There was plenty to see – and nosh on - at galleries in mid-city this past weekend, from new solo shows to lively group outings. At George Billis on La Cienega, three terrific solo shows offered a wide range of work. Audra Weaser’s Gathering Light created a moody,...
Sayre Gomez extracts strangeness and cultural significance from prosaic architectural facets of Southern California. The life-size paintings in his current show evoke banal intersections between commerce, fantasy and nostalgia: strip mall facades are romantically...
In his installation Vessels, Andrew Schoultz has transformed the gallery space into a fantastical and playful environment. He presents sculptures, paintings and works on paper in his signature style, using an array of concentric lines that define shapes and objects...
Few artists crisscross high-low categories as deftly as Kenny Scharf, whose whimsical work inhabits a gallery as strikingly as it does a street. Just down the road from his tire-shop mural, the exterior of Honor Fraser is currently festooned in a tacky crown of...
Guided by the energy of the growing full moon, we began our gallery excursion this weekend on Friday evening at the opening of Dark Fantasy, at UTA Artist Space. Located in the heart of Beverly Hills and established in 2016, the hyped exhibition space is one I have...
Analia Saban’s overall practice enacts recurring variations on a kind of populist materiality, in which she invents ways to explore the physical qualities of commonplace stuff like concrete, wet paint, plastics, and the entropic effects of time. She both demystifies...
At first glance and from afar, Nathaniel Mary Quinn's imagery appears to be photo-collage, but upon close viewing, the works are actually painted. What immediately comes to mind is the work of Francis Bacon, Romaire Bearden, Deborah Roberts, and the Surrealist parlor...
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...
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