Like unruly creatures, Dona Nelson's double-sided paintings defy convention; they stand free, hang from ceilings and incorporate quotidian materials in bizarre ways. Titled "Painting the Magic Mountain" in wry reference to Thomas Mann's 1924 novel, this show contains...
Installations and immersive experiences were everywhere this weekend, with the opening of CA 101 2019 starting things out on Friday. Yes, beautiful paintings, photographs and sculptural pieces were present too as gallerygoers took in the bright orange sunset at the...
Moffat Takadiwa mines Zimbabwe's landfills for materials. These landfills contain boundless amounts of plastic trash which Takadiwa collects, cleans, sorts and then uses in the creation of his magnificent assemblages. Prominent in his woven wall-based works are bottle...
Informed by her religious upbringing and her love of Renaissance painting, Naudline Pierre re-interprets devotional painting traditions with maverick imaginativeness, devising phantasmagoric scenes where humanoid figures radiate colorful nimbi and commune with winged...
“Hey, I thought this thing started at 6 o'clock?” Yeah, so did everyone else. As the time neared 6:20, variations of this conversation could be heard throughout the main foyer of the Hammer where many eager (read impatient) gallerygoers and who’s who stood around...
An artist’s artist is one who has garnered respect and notoriety not only from curators, collectors, dealers but also their fellow artist. And I could not but use this particular phrase repetitiously in the lead up to the opening of Sayre Gomez’s solo exhibition at...
Disruption! Art and the Prison Industrial Complex, a group exhibition currently on view at Pitzer College Art Galleries, brings together artists directly impacted by the prison system and those that address it in their work. Curated by multidisciplinary artist,...
It's difficult for paintings of female nudes in bucolic landscapes to transcend historic tropes of voyeuristic escapism, but Deborah Brown succeeds in positing hers as self-reflective meditations on contemporary femininity. The 11 paintings in her show at The Lodge...
If, as John Berger writes, “Oil painting… is a celebration of private property”, then Street Art is the equally joyous appreciation of public property. This difference is due to the nature of the work and their contrasting environments: Graffiti beats the streets...
After success and critical acclaim, Philip Guston somehow bravely abandoned his signature style. His transition from abstract expressionist to neo-expressionist (before there was such a category) was heretical. In ab-ex lockstep he had been part of the American...
In tandem shows at Roberts Projects, two figurative painters' allusions to contemporary anomie are animated by skeptical drollness. Celeste Rapone's bloated female protagonists contort and distend as though awkwardly striving to fill the expansive canvases they...
After a slight summer slumber, the LA art scene has officially turned the heat back on. This week I had the absolute pleasure of spending my Thursday morning in the LA Arts District at Hauser & Wirth for their press preview and breakfast featuring the work of...
A wildly busy night of openings marked the first night of the fall art season in Los Angeles, with terrific new shows running from the west side to the east. On Thursday in San Pedro, a terrific combo of poetry and art took over Michael Stearns Gallery, while a...
Offal, a group exhibition featuring 45 Los Angeles-based contemporary artists at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, works at finding how the metaphor of offal (which usually describes the parts of an animal that are discarded and not eaten) could be turned into a...
Dark humor pervades provocative works by Jesse Draxler, Jordan Weber and Mark Mulroney in "Don't Just Do Something, Sit There" at NO Gallery. These artists hail from different regions yet overlap in their hard-bitten manners of exploring mortality and contemporary...
Last Saturday, the hottest gallery opening taking place was at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles for the opening of Judy Chicago: Los Angeles. This exhibition presents a largely unseen body of early work, reminding us that about 50 years ago Chicago spent the good part of a...
During these last summer weeks, the LA heat gets to us all, making it essential to take a little breather. As a result, ’tis the season the LA art world slows, but honestly, the slight hiatus in the usually jam-packed agenda of openings was a nice reprieve, as I was...
At Marc Selwyn a year ago, "Jay DeFeo: The Texture of Color" included small paintings on paper from 1982-86. Those works imparted an inventive sense of discovery while also showcasing the artist's formidable expressive talent. The same is true for her current show,...
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