I had wanted to see the Guggenheim Bilbao since it first opened. Ed Moses and I had once met up, completely by accident, in London. He had flown in from San Francisco and I from Los Angeles, arriving within the same hour. Ed invited me to stay with him, saying he had plenty of room. That night we joined Allen Jones at The Bohemian Club for dinner. Amazing fun. Ed and I had both come for a...
The malaise of our times is encapsulated and iterated over and over in this year’s Venice Biennale—whether racial conflict, gender redefinition, women’s rights, immigration, environmental threats, or any combination thereof. One begins to wonder, as one wanders through this sprawling extravaganza, whether there has ever been a more troubled era. The answer of course is yes, but the difference is...
On a narrow one-way street in San Miguel Chapultepec, it’s impossible to miss the disparate wood-paneled exterior of Kurimanzutto. Surrounded by modernist apartment buildings in a rich palette of burnt sienna, robin’s-egg blue and royal yellow, the gallery’s presence is pronounced—much like how it is positioned within the vibrant art scene of Mexico City. Kurimanzutto is one of the most...
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to spend a night in a gallery or a small museum, and wished you could walk down a motel hallway and see original murals on your way to the ice machine instead of prints that could have—and possibly did—come from a Walmart catalog, then staying in an art hotel is the perfect option. Art hotels exist in exotic locales from Paris to Israel, but there...
“I paint almost every day,” says Rich Untermann, owner of the Spanish Garden Inn in the heart of downtown Santa Barbara. “When I like a painting, I frame it, and hang it someplace in the hotel. I shift them around until they feel comfortable—it is in a constant shuffle.” Over the years, Untermann’s paintings have filled up most of the hangable places in the hotel’s public spaces and 24 rooms....
Robert Russell is a Los Angeles painter whose conceptually based process often begins with an internet search. Be it for other people named Robert Russell, artist's monographs, tea cups, or for his current exhibition, Allach porcelain figurines, Russell culls online...
Richly colored, blossoming pseudo-portraits comprise Vanessa Prager's solo exhibition titled "Portraits" at Diane Rosenstein Gallery. Each painting depicts a bloom of vibrant flowers sprouting from the necks of the (assumedly) human subjects. Prager's works are a nod...
When Kehinde Wiley had the honor of being selected to paint a portrait of former President Barak Obama, it marked a historic moment as he became the first African American to paint an official US presidential portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery....
Hard-edge painting has rarely been so romantic—or had such an enchanting soundtrack. Visual and musical artist Amadour’s exhibition of breezy architectural abstractions, "Echolocation" (even the name evokes a merger of sound and space), explores the recurring motif of...
Phillip K Smith III makes works that glow. His individual pieces and his installations share a kinship with California Light and Space artists like James Turrell, Robert Irwin and Larry Bell, as they are primarily about light and the nuances of shifting colors of...