The idea that abstract painting can be a direct conduit to the unknown, or a means by which artists struggle to understand their own mortality and relationship to God, etc., is certainly not a new concept, yet "Remains," a group show at Durden and Ray, attempts to...
To be a truly outstanding ceramicist one must possess a love of nuance and detail. Kathy Butterly’s exhibition titled "The Weight of Color" at Shoshana Wayne Gallery is more than a mere testament to these attributes, but an all-engrossing visual experience not to be...
In April I received a catalog for Sotheby’s May 2015 contemporary art auction with a cover image of a cardboard Coca-Cola crate embossed in gold leaf, an artwork created by Danish artist Danh Vo. This untitled 2011 work sold at that auction on May 13 for $466,000. I...
Joanne Heyler is the founding director of The Broad museum and director and chief curator of The Broad Art Foundation. She has been Eli Broad’s principal art advisor for the past 23 years.Artillery: Have you ever disagreed with a purchasing decision, or the final...
The North is very much on our collective minds lately – especially in the wake of recent news that TransCanada has suspended its application procedure to build the 1200-mile Keystone-XL pipeline to transport tar sands-extracted oil across the U.S. Plains states to the...
Filmmaker and installation artist Maureen Selwood has turned her attention to the tactile world of sculpture and drawing in her first solo exhibition "Sounding the Note of A" at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, and are we lucky to witness it. Extrapolating on gestures of...
In many ways, Monday evening’s “Un-Private Collection” panel/conversation at Disney Hall, featuring The Broad Museum’s principal architect, Elizabeth Diller, of the Diller, Scofidio + Renfro firm of architects, and moderated by the distinguished architecture critic,...
Dear Readers, Last month, Artillery held a panel discussion on whether artists need art school. On my way to the panel, I received a phone call from a friend telling me he wouldn’t be able to make it. This friend is known for his cynicism; he added wryly that if he...
Perhaps the best example of the depth and breadth of Sandow Birk’s artistic oeuvre, along with its powerful social/political implications, is his recently completed “American Qur’an,” nine years in the making. Birk conceived of this series during the Iraq and...
Considering the degree to which historians live in the past, Amelia Jones may not be what you’d expect. Confronting cultural biases relating to the politics of identity, she seems as much social activist as art historian.Via art history, Jones speaks out against the...
On a hot August night in the Pico-Union neighborhood near Downtown Los Angeles, Nuttaphol (pronounced nut-tah-pun) Ma welcomed me to The China Outpost, the project the 43-year-old artist calls a nomadic, self-imposed sweatshop, which bleeds into his living space at...
During her childhood in provincial Nigeria, Shiri Mordechay recalls traversing roadways littered with human skulls, glimpsing live babies discarded in trash cans and being spellbound by a harrowing band of voodoo practitioners that surrounded her abode and pounded...
This September, LA gallerist Anat Ebgi launched an unheard of exhibition program committed to featuring only female artists for an entire year: a concerted effort to correct a persistent imbalance in the art world. According to Ebgi, “The exhibition program will serve...
Where do you start with a six-hour operatic extravaganza on sex, art, alchemy, reincarnation and the decline of the American auto industry, drenched in melodrama and symbology, with so many threads running through it that the original material, if any, is obscured; a...
Trying to communicate the plot of Matthew Barney’s recent, nearly six-hour opera, River of Fundament, makes me feel like the SNL character Stefon ...“The movie has everything: Fran Lebowitz, gold-leafed poop, Egyptian gods, Elaine Stritch, classic cars, Maggie...
With my eyes acting as an open lens, I turn my gaze out onto the world in all its permutations and my mind begins to organize images and methods of articulation.Borderland is an epic painting that concludes almost a year-and-a-half’s work. The images evolve from...
For years he was the bad boy of the art world, known for his sawn-in-half cows, his pickled sharks and his diamond-encrusted skull that cost as much as the national debt of a small third world country. There were also the medicine cabinets full of pills and surgical...
Many collectors are the most influential people you’ve never heard of. Not so Stefan Simchowitz, the art collector who has been dubbed the “art world’s patron Satan” (New York Times Magazine), “the greatest art-flipper of them all” and “a Sith Lord from the...
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