“People I have great admiration for, people in my own circle, they just keep coming to Los Angeles. All the key people, and they just keep coming,” says art dealer Jeffrey Deitch at his Los Feliz home. “It never stops. And now we have reached critical mass. It’s no longer, ‘Wow, things are happening here.’ It’s now. It’s real.” We are in the kitchen of the house Deitch bought back in 2010, when...
A recent Barbara Kruger text mural adorns LAXART—accompanying the relaunch of their newly renovated space. The site-specific work debuted in June and extends until Spring this year. One might not have paid much attention to the building before, but Kruger’s signature Helvetica black text on white commands your attention. It just looks so good. Large fig trees surround the building as you enter...
Mention Blockchain and most people immediately think of Bitcoin. No surprise since Blockchain technology was invented to track transactions of the once-esoteric cryptocurrency. But Blockchain is being touted as a technology that will revolutionize our world, in ways that are unrelated to using Bitcoin or its competitors. Perhaps one of the most intriguing applications is its potential for...
Yunhee Min’s work at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects last summer follows an earlier body of work similar in style, “Movements” at her New York gallery in 2016. Both of them mark a strong new direction for her painting. The new series, entitled the “Wilde Paintings,” is so named because the generous natural light in her new DTLA studio—located on a street in the fashion district named for...
Vera Arutyunyan coats her canvases with pigment and passion. For much of her 25-year artistic career, the Armenian-born artist’s bold abstract oil paintings have been expressions of her complex emotions as an immigrant building a new life in the United States. Growing up in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, Arutyunyan excelled in both art and science. While studying geological engineering at...
Brandon Ndife's practice is grounded in vital materiality that considers matter as lively and metamorphic, bound to forces and encounters that push and pull, tumbling ceaselessly into rambunctious states of transformation. Biomorphic clusters of industrial and...
One half of Chicago’s famous corn cob buildings, formally known as Marina City, floats above a winding road in a mountain pass. It pierces a white void, which highlights the building’s delicate edges, the bite marks in its ocular facade. Below, light streams through...
Victor Estrada erupted onto the art world landscape with his confounding work in the 1992 Los Angeles MOCA exhibition, “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s,” along with other luminaries such as Harry Gamboa Jr., Megan Williams and Mike Kelley. What’s mystifying is...
For someone brought up within a more or less secular Roman Catholic culture, living now (atheism aside) essentially as if she were a nun, one would think I might know something about “Vespers”—the title of Justin Liam O’Brien’s current show at the Richard Heller...
During the early months of the pandemic, Judy Fiskin needed a new way of working in which she did not have to leave the security of her home. Fiskin happened upon a real estate website with interior images of houses for sale and...