulates the gravitational fields that tether shapes and colors to...
Despite being mired in digital culture, the Bonn based artist Arno Beck makes analogue works. In his exhibition "Zen Them to Hell", he presents typewritten landscape drawings. Each of the eighteen identically sized and shaped, framed works on paper juxtapose...