Articles

THE BURDEN OF MISREPRESENTATION
Documentaries Trumped by Biopics

Artists and the art world are a source of endless fascination for the movies. They seem inherently romantic or scandalous—or both—and in the past these movies usually featured white guys such as Michelangelo, van Gogh or Jackson Pollock in postures of tragic genius. Fortunately, we’ve moved away from the Great White Male Artist trope, especially as some neglected women artists have been...

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

by Reviewed by Barbara Morris

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. ...

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Reviews

Post Human
at Jeffrey Deitch

Jeffrey Deitch reimagines his 1992 exhibition, “Post Human,” with a dialogue between the 90s works and newer ones, presenting dueling visions for the future of humanity and the self. The show is an opportunity to see Paul McCarthy's The Garden (1991-1992) and Charles...

Rema Ghuloum
at Philip Martin Gallery

This show has some of the best paintings that Rema Ghuloum has made, but that might be a problem. She’s honed this language—obsessively detailed, rainbow-hued, color field paintings—past the point of perfection. These paintings glow, but the unfinished, muddy, and...

Carter Potter
at as-is.la

Sometimes art can just be a weird, cool thing that happened one time. Like, what if you took apart a three-part sectional, stacked it vertically, and poured eight gallons of house paint through it. This is a dumb idea, but dumb stuff can be fun. With art, one plus one...

Andrew Schoultz
at Guerrero Gallery

The word trippy comes to mind here, but it might not actually apply. The quasi-mythological take on nature and the vibrating, prismatic color naturally suggest psychedelia but, overall, these are too controlled to be visionary. They feel, at times, like a collision of...

Austin Lee
at Jeffrey Deitch

Austin Lee’s haunting soft-focus paintings are what I imagine my nightmares would look like if rendered in claymation and run through an AI algorithm. The artist’s digital/analog hybrids are creepy—a good kind of creepy, my kind of creepy. In the video Starers (2024),...

“signifying the impossible song”
at Southern Guild

At the entrance of the gallery, viewers are confronted by a massive wall work by Moffat Takdiwa, bhiro ne bepa (pen and paper) (2023), constructed from the detritus of late-stage capitalism and post-colonialist society. The artist embraces the texture and materiality...

Becky Tucker
at Steve Turner

I love seeing an artist push the boundaries of the medium. Becky Tucker does exactly that with stoneware creations that are —FIRE. They look like Clive Barker created the Cenobites from Hellraiser in a kiln lit by hell’s inferno. The most imposing pieces are a trio of...

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...

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