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Tag: art review
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Richard Hawkins
at GAGA & Reena SpaulingsIn typical Richard Hawkins fashion, his videos “Blood Everywhere” feature unclad male celebrities (Timothée Chalamet and Bill Skarsgård) slowly starting to rot, eyes blackening and blood gushing. Chalamet undergoes a literal “twink death,” while skipping over the actual aging process, immortalized forever in youth. These haunted characters turn into doppelgängers of their former selves. This is mirrored by footage from the film adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Both Chalamet and Skarsgård are in some regard already doppelgängers—Chalamet replicas appear at an unstoppable rate through look-alike contests, while Skarsgård and his siblings are nepo babies (a form of doppelgängerdom).
Despite a pastiche of uncanny signifiers creating a B-movie campy thrill, the true unease of these videos lies in their form rather than content. Much like a fancam, these videos feel deeply of the gay scopophilic celebrity worship internet. The videos are vertical, probably due to their production on an iPhone or iPad, and thus read as familiar, casual. Hawkins avoids the groan factor of AI. At its best, AI is a poetic collage medium creating the undead.
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Math Bass
at VielmetterReminiscent of the visual languages of midcentury graphic design, children’s book illustrations, and corporate branding, Math Bass’s paintings are unnervingly poppy. The language consists of cartoonishly pared-down symbols (alligator, cloud, speech bubble, to name a few) with a grammatical structure, but no fixed definitions, so the viewer is left to give up on interpretation. After getting past the initial hurdle of my visual associations to ubiquitous flat vector graphics, I am drawn in by the paintings’ irregularities. The edges of objects vibrate and what appears straight or smooth is wavy and hand-touched. I am also interested in the visual rhymes. Smoke, speech bubbles, and moons bounce around each other, borrowing, and taking forms, space, and modes of rendering. These paintings reward close looking—abstracted leg-like shapes shine, while the rest of the painting is matte. The audio sculpture opens up an otherwise closed vernacular, creating a phenomenological experience of oneself as shrunken in a tranquil and subsequently frightening forest, an element of fantasy that the paintings alone do not provide.
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Chase Hall
at David KordanskyThere is just something about Chase Hall’s mark-making. He covers the faces of his subjects in stylized patterns that resemble African masks before staining the cotton with coffee. The artist’s marks make a lifeguard’s flotation device resemble an African shield. Other marks in the compositions make me think of Elizabeth Catlett’s woodcuts.
Halls’ images of Black equestrians, a queer Black sunbather, Black lifeguards, and surfers give me that Black-people-in-white-spaces feeling that something is out of place. I was wondering why the Black surfers’ penises had to be on display in Malibu (2024), but I just answered my question: I’m still thinking about it, so the work is working.
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Haunting House
at Departure LoungeThe last time Jamison Edgar curated Matthew McGaughey was at Honor Fraser, where I had VR sex with the Fixer Upper stars Chip and Joanna Gaines. I wore goggles with Chip’s POV and had an unforgettable sexual experience with a creepily uncanny version of Joanna through Chip’s body. The three-person pop-up exhibition, “Haunting House,” presents this domestic saga’s next chapter: Renovation Game. Here, the house represents violent bodily renovation. The four-channel video, Reconstruction (2024), is set in a jagged drywall hole, illustrating the relationship’s violent undercurrent—a nod to The Shining’s axe scene. In the Hole Theory series, McGaughey creates flesh wounds from images of holes in interior walls, wrapping the canvasses with a translucent “skin.”
Daniel Klass Beckwith’s rug works are littered with the detritus of a domestic nightmare. These are the rugs in the home where you don’t want to stay for dinner, or the morning after. The “ick” evaporates upon discovering that the pieces of litter are actually tiny polyurethane sculptures depicting mustard squirts, spaghetti, and cigarette butts.
I have mixed feelings about the aesthetics of Alex Steven’s Justin Bieber and Heaven’s Gate-themed works. The intersection of fanaticism and capitalism brought printed Bieber blankets, brass-plated fingernails, and a diffuser with Mormon-marketed essential oil. I do appreciate the nod to Hans Bellmer’s La Poupee in the figurative wall sculpture, In Love With A Clown at the Show (2024). “Haunting House” was worth the visit, and Jamison Edgar is a curator to watch.
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Shiva Ahmadi
at Shoshana WayneA welcome break from hordes of contemporary painters retreading 60’s rear-guard aesthetics, Shiva Ahmadi is instead reminiscent of her near-contemporary Wangechi Mutu. Here are the same flowing watercolor lines radiating thick tendrils of hair, the same cosmic mother figures with lumpen, childbearing hips, the same exploration of neo-mythic wild space—except all a little more predictable and kitsch-prone, and with a yellowed hippie-dentist-office glaze. The “Pressure Cooker” series of etched and plugged kettles, standing at the crossroads of conceptual metaphor, postmodern reclamation of traditional craft (in this case, the rich history of Middle-Eastern metalwork), and feminist commentary on domestic space is slightly more promising. Slightly.Shiva Ahmadi: Tangle
Shoshana Wayne
5247 W. Adams Blvd.,
Los Angeles, CA 90016
On view through December 14th, 2024 -
Sabine Moritz
at GagosianStaggeringly reactionary paintings for a staggeringly reactionary world, Sabine Moritz serves up “lyrical abstractions” (this is a genre, not an assessment) with the warm Crayola-explosion palette of early Jasper Johns and the paint handling of a tamer and more European Cecily Brown. These surfaces positively pullulate with squirming strokes struggling to be anything more than the old-fashioned post-post-Impressionist floral smears they are, and it looks like Moritz is having a wonderful time, not least because the canvases are large enough to communicate that she is working in a very large studio somewhere. What anyone else is supposed to be getting out of this exercise is more obscure.Sabine Moritz: Frost
Gagosian
456 N. Camden Dr.,
Beverly Hills, CA 90210
On view through December 21, 2024 -
Elise Rasmussen
at Night GalleryThe history of photographers capturing the West is as storied as the mythos of manifest destiny. Elise Rasmussen steps knowingly into this lineage and subtly pushes the contemporary momentum of turning towards the sculptural, beginning to break photography’s physical confines. In Montana (2024)—she fractures the landscape before asymmetrically piecing it back together, distorting, remapping, and pushing beyond the boundaries of the original fixed frame. Water exposure dissolves the traces of trees, emulating the fires that have become commonplace in the region. The West isn’t just captured; it burns. Ultimately, the attraction in the beautiful is what is left and will be lost.
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“Actions”
at Sarah Brook GalleryWhile the connection between the works in Actions is as ambiguous as its title, the exhibition braids together three artists worth examining individually. Laurel Nakadate’s installation serves as a wall-sized shrine for bridging time and absence, with altered snapshots depicting a world where her mother and daughter coexisted. Graham Collins’s casein paintings reveal hidden complexities as shifting perspectives uncover intricate ceramic sculptures, which feels earned. In comparison, Zoe Koke’s work is charged. She interprets nostalgic memories like the golden light within a dreamy, feral field seen in Mother’s Yellow Broom, (2024). Yet her unapologetic, acute strokes also conjure something more insidious: predator and prey, chasing and fleeing those memories poised for slaughter.
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Beatrice Arraes
at Sea ViewThe song Kukukaya, which partly inspired Beatrice Arraes’s solo exhibition, speaks of a game meant for four, but “Jogo de Mesa (Table Game)” feels purposely solitary, quiet—a slow reckoning with time, where winning was never the point. Her paintings, saturated in deep hues, exist almost entirely in shadow, at times broken only where she carves into the wood panel. The act isn’t violent; it’s tender, like learning a secret, peeling flower petals. Her landscapes of Northeastern Brazil, untouched and wild, are small but pulse with raw energy beneath their stillness, turning solitude into something shared and desired.
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J. Parker Valentine
at Bel AmiThe one large abstract drawing here, wedged precisely in between the ceiling and floor, explores a relationship between geometric form and explorative mark-making. The light touch is enticing, but the sketchy linework feels too beholden to the diagonal lines and ovals as if loosely re-tracing them. The sculpture suffers a similar fate. Lassos dyed in subtle colors are arranged on a screen-like steel armature — letting the curves fall where they may. These, too, are torn between the physicality of their material and their careful presentation. The natural dynamism of
lassos happen in three dimensions—in two, they are just ropes. -
Alexander Reben
at Charlie James GalleryThe central piece here is four split-flap displays showing AI-generated text and a large HD TV displaying images based on those texts. The problem is that AI images are already familiar enough to be corny. The upscale production values do not help, and the jokey critique of high-brow art speak, aka International Art English, never lands because those are old jokes. One piece, Artificial Musings of a Null Mind, sort of works: a Terminator-like skull spouting gibberish, like SkyNet gone rogue meets MadLibs. It still feels glib, though, as if a whimsical hellmouth is amusing and not troubling.
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Eugenia P. Butler
at The BoxButler’s threadbare saffron works-on-silk line the perimeter of the back gallery, floating forward and back, filling and falling as if breathing. Suspended by invisible supports and backlit, the delicate veils with their enigmatic marks and hand-drawn symbols precipitate a feeling of reverence, a sense of encounter with that which is unknown, other. Here, the difference between presence and absence, material and mystical, is difficult to delineate, recalling Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation that spirit is merely matter “reduced to an extreme thinness. O so thin.” Sitting on the bench against the only unadorned wall during the opening reception, I watched lively clusters of people stream in from the main room and fall suddenly silent, arrested by what was and was not there.
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Shirazeh Houshiary
at Lisson GalleryHoushiary’s mesmeric abstract canvases depose our human perception of scope and scale, engaging the macro and microscopic; they connect a single breath to the breadth of the sea, carbon’s molecular structure to the structural integrity of a star. The intricate pencil markings imagine waves, auroras, and fields that undulate, spiral, expand, and contract across pigment-washed aluminum surfaces. Far from static, the nebulous aquamarine and azure forms appear amid metamorphosis; ongoing, they’re uncircumscribable, infinite, like the energetic systems they intend to invoke. This illusory effect is intensified by the inert low-lying sculpture: cerulean and teal bricks arranged in spirals that recall churning waters一if also oversized legos.
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Plugged In: Art and Electric Light
at Norton Simon MuseumGrouping art by medium is always too obvious, even when the medium in question has the pizzazz of electric light. This exhibition focuses on the years 1964-1970 but does not, otherwise, establish a clear throughline. Experiments with electric light were, indeed, popular in this period but included disparate tendencies within Pop Art, Minimalism, Neo-Dada, and early installation art. These artists all thought of electric light as one material among many. By essentializing the medium, it fails to explore the underlying threads of influence or even explain why so many artists, during this period, chose to “plug in.”
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Meg Lipke
at SHRINEThese paintings have a slight hamfistedness, which suggests distance from their alternately whimsical, mystical, Modernist, and Premodern sources. The allusions and references here—like Lipke’s interpolation of Neolithic-era petroglyphs into Kandinsky-esque painting – feel shoehorned in. The spirals, squiggles, and curlicues are more re-created than improvised, which is odd for a style that invokes the freedom of transcendental non-objective art. The single rounded corner of each shaped canvas suggests an uneasiness with painting itself, which could be the problem. Overall, these look good, but the hodgepodge of allusions feels like unnecessary baggage.
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Larry Madrigal
at NicodimWith scraped knees, tangled sheets, and yesterday’s discarded clothes strewn across the floor, Larry Madrigal’s new evocative paintings at Nicodim showcase the artist at his strongest. In moments where his fluid and textured style strives to move beyond the sexual indifference and disarray that plague contemporary life, he asks his audience: Would you stay? Could we remain in the eternally cluttered, humid rooms he depicts when love grows lackluster? If the audience can look past his sometimes clumsy attempts at humor, they will discover the insight of inverting the fable “clean sheets tell no tales” — for in this work, dirty sheets reveal the truth.
