Art Los Angeles Contemporary
Perceive the Passion: January Ends with Heat
It might still be chilly January, but ahead of the bevy of art fairs coming to LA, January wound down with the visceral heat of passionate exhibition openings. At California State University’s Ronald H. Silverman Gallery, 60 artists presented astonishing depictions of...
Kristy Luck
Floral, terrene, celestial and human elements coalesce to form otherworldly realms in Kristy Luck's paintings suffused with mysterious symbolism. Evoking subconscious vistas, the Los Angeles artist's scenes are reminiscent of abstract landscapes by Modernist painters...
Diane Rosenstein
Diane Rosenstein Gallery’s exhibition, King Dogs Never Grow Old, curated by Brooke Wise, invites us into a display of the uncanny, rocking traditional senses of stability and instead, celebrates the nonsensical. The show’s title, borrowed from the surrealist text, Les...
Frieze Los Angeles 2020
Frieze Los Angeles is back, poised to take the city by storm once again. Its inaugural run in LA at Paramount Studios in 2019 was greeted with wild enthusiasm by art aficionados and newbies alike. One can only hope a literal storm doesn't follow in its wake as it did...
To Paint is to Love Again
Last weekend Nino Mier opened three concurrent exhibitions, the main attraction being organized by Purple Magazine editor Olivier Zahm. The questionably titled To Paint is To Love Again, exploring Zahmn’s love of painting and Instagram, mainly knowledge of...
Rain & Creativity in Dublin
Located in the heart of Dublin’s Liberties district, the seven-story Aloft Dublin City hotel stands out in a gritty neighborhood of winding residential streets and old distilleries. The Liberties (the unusual place name results from this having been the only part of...
Keep Squares Out Your Circle
Last weekend was competitive, with highly anticipated exhibitions opening across the city. Attending them all would have been challenging at best. A personal highlight being Jack Levinson’s play The Troubadour presented by OOF Books at MOCA on the occasion of the OOF...
CAAM
What is a blacksmith? Although the meaning is one who works in heavy metals that are heated in contrast to whitesmiths who beat gold or tin, experiencing the LA Blacksmith group exhibition at the California African American Museum (CAAM), guest curated by independent...
Käthe Kollwitz; Jean-François Millet
At the Getty, two exhibitions of works on paper examine process and technique while presenting disparate views of peasantry. The Getty Research Institute's "Käthe Kollwitz: Prints, Process, Politics" comprises over 50 prints, preparatory drawings and studies by...
FUNKO-DELIC
Andy Warhol predicted, “Someday, all department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores.” If that’s the case, then there’s a new museum in Hollywood that needs to be added to the list of L.A.’s tourist attractions. Funko, a company...
2020 Vision
Like wine and cheese, art and activism are a perfect fit for the LA art scene. Passionate projects made their debut to start a sizzling 2020 the first weekend of the new year. At SoLA in South LA, a powerful, wide-ranging group show included performance art,...
“The Box Project”
Enchanting objects spill from tiny containers in "The Box Project," an unconventional show of 76 artists from three countries. These artworks were not originally intended for public display; rather, they were created as part of an esoteric correspondence between three...
Matthew Marks
Distributed across the otherwise empty gallery spaces (there is nothing on the walls) are carefully placed, custom-designed wooden tables. Atop each table is a specific arrangement of artist's books by the painter Laura Owens. The presentation is inviting as the books...
Top Ten 2019 LA Shows
The LA art world has seen an exceptional year. Even as big-name artists and galleries prevail amid the booming market, previously unrecognized artists are being shown more widely than ever; and sociopolitical issues are driving much of the critical discourse. Of the...
Q&A with Toni Bentley
Toni Bentley danced with New York City Ballet for 10 years under George Balanchine and is the author of five books that include The Surrender, An Erotic Memoir, about an obsessive love affair that introduced her to sodomy, rendering the physics, paradoxes and...
In Conversation with Monica Majoli
Monica Majoli, an artist and professor of art in painting and graduate studies at UC Irvine, whose work explores sexuality and intimacy, is interviewed by art historian, Ph.D. Candidate and Provost Fellow in the Humanities at USC, William J. Simmons. WS: I’ve been...
Leigh Salgado’s Thrills & Frills
A pair of pastel-hued bikini underpants are draped across the wall. Riddled with tiny holes, the thong-thin back resembles the mesh of fishnet hose. A large lavender moth orchid hovers over the genital area, recalling the poetic similarities between labia and the...
