Articles

GENOCIDE AND GENIUS
"Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History" by Benjamin Balint

Bruno Schulz’s fantastic stories mesh familial dysfunction, metamorphosis and metaphor, complemented by a body of visual artwork filled with sexually charged imagery with a masochistic perspective. Benjamin Balint presents an impassioned narrative in Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History. Schulz may have been small in stature and unimposing in aspect, but he was...

PAINTER OF DARKNESS
Cracking the Kinkade Vault

by Doug Harvey

Shortly after Thomas Kinkade died tragically from an overdose of Valium and booze in April 2012, LA artist Jeffrey Vallance had a dream in which Kinkade showed him a secret vault of disturbing artwork that ran counter to the wholesome, uplifting image cultivated around the Painter of Light™ and his artwork during his lifetime. To Vallance’s astonishment, when he recounted the dream to Kinkade’s...

MICHELANGELO WHO?
"The Story of Art Without Men" by Katy Hessel

by Reviewed by Annabel Keenan

Any project that attempts to recontextualize history is embarking on a daunting, arduous task. There’s a fine balance between providing too much detail and too little, in particular when the temporal scope of the story is ambitious. Embracing these challenges with confidence and clear mastery of her material is Katy Hessel, who has rewritten art history from the Renaissance to the present day to...

THE BOOK AS BOOKWORK
Luis Delgado's Physicality as a Thing

by William Moreno

Luis Delgado, prolific photographer, documentarian and inveterate bookmaker seemingly operates under the radar—even after a nearly 50-year run. A recent Los Angeles transplant, he was born and educated in Mexico City to a Mexican father and American mother —immersed in a growing cosmopolitan milieu. Early on he studied under the tutelage of Guggenheim fellow Frank Gonzales, and took up painting,...

ENVIRONMENT MAKING
Malaya Malandro on Collaboration

by Emma Christ

Created by Francis Kanai and Malaya Malandro, Everything Is a Self-Portrait is a collection of photographs and poetry produced from years of phone calls and emails between their respective homes in Japan and the US. More than a simple display of two artists’ works, the book is a glimpse into a larger conversation—one that is ongoing. While the book is separated into sections by medium, the...

CELEBRATORY AND MOURNFUL
Clay Biennial at Craft Contemporary

by George Melrod

One expects certain things from a good ceramic biennial: personal visions, agile skill sets, revelatory juxtapositions, and an insightful contemporary theme to weave them all together. Happily, this third iteration of the clay biennial at the Craft Contemporary, titled “Wayfinding,” offers vision and agility to spare. Although the theme is rather broadly drawn—referring to clay’s origins in land...

ART THAT TRANSPORTS
Three New Metro Stations Featuring Eight Installations

by Scarlet Cheng

The Regional Connector will open June 16, and it’s really good news for those of us who take Metro, because it will reduce time and station changes in getting around on LA’s ever-expanding light rail. I'm also looking forward to the public art—some of the most ambitious projects yet—that will distinguish three new stations that connect Union Station to 7th Street/Metro Center Station. Having...

Village Mindset
Innovative Community-Building at Art + Practice

by Alexia Lewis

It has long been the rule for nonprofits of all kinds to create and maintain paternalistic relationships with the causes and communities they claim to serve. Unfortunately, there are several arts nonprofits that fit this bill. So it’s refreshing to catch up with an organization such as Art + Practice, which has directly contributed to positive and long-term impact in the majority Black community...

Extra Flavor
Desert X Breathes New Life

by Catherine Yang

In another sign of an unusually wet winter in Southern California, the desert and foothills of Coachella Valley are painted a lush green, the tops of the San Jacinto Mountains dusted with a few inches of stark white snow. It is against this startlingly serene backdrop that the 2023 iteration of Desert X, a young and ambitious biennial, blossoms across the sun-kissed Fantasyland of Palm Springs. ...

Commerce and Culture
Andy Freeberg's Cheekily Captured Art-World Inequalities

by William Moreno

Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. —Susan Sontag, "On Photography" Photographer Andy Freeberg has become something of an inadvertent cultural sociologist. Born in New York City and currently residing in Northern California, he began his professional career as a photojournalist working for...

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Reviews

Liz Larner
at Regen Projects

Liz Larner’s wall works evoke the weathered, mysterious exteriors of unearthed petrified wood. Suspended layers of obsidian, sage, amber, and indigo feel almost magnetized, capable of reshaping the viewer the way magnetic forces reshape landforms. The tautly stretched...

Julia Weist
at Moskowitz Bayse

Julia Weist’s “Private Eye” is like a neo-noir where the investigator investigates themselves and invites us along. The work traffics in suburban paranoia: messages on vanity plates and yard signs asking us to believe. Today, the taboo of surveillance has faded, and...

Matthew Brannon
at David Kordansky Gallery

Through images of Satan and Darth Vader, and references to the politics of the 1970s, Matthew Brannon will unexpectedly break your heart. His show at David Kordansky Gallery mirrors the sensation of biting the pit at the center of a peach: a bitter core beyond what...

Haena Yoo
at Murmurs Gallery

Brushing my hair as a girl, I remember my hand growing heavier with each stroke as I entertained the wicked urge to unearth every girlish tendril in one fell swoop. The manic, menacing quality of Yoo's strange architecture reminds me of these early manifestations of...

Gabriel Madan
at Gattopardo

The slapdash brushwork of Gabriel Madan’s work suggests a personal but ultimately fleeting investment in his subjects. The style and content are both Pop but not too Pop - an oddball mix of semi-famous celebrities and obscure kitsch. By loosely hand-painting...

Austin Lee
at Jeffrey Deitch

Some shows suck, and some shows barely avoid sucking. Austin Lee seems capable of great things while failing by a long mile. The paintings depict brightly hued, crying, Gumby-like cartoon figures. They are clearly intended to be emotive but fail to elicit emotion; the...

Betye Saar
a Roberts Projects

Mojotech is Betye Saar's abbreviation for the "magic of technology" and the title of her large-scale installation from 1987 on view at Roberts Projects. Standing at the horizon of Saar's trailing altarpiece, I'm reminded of the language of trees and how they...

Brett Ginsburg
at Matthew Brown

This show feels like something that I would have walked in and out of quickly about twenty years ago. The paintings—hazy process-based geometric abstractions—artfully avoid the conventions of painting without actually saying anything. The pink prints look like...

Piper Bangs
at Megan Mulrooney Gallery

Juicy larvae play amongst feral grasses. Slugs laze on velvety pillows of tufted lichen. Cornucopias of ripened fruits germinate in tendrilled verdant habitats. I can’t help but delight in Piper Bangs’ paintings, resonating with my love of dirt and belief in the magic...

PEER REVIEW
Kelly Wall on Ellen Schafer

Known for her life-sized stained-glass sculptures of intertwined lawn chairs, Kelly Wall uses sculpture and time to explore perspective in different ways, turning familiar objects into something uncanny and almost disorienting. In her recent outdoor show at Various...

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