When looking at art one considers line, shape, volume, the play of light across pigment. When looking at Los Angeles, one considers other lines. The stark divide between the haves and have-nots is as tangible as the freeways that divide one neighborhood from another. With the theatrical performance of big money that makes LA more destination than home, the art world can seem like just another...
An interview with Paris Photo LA’s new director, Florence Bourgeois, and the new artistic director, Christoph Wiesner, was the first thing on my agenda for the fair this year. I wanted to get from Bourgeois and Wiesner a sense of what changes or innovations they hope to bring to PPLA. Because this is the third year of the three-year commitment Paris Photo had made to be at Paramount Studio in...
Prestidigitator, composer, engineer and conceptual artist Nahum hails from Mexico City, has lived in London for many years after a degree from Goldsmith’s College, but really, he belongs anywhere. Recently he and eight other Mexican artists, along with a Mexican scientist, spent a day floating above our planet in zero gravity on a parabolic flight. Russians flying the huge Ilyushin 76 MDK...
IN THE BEGINNINGThere is something about abstraction. The concept of the non-pictorial, non-mimistic image is unique in art, and in the world. Sometimes it seems to me that there is abstract art, and then there is everything else. This is what Ad Reinhardt meant when he wrote that “Art is art-as-art and everything else is everything else.” It is an intriguing concept. Everything in the world...
Los Angeles painter James Hayward taught a USC graduate seminar in 1987. That was my introduction to him. He wasn’t much of a teacher, but he sure was a talker. He sat in a chair front and center in the classroom with his legs stretched wide open. When he would get excited by his own tall tales (which was most of the time), his long skinny legs would begin to flap back and forth wildly in rhythm...
Think about the differences between the long-standing practices of painting and sculpture, and clichés persist: Painting is “flat,” sculpture is not; paintings go on a wall, sculptures do not. In contemporary art these separate paths often intersect; some notable mid-20th century examples being Jasper Johns’ encaustic and plaster paintings, Lucio Fontana’s stabbed canvases, Robert Rauschenberg’s...
An acknowledgment of tradition coupled with a refusal to conform to established conventions makes Analia Saban an artist not easily categorized. Her work flows seamlessly across genre, concept and medium.A native of Argentina, Saban recalls arriving in California nearly a decade ago. “When I got to UCLA, I was confused because there was all this attention always going to painting. I thought, why...
I met Sheldon Figoten in San Francisco in the mid 1970s. We were just a couple of ambitious young artists from Los Angeles on sabbatical in California’s northern hemisphere at the time. After returning to SoCal, Figoten settled in Venice and over the years has become friends with many of its veteran abstract painters. Ed Moses, for one, is a longtime pal. Where Moses has had a storied career...
Propped against the wall of her second-story Hollywood Boulevard studio, three of Liat Yossifor’s gray paintings—each about seven feet by five feet—in various stages of completion sit perched on low wood supports. Yossifor’s high-ceilinged studio feels spacious, if rather austere; other than her paintings, supplies, a table with tools, and an old paint-stained leather sofa, there is little else....
The early 20th-century’s turn towards modernism in painting was a decisive shift in interest away from artistic representation of acts of witnessing. Abstract art—which now seems to dominate many visual demesnes including the decorative and graphic design, and sets the agenda for contemporary painting practice—is about a different kind of personal account, one not dependent on history or...
Grief comes in countless forms. There are as many ways to feel the peculiar sensation of loss as there are things to lose. One can lose another, something external, and just the same – or just as differently –one can lose oneself. With bereavement, there is no wrong...
Fragments of paper, cardboard, wire and foil have all been carefully orchestrated into a space that seems to float seamlessly and coalesce into a compelling quasi-geometric composition in “Collages 1957–1982” by Louise Nevelson. On closer inspection, it becomes clear...
Fairytales operate in a special place of human consciousness. They offer the building blocks of moralism and societal standards, for better or worse. Though folk stories, myths and fairytales are found throughout every culture, there are many common elements: simple...
Though at first seeming to depict ordinary, even prudish interior domestic scenes, upon closer inspection Anne Buckwalter’s paintings reveal provocative signs of sex, eroticism and sensuality. In Clean Linens, her first solo show at Rachel Uffner Gallery, Buckwalter...
When it comes to exploring concepts of Zen Buddhism and contemporary art, artists have used Modern and Contemporary art approaches like Minimalism, video, and Expressionism to convey these ideas to the viewer. What about Realism? Ernie Marjoram in his solo show...
I’ve written a lot about Los Angeles and how it’s mistakenly known as an “ugly city.” And while before I’ve been willing to blame that mistake on biased reporting, I’m starting to believe that the call is coming from inside the house. Truthfully, we have only...
“All men are gay,” reads the cover of a newspaper from Bøssehuset (The Gay House). The newspaper is part of the exhibition Psychopathia Sexualis at the art space Overgaden in Copenhagen, which displays a combination of archival material and contemporary art—the former...
It is hard not to wonder if Hanna Hur's paintings were made explicitly for Kristina Kite's gallery space or if it is pure coincidence that the black and white checkerboard floor so perfectly complements the geometric patterns within the paintings. The way the space...
As an omnipresent symbol across the history of humanity, the ocean assumes many roles. It is a healing force, and is immensely destructive; it is divine and earthly. The ocean encompasses the myriad of natural and mystical forces which have captivated our imagination...
Paper is a flexible medium. It is unconstrained frames and backings, untethered by nails or staples, and has become essential across countries and centuries. Still, in the canon of western art history, the primacy of canvas painting has pushed works on paper aside,...