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Tag: abstract art
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OUTSIDE LA: Gosha Levochkin
The Hole, New YorkKicking off 2022, New York’s The Hole has debuted a solo show from Gosha Levochkin, the gallery’s first with the Russian American artist. Wild, vibrant and interminably buzzing, Last Element is rife with bright constructivist shapes, cartoonish figures and references to graffiti, comic books and Japanese animation. Levochkin’s paintings are far from narrative, yet the shapes and figures come together in dreamy scenes that invite the viewer on a trippy, electrified journey.
Welcoming the viewer are two aptly titled paintings, Up and Down (2021), that depict jumbled figures blending into and climbing on top of one another. Their brightly colored noodle arms pull thin ropes in apparently endless motion. In Up, the figures appear to be on a ladder, perhaps on a playground. Down imparts a similar feeling of play with a paper boat floating calmly in light blue water. However, despite this element of play, there is something slightly sinister about the overlapping bodies. Are they forever stuck in motion, climbing, tumbling and pulling like Sisyphus? Is the rope being dipped into the water in Down really a rope, or is it an electrical wire? This subtle tension and hint at discomfort continues throughout the show, lending every work an air of excitement, as if the scenes unfolding are about to burst into motion.
Gosha Levochkin, Down, 2021 The people in these first two paintings seem to be on a wild journey. As the show continues, they jump into environments with unidentifiable shapes and architectural elements that melt into one another. In Hybrid Power (2021), a cart carries purple-haired figures. A cord plugged into the wall is attached to a device that emits frenetic, jagged bursts of energy bouncing in various directions. Architectural features like columns are sucked into the central jumble from some unknown source. Perhaps this is another image of a figure at play, or perhaps they are hard at work with their arms frantically completing a task.
Gosha Levochkin, Found Nothing Splash, 2021 A similarly buzzing scene unfolds in Found Nothing Splash (2021), in which space and logic are fully abandoned. A large figure stands on the right and looks out onto the swirling tornado of colors and jagged lines. Additional figures appear in fragmented, confused postures, as if being sucked through the swirl. Tiny people jump around the whole composition, springing from place to place.
Installation view of Last Element, 2021 Contributing to this sense of movement and play is an audiovisual animation installed directly into the gallery wall that Levochkin made with motion graphic artist Jonny Lee. Like stepping into the virtual realm of a video game, the work features an animation of water cascading out of a large red pipe and into a bright blue current. The constant flow points to the interconnectivity of humanity, a fact that has become increasingly true with our reliance on all things digital over the last two years. Adding to the virtual feel is the audio score created by Jay Rothman, a composer and sound designer with a background in early video game music.
Whether at work or at play, the figures that weave in and out of Levochkin’s energized scenes are hard not to love. With bright colors, wild scenes and jagged lines bursting with energy, Last Element is refreshing, exciting and a welcome invitation to embrace the chaos.
Last Element is on view through February 27th, 2022 at The Hole NYC, 312 Bowery, New York 10012
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OUTSIDE LA: Helen Frankenthaler
Dulwich Picture Gallery, LondonThe woodblock prints by American painter, Frankenthaler (b. 1928) that form “Radical Beauty” at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, follow the wave of recent retrospectives highlighting overlooked 20th-century female artists such as Hilma Af Klimt and Agnes Pelton. This exhibition, much like Matisse’s The Cut-Outs, centers on a medium the artist was lesser known for but may come to be their standout and most memorable work—as I believe for Frankenthaler it should be.
The exhibition features prints created from many layers of woodblock prints, allowing for depth in the colors from the layering prints and wood textures. The color palettes resemble night skies, sunsets, how clouds look out of an airplane window. That is to say they are vast. The feeling I get throughout this exhibit is similar to being in nature with awe-striking landscapes: I tingle, get teary, and feel a little aroused.
Freefall, 1993 by Helen Frankenthaler. Photograph: © 2021 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc/ ARS, NY and DACS, London/ Tyler Graphic Ltd, Mount Kisco, NY Against the back wall in the first gallery is Freefall (1993). This large print of ocean-blue tones moves into darker hues as the piece spreads. In the lower portion of the piece, the green, peach, and yellow shapes see faint darting vertical lines emerge, making the paper look like wood. The works in this first room set the precedent for experiencing how Frankenthaler’s colors move. Guzzying, a delightful word coined by Frankenthaler to describe the technique where she sandpapers and drills into worked surfaces to achieve different effects, allows the colors to continue spreading, and add additional depth.
Madame Butterfly, 2000 by Helen Frankenthaler. Photograph: © 2021 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Some works feature the soak-stain technique commonly used in Frankenthaler’s painting to thin out paints making them more translucent and abstract. Japanese Maple (2005) sees juicy rich pinks and reds, offset with a full-moon-like blob of electric blue. A triptych composition, Madame Butterfly (2000) made in collaboration with Kenneth Tyler and Yasuyuki Shibata, is a 1 x 2m work where 102 color woodcuts have been made from 46 woodblocks. Frankenthaler cites her prints as being about ambiguity, speaking to these works not imposing an image or experience, but allowing the colors to ignite nondetermined feelings.
Installation Shot, 2021. Photograph: © 2021 Alice Cotterill for Dulwich Picture Gallery One corridor shows the development stages of prints that formed Essence Mulberry (1977). In this room are some highlights with orange and amber horizontal blocks that are reminiscent of the desert. Frankenthaler says of her woodcut prints: “they’re repeated but they’re different.” The stages of printmaking displayed—along with a video of Frankenthaler at work in her studio—provide insight into the woodblock print process without lengthy curatorial statements distracting the viewer. You are only pulled out of the works with the unavoidable reflection that comes from glass-protected wall pieces being lit up in gallery spaces.
Outside the exhibition sits Frankenthaler’s painting Feather (1979), an iridescent-toned painting contrasted with rich ambers. Shown next to Monet’s Water Lilies and Agapanthus (1923), to highlight both artists’ depictions of the transience of nature through paint, it also remarks on Frankenthaler’s overlooked body of work. “Radical Beauty” is a pleasure for those that don’t perhaps have synesthesia, but want to hear colors and feel colors.
Helen Frankenthaler: Radical Beauty
Until 18 April 2022
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The Spiritualized Landscapes of Hung Viet Nguyen
DEVOTED TO NATURE“Art is a universal language,” Hung Viet Nguyen says. “And when I came here as an immigrant, my English language was not that great. My strength was in painting. I slowly convinced people that my art is my language.”
Nguyen came to the US from Vietnam in 1982, with a background in biology and a lifelong passion for art. After making the move, he decided to make art his livelihood as well. A course in technical drawing led to a career as an illustrator and graphic artist while raising his children and pursuing his fine art. For seven years he stopped painting to experience nature both in solitude and with his family. “I absorbed the texture and the culture that nature taught me,” he says.
Pattern, color and subject all inform Nguyen’s narrative, spiritual art, the elements of which arise entirely from the artist’s personal experience and interpretation. “Artists balance what happens to them in life with their art,” he says. “When things were all good, sunshine—normal in California—my work was darker for a while, but when the pandemic hit, and it looked so bad, spirits were so down, I made my colors brighter. I wasn’t trying to escape but to balance what my art said with what was happening in the world.”
Nguyen in his studio, photo by Genie Davis; Regardless of the palette Nguyen uses, his work is always spiritual, and devoted to nature, as he himself has been since he was a child. “That is always in my mind from a young age. I had respect for trees, rocks, plants. It’s not religious, it’s spiritual in respect to everything surrounding me—after all, they’ve all been there longer than me.”
Nguyen is currently creating his fifth series of “Sacred Landscapes,” a body of work which average approximately 50 paintings per series. He viewed the cycle of nature through four previous series, titled “Cruelly Go Round;” “Coastal Sensibilities,” which focused on the sea; “Myscape,” referring to his personal landscape; and a more abstract series, “Symphony.”
“What led me to ‘Sacred Landscapes,’ was that we live in a city. I need to live here to work, to sell. But nature is a counterbalance. When I need to, I go to the beach or the trail. I call it going to the temple. Nature to me is closer to God than [I am] in a church.” He often travels the country and abroad to experience nature, with two areas in California most special to him, the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest near Bishop, and the Palos Verdes Peninsula near LA.
From series, “Sacred Landscape V,” #27, 11” x 14″. Inspired in part by Asian scroll paintings, highly textured, intricately detailed and visually immersive, Nguyen’s work is created by both palette knife and brush. He runs through so many palette knives that he has collected the used ones on a long chain that hangs from the ceiling of his studio. “I wear out the stainless-steel painting on canvas, that’s how much I use them. But I also use the brush when I want to create something more fluid.” He explains further, “For me the texture comes first, it’s part of my pattern. It can create anything, like a mosaic. When I am out in nature, I look, and I think, I can match that surface, I can recreate that. I think when you have a language, you have an alphabet. And with that alphabet, you can make anything, say anything, good or bad. When I am lucky, I can use my language well, and things like texture turn out as they should, smooth, or soft, or hard.”
Nguyen also sometimes incorporates actual words in his work. On his large-scale (48 x 84 inches) Sacred Landscape V, #32, his wife’s name and mother’s name are partially revealed within the grassy areas of the vast painting. “My wife understands me and lets me have the freedom to create. I also wrote in this piece ‘into nature, open out senses, feeling/seeing, gentle and dangerous magnificent, ask no more, common, extraordinary.’” The work itself is all that. To the left, a clear lake surrounded by a meadow, behind which a glacier rises, slipping into the sea; a steep, vertical volcano with hot lava still seething inside takes up the middle section; another volcano appears to have finished its act of tumultuous creation and adjoins a blissful series of waterfalls, ocean, and another lake around which two small human figures are poised under a rich burnt-orange sky. Both dream and fable, fairy tale and Adam and Eve–Biblical, this work is not just an alphabet of language but an entire novel.
From series, “Sacred Landscape V,” #36, 84” x 48″. While Nguyen doesn’t specifically see his Vietnamese heritage in his work, he realizes that “my painting looks different than Western painting in some ways,” in that he doesn’t work with perspective. “I create space that isn’t restricting. You can look down or up, as you do when you are in nature.”
Oil on panel, his large vertical work Sacred Landscapes V, #36 features a cavernous volcano, visually twinned with a cascading waterfall spilling into the sea; some smaller panel pieces such as Sacred Landscapes V, #27 feature glacial forms and sea, with the glacier cracking into the ocean; Sacred Landscapes V, #30 is a beautiful, sinuous tree. From an earlier series, Sacred Landscapes IV, #40, gives viewers a dark and transcendent night sky, with a mystical circle suspended above grey hills. In the foreground, a small figure and his horse cross this mysterious landscape.
His subjects in nature are limitless. “Nature taught me my style, which comes from a pattern,” he says. “I am just creating the language; it is a journey of discovery. I think I am going to keep painting for a very long time. I haven’t seen anything that limits me, yet. Sometimes a new element comes up, right now that has been volcanos.”
From series, “Sacred Landscape IV,” #40, 12” x 12″. On days that his studio is too hot or cold, the artist has begun doing smaller pieces in his home, using old product tins such as small metal cigar boxes. He uses both inside panels to create two separate small works that are linked together. In one such piece, Stars Grazing, a couple lie on the grass, looking up on one side. On the opposite side, a filament of stars is strung. To create these he uses pencil, ink, watercolor and varnish. “I use different kinds of varnish—some look old, with a lot of crackle in them. That is something I’m experimenting with.”
Nguyen is prolific and sells approximately 50% of his work. “When you sell, it stimulates you to work harder. Picasso once said he was a good collector of his own work,” he laughs. “It isn’t about selling for me though. I can’t control that. If I work honestly, I satisfy myself, and I believe that if you do honest work, the work will find a way to get out there. If my work is good but no one sees it, they don’t know it is there.”
See Nguyen’s work in March 2022, at the Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum at California State University Long Beach.
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Shoptalk: LA Art News
Art Fairs, Breakout Artists, and More.On a Roll
LA artist Sandy Rodriguez is having a very good year—her work is currently in a solo show, “Sandy Rodriguez in Isolation” (through April 17), at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, TX, plus she’s part of two major exhibitions in the LA area, “Borderlands” at the Huntington Museum (through fall 2022) and “Mixpantli: Contemporary Echoes” (through June 12) at LACMA.
I love the fact that everything she uses to make her work is carefully considered and contributes to the meaning of the work. For “Borderlands” she created a monumental 8’x8’ map of greater Los Angeles which mines deeper histories of the land. That map—YOU ARE HERE / Tovaangar / El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Porciúncula /Los Angeles—shows topography, flora and fauna, language and stewardship over time. This work, like much of her oeuvre, is on amate paper, made by a hand-process that predates the Conquest, or the coming of the Spanish to the Americas. It is made from tree bark in a traditional manner involving being pounded by lava rock to bind the fibers. “At the time of the Conquest, it became illegal to make this paper or work on this paper,” she says on a museum video. “If it’s outlaw paper, I’m going to use this paper and tell that story on this sacred paper.” Rodriguez also uses pigments that are mineral and earth-based—in the gallery, there’s a showcase featuring the pigments she uses.
The solo at the Amon Carter features 30 new works-on-paper she created during her stay at the Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency. It was during a turbulent time of COVID rising and nationwide demonstrations against police brutality, and she looked to the natural world around her to guide her. Studying and collecting native plants, she incorporated them as raw material for this series, which includes landscapes, maps, scenes of protests, and botanical studies. A big congratulations, Sandy!
Fairs Bouncing Back After Pause
Frieze returns to Los Angeles after a pause last year due to you know what. This time (February 17–20) it’s bound for a new location next to the Beverly Hilton, in a new structure designed by Kulapat Yantrasast and his firm wHY, which created the white tent at previous Frieze LA on the Paramount lot. Leading the return is Christine Messineo, newly appointed director of Frieze LA and New York, with the LA edition featuring over 100 galleries from 17 countries. Also new will be a public art component, Frieze Sculpture Beverly Hills, in Beverly Gardens park, with support from the city of Beverly Hills.
Among the galleries at the main event will be 38 LA-based galleries—(the usual suspects): Blum & Poe, Jeffrey Deitch, Gagosian, David Kordansky, L.A. Louver, Regen Projects and Various Small Fires (VSF). They will be joined by first-timers Bortolami, Sean Kelly and Galerie Lelong & Co., as well as New York returnees Paula Cooper, Gladstone, Marian Goodman, Gallery Hyundai, Pace, Maureen Thaddaeus Ropac, and David Zwirner. So, okay, a pretty heavy-duty array. Given the rather riotous success of Art Basel Miami in early December, Frieze should also benefit from people eager to gawk and gab and buy gobs of art.
Looks like other art fairs will also sprout around that time, including Felix returning to the Roosevelt Hotel, also February 17–20, and a new fair, the Clio Art Fair for “independent artists,” at the Naked Eye Studio on the same weekend. No news on any dates for Art Los Angeles Contemporary, which made an inspired move to the Hollywood Athletic Club in 2020. Apparently, that cost a bundle to launch.
Meanwhile, Intersect comes to Palm Springs Feb. 10–13, with exhibitors, talks and programming at the Palm Springs Convention Center and some other desert locations. Specifics aren’t out yet as of this writing, but in a brief chat director Becca Hoffman conveyed their commitment to building community and connecting with the local art ecology. Hoffman was formerly director of The Outsider Art Fair. Intersect has already debuted in Aspen and Chicago.
At the start of the year the long-running Los Angeles Art Show returns to the LA Convention Center, January 19–23, after getting off-schedule in 2021 with a summertime session. This show covers both modern and contemporary art, and is making concerted efforts to be more relevant with special programming, this year concentrating on the global environment. The new direction is being led by Kassandra Voyagis. “With a focus on the global effects of humankind on the planet,” she said in a press release, “It is the right time to present voices from around the world, and I am excited to facilitate this wonderful event.”
Photo by Libby Lumpkin. We Love You, Dave!
Dave Hickey (1938–2021)
Dave Hickey, who died this past November, at 82 (about a month to the day this is being composed), was in many ways a godfather to Artillery, friendly with its editor and several of its contributors, but more importantly, in his intellectual scope, irreverence, eclecticism and unflagging pursuit of fresh beauties in every medium and across a richly diverse cultural terrain, a guiding critical spirit. Long after the Cool School’s halcyon days (he wrote the catalog essay for Ed Ruscha’s SFMOMA 1982, I Don’t Want No Retrospective) and his years on the rock ‘n’ roll caravan—including songwriting in Nashville, writing for Rolling Stone, and backing up Marshall Chapman’s rhythm section—his essays for LA’s Art Issues tore a swath through the domain of art and cultural criticism as wide and as glittering as the Vegas Strip. His epochal 2001 SITE Santa Fe biennial, “Beau Monde” (which I covered at the behest of Artillery’s editor), was, among other things, a material and architectural dramatization of the art conversation he had himself ignited, and which not so incidentally foregrounded Los Angeles as an art and creative capital. It gives us no small joy to carry his legacy—“bad acting and wrong-thinking;… courageously silly and frivolous;… enthusiastic, noisy;… seductive, destructive”—forward, because (as he said in the same essay), “art doesn’t matter. What matters is how things look and the way we look at them in a democracy …—as a forum of contested values where we vote on the construction and constituency of the visible world.” —Ezrha Jean Black
Other News
One of the top five art books of the year cited by NPR’s Heller McAlpin is “Master of the Midcentury: The Architecture of William F. Cody,” authored by Catherine Cody, Jo Lauria and Don Choi. Cody helped create the sleek postwar Palm Springs look and designed a number of celebrated buildings still standing, including the Del Marcos Hotel and the Palm Springs Public Library. Yes, you can stay at the Del Marcos and enjoy the updated Mid-century furnishings and the central swimming pool outside your door. Catherine Cody is his daughter. Other books on the list are “Woman Made: Great Women Designers,” “Bird: Exploring the Winged World, “The Unwinding: and other dreamings,” and “William Morris.”
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Pick of the Week: Lindsay August-Salazar
Lowell Ryan ProjectsFew grasp the power of language to be visually enthralling while expanding our consciousnesses as well as Lindsay August-Salazar, whose solo show at Lowell Ryan Projects, “There’s No Place Like No Place” brings these questions to the forefront. Employing vibrant color schemes punctuated by a symbolic lexicon of the artist’s own invention, August-Salazar challenges us to recall a poetic past and make our own meaning in the face of our ever-changing mediascape.
The exhibition opens with six large-scale, burlap-grounded paintings that showcase August-Salazar’s fearless command of color and energetic brushwork. In her animated compositions that appear to levitate off the canvas, every rhythmic swath, gesture, and shape are as cohesive and captivating as recorded choreography — vestiges of her background as a hip-hop dancer.
The paintings also feel distinctly collage-like in their amalgamation of symbols and use of cutouts that tease fragments of coarse burlap beneath the glib acrylic. In referencing collage, August-Salazar reiterates the sheer multitude of histories, meanings, and interpretations that characterize her exploration.
Up in the sun-soaked loft, August-Salazar displays a suite of 47 unframed works on paper that echo the vibrancy and linguistic themes of her paintings, furthering them through repetition. I felt like I was entering a secret playroom or ancillary studio space brimming with insights to her creative process or possibly long-awaited clues for translation. Hanging gracefully off the wall, these delicate works introduce an element of levity and evoke a sense of childish whimsy and wonder to complement the palpable intensity of the paintings below.
At every turn, certain symbols of August-Salazar’s visual vocabulary (which she fittingly titles Abstract Character Copy) jump out — a smattering of English letters, a trio of hieroglyphics, a half-crown, an arc of yellow reminiscent of a Warhol banana. Each individual element of her wide array of visual signs felt vaguely familiar yet entirely unprecedented, like faces I’d seen in a dream that I yearned to recognize.
Through the eccentricity and indefinability of her visual vocabulary, August-Salazar conceals more than she reveals and offers little more than a sparing understanding of a hidden message only she knows. She thereby creates the uncanny feeling of walking through her own personal utopia — one that I was overjoyed to have been invited into even though I didn’t speak the language.
Lowell Ryan Projects
4619 W. Washington Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90016
Thru Dec. 11th, 2021 -
OUTSIDE LA: Jennifer Bartlett
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, PAVarious sizes of square panels mostly covered with dots with groups of parallel lines and occasional fields of paint line the gallery walls of Locks Gallery in Jennifer Bartlett’s installation “Recitative”—its title derived from a rhythmic free form vocal style of 16th-century Florence.Vertical groups of threes begin the left-to-right read and as the gaze traverses the arrangement, resonances build. The characteristic viscosity of enamel paint allows for different thicknesses and therefore different hues of blues, reds, yellows, greens—even as the palette expands. There is a rhythmic build as the eye tracks back and forth throughout the pattern overall, with single panels that emerge causing a momentary stoppage. The mix of making a process-based sequence that follows a rule-based pattern is highly satisfying to the eye and the mind. Bartlett utilizes this trope to create this monumental work that projects simplicity in everything except its reverberations.
Dot matrices are delineated in grids with only the variation of paint to distinguish one from the other. Elsewhere dots are placed within dots complicating the pattern and becoming targets. Dots move and in doing so become lines that create tangles that seem to be without preplanning. Finally, in one last explosion, the dots become a thick black line that marks off a very irregular squiggle drawn out across 24 overlapping plates. Clearly both the musical inspiration and the reductivist conceptual patterning lean into something other than just a process.
Installation view, 2021 Bartlett’s work with steel plates has for many years followed a specific practice. The plates are painted in enamel and then silkscreened with the grid onto which the artist deposits paint. Much of that work is done by trusting that the irregularities of enamel will create differences in tonality and even drips. The grid is light but visible and the variances from the perpendicularity are the point of this technique. Difference emerges ineluctably and watching the smaller and larger square plates as they move up and down from a single horizon acts like a graph bar moving up and down but suddenly in the left or right progression there is a clot of colored plates all adamantly disobeying the previous arrangements.
The pleasure of this work has always been the interplay between expectation and perception. There is a prelude to the development overall but soon as a viewer traverses the sections, all of the minute differences rush to the fore obscuring the predictability of the pattern. It overpowers believability just like some types of music in which a single note builds overtones and undertones simply because it’s being played over such an extended time.
Jennifer Bartlett: Recitative
Locks Gallery
October 8 – November 27, 2021
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Remarks on Color: Timid White and Bruised Sand: A Conversation
Remarks on ColorConsidering the world today, it’s no wonder you’ve begun to peel, to pull away from your respective homes, to hide from the tremors, quakes and quick-sands of the living world. We are all guilty of something. We have all fallen under at some time or other, curling in on ourselves behind the bedposts.
Bruised Sand tells Timid White: “You must learn to live like the future is a clean wide wall that could burn down at any time. You must learn to let your hair down at the center of the fire.”
Timid White whispers back in chilly admonition: “You’re one to talk with your dishwater bangs and the dirt beneath your nails. You always spend too long taking out the trash, discussing matters of import with any passing stranger who will listen, or perhaps this is your final attempt at optimism.”
Bruised Sand trembles his answer through half parted lips: “Take care, my friend. Colors like us have too many shades and more options than most, yet life on a static beige wall can kill you as the glue starts to dry and the boredom sets in. These are not admonishments so much as they are words of commiseration, living as I do, like you, against the broad and unforgiving face of these parapets.”
Timid White exhales into nothingness: “I’m sure you mean well, blanketing these rooms with a slightly brighter shade than my own, with undertones of pink and a nuance of yellow, but mind you, I hear everything, each flagrant and final confession, hurled insults, the stifled words of love blurted into a pillow, the laughter of children and the howling of a much-loved family dog. I take it all in and hold it together the way only a perfectly painted wall can do.”
A momentary pause as the house settles again into silence.
Bruised White, feeling suddenly alone and incomplete begins yet again: “You and I are not so dissimilar. We were born for the bland ineluctable moment, to hold the room together in stoic flatness, with no opinions or points of view, a reflection only of the lives that go on around us – a receptacle for longing, a backdrop for love. We’ve both been here for too long. We’ve seen it all – the requisite plate of spaghetti that inevitably finds us – vomit, blood, semen and tears. They all are laid low. They all come to us in the end, burying their faces in the crooks of our arms. . . so I opt for a truce.”
Timid White relaxes as though for the first time: “Perhaps you’re right. After all, we are doomed to stand here together forever.”
Nir Hod, The Life We Left Behind, 2018 
Marnie Weber, Bluebird of Happiness in the Fall, 2016 
Candida Alvarez, It was Dark, I could see the stars, 2019 
Rodney McMillan, Untitled (weighted), 2019 
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Dante and Virgil in Hell, 1850
Ruben Ochoa, Post Collusion, 2018 -
GALLERY ROUNDS: Leigh Salgado
Launch Gallery“As the World Turns” is an apt title for Leigh Salgado’s fourth solo exhibition at Launch Gallery. Many of the graceful works are circular, globe-like. A lush world of beauty that also evokes ideas of the circular nature of life: our annual passage around the sun, and speaks to the power of female strength in nature.
The painted, collaged, and cut-paper works are intricately mandala-like. The layers of each hand-cut paper and acrylic piece are as delicate as butterfly wings held in place by tough yet fragile spider webs.
Leigh Salgado, In & Out, 2021 Creating almost impossibly perfect patterns in medium and palette, Salgado juxtaposes the transitory nature of life and its abiding existence, and both the poignancy and power of its beauty.
Her lacy patterns are sensual and tactile, with painted elements varied in each piece. In Secret Garden, her work is almost like stained-glass, rich and deep. Be Still My Heart is more of a mosaic, with its image of an actual heart blossoming like a flower. And speaking of flowers, Heartbreaker makes muted blossoms grow around the image of a woman’s lingerie; the darker, more muted palette seems like an elegy for a femme fatale who has cast that role away. In and Out carries an autumnal color palette and reveals broken handcuffs, once again calling to mind the idea of a role or a relationship cast aside.
Leigh Salgado, Ballgown, 2021 Ballgown, with a golden background and a dress seemingly made of bubbles, appears to burst the fairy-tale-princess myth into something that doesn’t last, a temporary dream at best.
Leigh Salgado, Red, 2021 Launch Gallery,
ends November 13. -
Pick of the Week: Unseen Picasso
Norton Simon MuseumMy first review for Artillery Magazine – almost two years ago now – was for my favorite museum in southern California, The Norton Simon. I recently went back and reread that article, and I found that my own writing was, to be kind, academic. Dry as a bone, really. There’s a strong voice, but one that is far more interested in saying something than showing something. It reduces the art to a history lesson instead of elevating it to the contemporary moment. But that’s what first steps are all about, making a place to look back and see how we’ve grown. Artillery Magazine has awarded me with that opportunity, and so for my fiftieth (and final) Pick of the Week, we’re revisiting The Norton Simon Museum and their new exhibition, “Unseen Picasso.”
I don’t love Picasso. I have a hard time liking the work of artists who I feel I would’ve disliked personally. It’s why I prefer Cézanne to Gaugin, or Caillebotte to Degas. But with Picasso, it extended further than the personal; I found his work, particularly later works, to be uninspiring and disconnected. In short, I’m a Georges Braque die-hard.
But it’s time to put old biases aside and welcome a new side to Picasso – an unseen side, if you will. Through this exhibition’s collection of lesser known lithographs, prints, and linocuts, I saw the threads of Picasso’s creativity and genius manifesting around me. In Dove (1949), for example, the bird, jutting out in sharp relief from the swirling gradations of black lithographic ink, is masterful and subtly detailed. It’s gentle gaze echoes its status as a symbol of peace.
What’s special about the prints in the exhibition is not only the technical wizardry and expert use of vibrant color (as in Bacchanal with Goats and Spectator (1959)), but the nods to Picasso’s creative process. The small inscriptions, the notes to the printers, the Roman numeral dating – these signs of the artists method in the work are personal in a way that is refreshing in a Picasso. They elevate the work as they ground it, making clear the labors of creation. In this room at the Norton Simon, Picasso is no longer a titan of Modern Art, but a craftsman, one who iterates ideas and claims perfection with a decisive “bon à tirer” – ready to print.
“Unseen Picasso,” and Picasso himself, conveys that we can all as artists and people strive for nothing but growth. I am immensely grateful for my time growing as a columnist with Artillery, and I look forward to continuing to grow and forge works that I too will proudly stamp, bon à tirer.
The Norton Simon Museum
411 W. Colorado Blvd.
Pasadena, California 90232
Thru Nov. 6th, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Amoako Boafo
Roberts ProjectsIn his essay on photography entitled “The Decisive Moment,” Henri Cartier Bresson describes the intricacies of portraiture and the subject. He writes that the ideal portrait is a “true reflection of a person’s world – which is as much outside him as inside him.” We are just as much individuals as we are part of the larger whole. And while Bresson writes about photography, this lesson applies well to painting, where the artist can make far more deliberate choices as to what is reflected in the subject. The portraits of Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo in exhibition at Roberts Projects, “Singular Duality: Me Can Make We,” express complexities both internal and external in a vibrant celebration of Blackness.
Black portraiture – which has been routinely excluded from the western art historical canon – is a subject that has been by some of the greatest contemporary artists, the likes of Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald. But what sets Boafo apart is the personal and impressionistic style of his subjects. The textured brushstrokes of the skin, mixing tan, blue, and black to create a complex color gradient, point to the intense care that Boafo wields. These direct signs of the artist illustrate the time and thought with which Boafo approaches his craft.
Contrasted with these apparent brush strokes are the striking fields of color that act as garb and backdrop for the subjects. The backdrops in particular are intentionally plain, with near shadows which cause the sitters to pop off the canvas and into the room. Combined with their larger than life stature, there is an immediacy to their presence – they exude an effortless confidence and ease, and above all comfortable with their self-expression.
But there is more than ease in these subjects. In Yellow Throw Pillow (2021), we see a seated figure resting their head on their folded hands, staring past the artist in a moment of reflection. The plaintive, wistful air surrounding the work is in contrast to the joy of Red Collar (2021) or the decisiveness of Purple Shadow (2021), demonstrating Boafo’s interest in capturing the wide-range of emotion, particularly for Black Americans in this past year.
Amoako Boafo’s work is simultaneously deeply personal, reflected in the care with which he paints his subjects, and illustrative of the wide range of human experience. Boafo offers ledgers of Black experience both inside and out, the individual and the whole.
Roberts Projects
5801 Washington Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90232
Thru Nov. 6th, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Humming to the Sound of Fear
Helen J. GalleryThe Korean Peninsula is a region rooted in duality. It is a land both literally and ideologically split down the middle, a lasting result of Cold War-era proxy wars, Western imperialist action, and an on-going brutal dictatorship. And even before the interventions that created the north and south, the peninsula has long been a place of dueling characteristics. The Korean identity has been hard-fought, being constantly re-defined and altered through centuries of alternately Chinese and Japanese colonialist action. This dualistic identity is explored in Helen J Gallery’s current group exhibition of four Korean and Korean-American artists, “Humming to the Sound of Fear.”
The most immediate work upon entering the gallery is the soundscape created by YoungEun Kim. Inspired by the loudspeakers which constantly blare information across the de-militarized zone between North and South Korea, Kim creates her own speaker system. Using only the highest frequencies of famous South Korean love songs, Kim organizes a fragmented and chirping melody, reminiscent of bird calls. This creates an ambient juxtaposition between the natural and man-made, carried through in the works of the other artists.
Two in particular who carry this theme are Jae Hwan Lim and Song Sumin, painters exhibiting a wide body of work in the exhibition. Sumin’s works of acrylic on canvas capture the mountainous ranges of Korea, blanketed in thick canopies, yet streaked across in billowing clouds of smoke. In white stain (2017), we see the smoke stretch across two canvases, first appearing as benign fog until it crashes cataclysmically into the earth, revealing itself to be a missile strike. This conflation of nature and war, violence and serenity, lies at the core of many of Sumin’s works.
Lim’s examination of duality, on the other hand, lies in a simultaneously traditional and radical use of medium, as he applies traditional ink painting techniques to large sheets of plastic. The painted mountain scenes, all inspired from Mt. Kumgang, a mountain which famously acted as a reconciliatory bridge between North and South Korea until 2008. The ink paintings create a familiar mixing of natural and manmade, of new and old, and are striking reminders of the immortality not only of artistic forms but of the plastic we use every day.
Finally, we arrive at the work of Kyle Tata’s photo collage series Lookout Mountain Lab Production Notes. Diving into the archives of the US military backed film producer, Lookout Mountain Lab, Tata examines the far-reaching tendrils of war during the 20th century and the ways in which conflict and propaganda can color every aspect of life.
Across the four artists in “Humming to the Sound of Fear,” we find the myriad of ways that we interact with conflict, nature, and borders both real and psychological.
Helen J. Gallery
929 Cole Ave.
Los Angeles, California 90038
Thru Nov. 6th, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Devin B. Johnson
NicodimGrief comes in countless forms. There are as many ways to feel the peculiar sensation of loss as there are things to lose. One can lose another, something external, and just the same – or just as differently –one can lose oneself. With bereavement, there is no wrong way and there is no manual; it is intensely personal and yet universal, one of the few things that we are all assured to feel regardless of how long we live. And one a time like the present, so deeply entwined with grief, we should confront it head-on. In Nicodim’s current exhibition, “My Heart Cries, I Set Out an Offering for You,” we see how loss and grief can manifest through paintings and sculptures from stellar young artist Devin B. Johnson
What we find in Johnson’s abstracted and ethereal paintings is not loss, but the echoes of loss. We witness the people who are still here and must meet that loss. Those who lay lilies at street corners. Those who come home to empty apartments or huddled families. Those who are haunted, as we all are, by one ghost or another. These representations of loss are more striking than others because they illustrate the subtle and quiet moments that come in its wake.
The paintings utilize a sepia-toned palette, reflecting the somber emotional state induced by his paintings. They are highly textured paintings evoke sensations of rust and ash, forms of loss in their own right. Johnson’s use of mixed-media paints for his more abstracted work, along with the understated gridlines and swaths of color, pay homage to some of the great Black abstract artist whom inspire him like Torkwase Dyson and Cullen Washington Jr.
Coming off of an unintentionally extended residency at Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock, Senegal and responding to the on-going battle for civil rights occurring in the United States, Johnson’s interest in loss, grief, and memory are deeply rooted to the current moment. An unexpected word is quietly repeated through his paintings: GLORY. It’s an odd word to be associated with loss, and reminds me of a statue that recently captivated me at the Met: Antonin Mercié’s Gloria Victis, glory to the vanquished. The work, depicting the winged goddess Pheme carrying a dying French soldier, reminds one that even in the most tragic moments of loss one can find uplifting strength. Johnson’s work reminds us that only by fighting through these darkest hours can we possibly find our destined glory.
Nicodim
1700 S. Santa Fe, #160
Los Angeles, California 90021
Thru Oct. 16th, 2021
