Articles

An Artist Answers Questions
with Danny Fox

Top 3 beers? Okay, without a doubt—Guinness. And because I’m in LA, I’m going to say Pacifico. And a can of Stella. Top 3 songs? Dirty Old Town by the Pogues. Sara by Bob Dylan. Chelsea Hotel #2 by Leonard Cohen. Top 3 dead painters? Alfred Wallis. Vincent, of course. Norman Hines. How do you like your eggs? I like them (two or three free-range chicken eggs) boiled for six minutes, peeled,...

Art Damaged
Expansion of the Critic

by Justin Gradin

Race Place

by Wyatt Coday

Since 2018, I’ve made a point of catching the Made in L.A biennial at the Hammer Museum, and at times I’ve come away with mixed feelings toward the city’s most ambitious survey exhibition. While it is worth asking — as many critics before me have — whether or not a biennal is a worthwhile form for an exhibition, I won’t attempt to answer that question here. But even after taking into account the...

Capturing The Castle
LA’s Coolest Apartment Gallery Leaves the Living Room

by Kate Caruso

Harley Wertheimer wears many hats: The native Angeleno is founder and director of CASTLE Gallery, as well as co-owner of Hollywood’s Stir Crazy café, and up until recently he was vice-president of A&R at Columbia Records. While Wertheimer got his professional start in the music industry, he began paying closer attention to visual art when he started lightly collecting in 2015. He’s not sure...

An Indigenous Gaze Towards The Future
Wendy Red Star Recontextualizes Native Culture in Outer Space

by Tara Anne Dalbow

Growing up on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, Wendy Red Star witnessed the ways her cultural heritage was practiced, performed and integrated into the daily lives of her tribe. These customs seemed deeply disconnected from the displays in history museums that rendered her people as ancient artifacts. Spanning self-portraiture, archival imagery, large-scale installations,...

My Favorite Cézanne
The Only Impressionist Painting I Actually Like

by Shana Nys Dambrot

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...

« Older Entries

Next Entries »

Reviews

The Rise of Mothball Contemporary?

There was a spectre haunting the Frieze Los Angeles Art fair—the spectre of the grandmother’s attic. Musty copper and seashells, old gold and furniture brown, sequins and feathers, paintings and sculpture not literally from an antique store but clearly informed by...

Nadya Tolokonnikova
at Honor Fraser

Nadya Tolokonnikova, the exiled Siberian performer and conceptual artist infamous for her Pussy Riot anti-authoritarian protest disruptions in Moscow—whose Putin’s Ashes artworks landed her on Russia’s most wanted list—has found a home away from home at Honor Fraser...

Barbara Carrasco
at the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles

The Queen of Los Angeles will not allow her history to be erased, and neither will Barbara Carrasco’s 1981 mural L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective. Censored swiftly after its completion by the commissioners, the mural collected dust in storage for decades and is...

Vanessa Hérnandez Cruz
at Highways Performance Space

Vanessa Hérnandez Cruz defied time and space with her sci-fi thriller disguised as a dance, “Rain Glass Vortex.” In the performance, Cruz wrestled with her dance partners: her walker, Pluto, and her leg braces. She moved her arms and core in jerky, robotic movements....

Prima Sakuntabhai
at The Fulcrum Press

This show is all smoke and mirrors, but in a good way. Prima Sakuntabhai plays with transparencies, reflections, and shadows to recapture their great-grand-uncle’s favorite haunts. The elder relative is Pridi Banomyong, a Thai immigrant who adopted revolutionary ideas...

Duelling Reviews: Joseph Beuys
at The Broad

The 40-Year Funeral By Pat Williams There are very few people alive today that can remember a time when conceptual art was considered to be unusual. To most of us it came as a given, buried in among our earliest memories of museum-going. You enter with a parent or two...

Olivia Mole
at Gattopardo

The shower scene in Psycho. You know it, everyone’s seen it. Go to the end. We follow a trail of blood and water through the tub, then push in as it swirls down the drain. In this moment, always, I beg Hitchcock to follow the zoom, to continue completely down the...

Jingze Du
at Steve Turner

Jingze Du’s exhibition “True Colors” features the most well-executed oils in recent memory and all of them are of cute animals. The animals are mostly uninflected white, and their cuteness is eerie and synthetic. The painting itself is restricted to points of defining...

T.J. Dedeaux-Norris
at Walter Maciel Gallery

T.J. Dedeaux-Norris had already segued from performance and music to painting and printmaking before completing her MFA at Yale, but she foregrounds the performative aspect of her approach in “Breach of Confidentiality,” her debut solo exhibition at Walter Maciel...

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...

« Older Entries

Next Entries »