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...
On an old oak-lined Pasadena avenue, I’m standing before an imposing wrought-iron gate to a stately Tudor mansion. In dappled afternoon sunlight twinkling beneath breezy treetops, this mysterious setting feels like the beginning of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Sprawling far beyond, the colossal estate, which I recognize from a video in Ariana Papademetropoulos’ recent show at Wilding Cran Gallery,...
The paintings of Lenz Geerk are unprepossessing and quietly sublime, his figures poised inside singular moments of divine inscrutability as they consider the world around them, whether it be a dying flower or the pointed edge of a table. This sense of veiled mystery could be said to denote a distinctly German sensibility as there are obvious connections with artists like Ludwig Kirchner and...
In her Culver City studio on a late summer afternoon, encaustic painter, printmaker and educator Pamela Smith Hudson revealed the origins of her vocation as a “materials artist” dedicated to exploring the potentials of paint, clay, print and wax: “My dad was a cement mason,” she said, while surrounded by her liquid-looking charcoal, teal, rose and cream-white canvases. “Dad worked on the federal...
Thirteen modestly-sized paintings comprise Chicago based artist Brad Stumpf's exhibition Shadow Plays. The paintings are beautiful, personal and intimate. Formally, Stumpf combines thickly applied paint that defines spaces—walls, desks and objects—with more sparsely...
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...