Unbeknownst to many, the majority of sculptors that are known for creating large sculptures in bronze, never actually work with the material. Rather they sculpt in some alternative natural—such as clay or wax—then when the final aesthetic is reached, the object is handed off to a bronze fabricator—a foundry person—to change the sculpture’s materiality. The job of the foundry is to take that...
Climate experts have yet to advance their science to a point where we might seriously contemplate climate management, but if they ever do, they might find the curatorial method of “Made in L.A. 2014” instructive. This more sharply focused edition of the Hammer Museum’s biennial of Los Angeles artists not only embraces a broadly defined institutional critique, but includes the hypothetical viewer...
Recently I went to Pascal Dombis’s Parisian studio to look into the large public artwork that he will be installing at end of this year at the National School of Architecture in Strasbourg. While there, I formulated some general reflections on his work. For awhile now, Dombis has been creating perverse computer-assisted paintings that seem to try to overthrow, or at least displace, modern...
Pierced by the oblique rays of a setting sun pouring in from the yellowing skylights, the bowels of the abandoned Domino’s sugar refinery in Brooklyn appear like the nave of a rusted cathedral. For two months this spring that majestic industrial ruin was the setting for Kara Walker’s impressively site-specific installation, ironically titled "A Subtlety" a meditation on desire, exploitation,...
Martin Mull has certainly earned his place in the canon of exceptional narrative painters, those for whom painting is a delicate and complicated process by which the artist quantifies his/her relationship to the world around them. Mull’s assessments are usually dark, even sinister at times, and this darkness derives from a seemingly inherent flaw in our humanity, as if the figures in Mull’s...
A small crowd gathers around the entrance to Fouladi Projects gallery at Market and Guerrero in San Francisco. A doorman with a long list in his hand gives me the uneasy fear that I won’t be allowed into the opening, on account of the über-hip celebrity inside. But I tell him I’m with the press, and he shrugs and steps aside nonchalantly. When I walk inside, every eye turns to register my...
Find it in Everything is a slight hardcover book, newly published by Little Brown and Company, featuring Facebook-style photographs by Drew Barrymore. You can find it on Amazon or even at the MOCA bookstore in LA. According to the back cover, Barrymore is now “a photographer.” A biography mentions that her work has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography in New York (a claim...
Disillusioned with the politics of network television and the intricate financing of big studio films, filmmaker David Lynch has once again returned focus to his core business: being an artist.Inspired as a teen by realist painter Robert Henri, Lynch took Henri’s legacy tome, The Art Spirit, to heart and enrolled as a painter at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. It was there...
“Photography; I’ve always loved it,” says Moby, the noted techno-music composer and performer who is also cultivating a reputation as an art photographer. “My mom was a painter, my uncle was a photographer for The New York Times.” When Moby was 10, his uncle gave him a serious camera, a Nikon F, and later some darkroom equipment. He learned to develop film and enlarge his own prints, but for...
I always thought that Phyllis Diller’s public/comic persona (the hair, the toothy smile, the A-line dresses and feathery accessories, gloves, booties, cigarette and holder) was her greatest work of art. But she was also a pretty great comic and (with a little help from a couple of male comedians) broke some pioneering ground for the women who followed her into the business. Less obvious, and...
I feel like most people would have a tough time imagining something more ideologically opposed to art than data analytics. Even the phrase sounds unartistic, more at home in investment banking than gallery houses. Art just feels too subjective to be encapsulated by...
Make Room's new location in Hollywood is a private garden courtyard leading into two exhibition spaces. This space, on a balmy, LA-summer evening, infused with the ethereal charm of director Emilia Yin, leant an alluring hush on opening night and afforded the...
SUMMER READING: July-August 2021 Digital Special Edition Review Subscribe or Order to Get Your Copy Today Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto Reviewed by Pelumi Odubanjo A ‘glitch’ is often considered to be an error; a malfunction that appears to temporarily cause or...
Art Is Everything By Yxta Maya Murray 229 pages TriQuarterly Yxta Maya Murray—art writer, law professor, fiction author—draws upon the disparate threads of her writing practice to construct her new novel, Art Is Everything, a kind of Bildungsroman of the Los Angeles...
After living through the angst-laden whirlwind that was 2020, I can’t imagine a better show to see than “Alice Neel: People Come First” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Neel’s dual focus on ordinary, often invisible people and social justice issues resonates...
While painting may, in most cases, operate within the mind alone, sculpture is intrinsically connected to the body. Sculpture itself has a certain corporeality. The works aren’t abstracted onto a wall, but rather exist in the world among us. We are forced to reckon...
In contrast to city symphonies’ majestic depiction of high-rises and new machinery, Yu Ji displays discarded objects and debris. Instead of emphasizing order and repetition, the artist embraces liquidity and discord.
YU JI Chisenhale Gallery OUTSIDE LA: London, UK By Eran Sabaner Kalaora At the center of Chisenhale’s main gallery, a black net is suspended, hanging between multiple points on the ceiling. Resembling a post-nuclear hammock, the net carries rubble...
For an artist who has deliberately cultivated a naïve style, Umar Rashid (who also occasionally calls himself Frohawk Two Feathers) appears to have calculated the exhibition’s title, “Per Capita” with almost labyrinthine deliberation—an amalgam of the coyly...
Alexander Harrison’s aptly named exhibition “Midnight Everywhere,” is an exploration of the moods, tones and colors that the night brings. The paintings in the exhibition form a cohesive collection and tell the story of a solitary artist living in an old wooden house...