Articles

My Favorite Cézanne
The Only Impressionist Painting I Actually Like

Every time I say I don’t like Impressionism people lose their minds—and I get it, people love the stuff, can’t get enough. I admit that I sometimes say it just to freak them out, because you should see the looks. I mean, you’re probably looking at me like that right now. I can hear it too: But Western painters had never thought about light that way before! The way they deconstructed figures and...

The Suburbs Are Dead?
Brad Eberhard Makes Noise with Alto Beta

by Matt Stromberg

“Well, there were many creatures in the cave. And some of them had their problems, but all of them, they were my friends....You don’t meet friends like this every day, so I’m staying in the cave.” —Wounded Lion, “Creatures in the Cave” I first met Brad Eberhard earlier this year when I agreed at the last minute to fill in as a DJ at an opening at Alto Beta, the art space he started in March...

Excavating Natural History
Mark Dion Explores the Sticky Wonders and Legacy of the La Brea Tar Pits

by George Melrod

As an urban kid growing up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I adored the American Museum of Natural History. The low-lit museum seemed like a palace of wonders to me. In its inner chambers the glowing dioramas of exotic animals in their native habitats appeared like scenarios from a dream, at once factual, scientific and a bit surreal. So, when I first discovered Mark Dion’s brilliant, dreamlike...

Linda Vallejo
A New Exhibition at parrasch heijnen Showcases Five Decades of the Artist’s Work

by William Moreno

Linda Vallejo’s career-spanning exhibition at parrasch heijen is a homecoming of sorts. The gallery is ensconced in the center of Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights district, where she was born, and a stone’s throw from the iconic Sears Building — an area where Vallejo spent much of her career’s formative years — as well as the legendary Self-Help Graphics (SHG), a critical art-production and community...

The Appropriated Strike Back
Is the Idea of What and Who Is Appropriatable Changing?

by D. Soberman

While many of the contemporary art world’s basic assumptions have been challenged in recent years, one that has remained remarkably constant since at least the 1960s is the collective verdict on appropriation: It’s fine! Andy did it, so it must be—and too many foundationally (and financially) important artists—from Roy Lichtenstein to Barbara Kruger and Sherrie Levine—built their entire careers...

Seeing Detroit Through Fresh Eyes
Taylor Renee Aldridge Returns to her Hometown to Head Modern Ancient Brown Foundation

by Tulsa Kinney

Recently I had the opportunity to visit Detroit for the first time in my life. What a magnificently diverse city bustling with bars and restaurants on every corner in the downtown area, with one of the top encyclopedic art museums in the nation where the socialist mural by Diego Rivera can be seen. No wonder Taylor Renee Aldridge left Los Angeles to return to her native Detroit, I thought to...

ABOLITION IN ACTION
Crenshaw Dairy Mart Cares About People

by Bianca Collins

The artist-of-color-led arts organization and collective in Inglewood, Crenshaw Dairy Mart (CDM), is continuing a legacy of Black-led art spaces in South Los Angeles. Co-founded by multi-hyphenate artists Patrisse Cullors, alexandre ali reza dorriz and noé olivas, it has been operating largely under the radar since its inception in 2020. As the kids say, “If you know, you know.” The art world’s...

HEAVY WATER
Rethinking the LA River for Future Generations

by Renee Reizman

The Los Angeles River is a permanent topic of fascination for artists in this city. In order to establish the city, bureaucrats and businessmen fought to colonize this humble waterway. They tore it away from Indigenous people, encased it in concrete, then rerouted it past the rancheros and into the burgeoning metropolis. Even if one never visits the Los Angeles River, its presence has informed...

NATURE’S WAY
Lucia Monge Collaborates with Her Environment

by Eva Recinos

As a kid, Lucia Monge often gazed at birds through her grandfather’s binoculars, taking in the wonders of nature at an early age. Sometimes the birds looked so extraordinary and colorful that she pondered: Could they be real? Or were they something from a fairy tale? Those formative years in Lima, Peru, shaped Monge’s focus as an artist. “A garden is a great privilege,” she said in a recent...

THE STARS ARE ALIGNED
Lita Albuquerque on Observational Astronomy

by Shana Nys Dambrot

A matriarch of the Land Art movement that is closely associated with the American Southwest, Lita Albuquerque has engaged with the surface of Earth from the South Pole to Saudi Arabia, Peru to Paris. But she has always given special attention to the music of the stars, and to the desert—a fixture of both her Tunisian heritage and her life in LA. Albuquerque’s iconic celestial blue-and-gold...

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Reviews

Hiroshi Sugimoto
at Lisson Gallery

The entrance to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s exhibition at Lisson Gallery, “Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form” is partially blocked by a curved wooden wall. The wall commands recognition, separating the exhibition from the outside world. It immediately invites the visitor to...

Lauren Bon
at Honor Fraser

If the sculpture of concrete’s last big cultural “moment” (sometime in the 2010s) was typified by figurative and abstract cement statuary that merely winked at its Home Depot provenance, Lauren Bon foregrounds this material in all its blunt, obdurate force. “Concrete...

Matthew Lax
at Human Resources

On a rainy Saturday in early November, I spent the better part of an hour sitting cross-legged inside an XL dog crate. I did so in order to watch the screens mounted to the crate’s interior that broadcast Matthew Lax’s two-channel video, A TIRED DOG IS A GOOD DOG,...

Gustav Metzger
at Hauser & Wirth

The re-examination—some would say reawakening—of radical artistic movements in the postwar era has exposed the technological as well as ideological stew out of which the digital activism of today’s art emerged. The performance and conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s...

Walead Beshty
at Regen Projects

Walead Beshty brings five distinct bodies of work together in his exhibition “Profit and Loss” at Regen Projects. In each of these projects, Beshty recasts familiar urban materials (vinyl, newspaper, cement) to expose the undercurrent of suffering and desperation in...

PICCLE P
at Sunset Blvd., et al

It is a high season for Piccle P. People with no prior special interest in street art keep bringing him up on their stories and reels, asking about the work, and pointing out Piccles while driving—though they don’t know his name. “The heart guy,” they call him—because...

Tim Presley
at SADE

I know when it’s time to eat my words and admit that, perhaps, I was wrong. A few years ago, I proclaimed (often) that I hated portraiture. In my defense, this was a period of overabundance, when Chloe Wise reigned supreme, and I was sick of seeing beautiful, posed...

Richard Hawkins
at GAGA & Reena Spaulings

In typical Richard Hawkins fashion, his videos “Blood Everywhere” feature unclad male celebrities (Timothée Chalamet and Bill Skarsgård) slowly starting to rot, eyes blackening and blood gushing. Chalamet undergoes a literal “twink death,” while skipping over the...

Math Bass
at Vielmetter

Reminiscent of the visual languages of midcentury graphic design, children’s book illustrations, and corporate branding, Math Bass’s paintings are unnervingly poppy. The language consists of cartoonishly pared-down symbols (alligator, cloud, speech bubble, to name a...

Chase Hall
at David Kordansky

There is just something about Chase Hall’s mark-making. He covers the faces of his subjects in stylized patterns that resemble African masks before staining the cotton with coffee. The artist’s marks make a lifeguard’s flotation device resemble an African shield....

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