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Tag: David Kordansky Gallery
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Mary Weatherford
at David Kordansky GalleryTwo big rooms of Mary Weatherford’s prodigious wall works still aren’t enough space to contain the mesmerizing views the artist generously presents in “The Surrealist” exhibition, which is a bold, seductive reminder of painting’s emotional power and material possibilities. Neon tubes, starfish, and coral press against luminous, amorphous, and almost galactic color fields in works that range from the intimate to the monumental. The artist’s deep commitment to pigment gives the surfaces a glowing, almost bodily presence. Her best paintings here—typically the largest—are both dreamy and visceral, undulating between clarity and mystery without fail. The show feels like an artist in full command of her language, unfolding history, memory, and matter into art that is formally elegant, unapologetically personal, and very much alive.
Mary Weatherford: The Surrealist
David Kordansky Gallery
5130 W. Edgewood Pl.,
Los Angeles, CA 90019
On view through June 28th, 2025 -
BEST IN SHOW: ARTILLERY 2023 TOP TEN
Breathless is not always an indication of on-coming medical crisis or pathology. Events (including cultural events) can stop us short or knock the wind out of us. And although the experience may be more common at live music events, it happens in galleries and museums, too. But at the close of 2023, the breathlessness we may have experienced intermittently in galleries blurs with a breathlessness we now encounter on an almost daily basis. The dark days of Fall 2023 are giving way to a spectral winter at the start of a political year where it seems as if the entire planet hangs in the balance.
Whether or not we saw this darkness specifically in work exhibited in L.A.’s galleries and museums, there was a great deal that reflected the bleak poetry of a planet and biosphere on the brink of catastrophe; a reflection of the earth’s generosity and a sense of irretrievable loss beneath it; the reflection of humankind confronting one another—alternately frightened, fascinated, and repulsed. In the meantime, L.A.’s galleries continue to burgeon and thrive. Galleries are now as strong as the artists they represent—reflected in the fact that some of the best shows of the year were group shows. The same might be said of its museums—and one show and one museum in particular. Closing out a year of stellar exhibitions, the Hammer Museum’s 2023 Made In L.A. biennial was perhaps its strongest ever. As Ann Philbin prepares to close out her tenure as Director, the L.A. contemporary art community owes her a tremendous debt of gratitude.
Max Hooper Schneider, Falling Angel (2023) Aircraft wreckage, fluorescent light tubes, Tesla coils, vintage neon signs, chains, crushed concrete, mixed media fiberglass pond, microcontroller, 156 x 99 x 162 inches (396.5 x 251.5 x 411.5 cm.). Courtesy François Ghebaly Gallery. Max Hooper Schneider — Falling Angels
François Ghebaly Gallery
May 6, – June 20, 2023Here’s a riddle: how many Lucifers does it take to crash a planet? The title carried a whiff of Milton’s Paradise Lost brimstone, and the exhibition’s drama fully measured up to it. The Lucifers crash, proliferate and burrow down into Schneider’s visionary lab and landscapes that many of us who have followed Schneider’s career over the last decade might have seen as nothing less than a promise fulfilled.
Alice Neel, Nancy Greene, c. 1965; oil on canvas, 47 1/2 x 37 3/8 x 2 inches (120.7 x 94.9 x 5.1 cm.) © Alice Neel, Courtesy BLUM. “Pictures Girls Make”: Portraitures — curated by Alison M. Gingeras
Blum & Poe (now BLUM)
July 2, – October 21, 2023A breathtakingly expansive survey of portraiture (from the mid-19th century to the present), Gingeras both recontextualized and redefined its domain in an exhibition that would have felt at home at the Met. “Portraits are pictures people make,” she declares definitively, embracing not simply the flux of personal, sexual, racial, ethnic or cultural identity, but an expanded notion of how this can be represented—entering not merely other worlds, but the shadow selves and lives within those worlds.
Martine Syms, The Fool, 2021; Laser-cut cardboard, Orafol vinyl with permanent adhesive and tape; digital video, color with sound, 4:11 min; 77.5 x 125.7 x 15.2 cm. © Martine Syms, Courtesy Sprüth Magers. Martine Syms — Loser Back Home
Sprüth Magers – Los Angeles
June 2, – August 26, 2023Given the timing, one could almost be excused for thinking Syms planned all along to pull the rug out from beneath what would become the summer’s blockbuster commercial film releases—which coincidentally navigated a similarly fraught domain of self, identity, and something that bore some resemblance to the ‘dysplacement’—the geography of self, its skewed nexus with place, and their continuous decoding, deconstruction, and reconstruction at the heart of her sprawling exhibition. (Or rejection: we might well want to burn it all down). Whether fragile domicile, the skin we inhabit, or merely the point our games come full circle—Syms’ ‘home’ is never less unsettling than the world erupting around it.
Mai-Thu Perret, She escapes the diamond pitfall and eats up the prickly thorns (2022) glazed ceramic (18 1/2 x 16 x 3 1/4 in. / 47 x 40.6 x 8.3 cm); courtesy David Kordansky Gallery. Mai-Thu Perret — Mother Sky
David Kordansky Gallery
March 18, – April 22, 2023Perret has worked in a variety of media over the years, but her affinities for ceramics have come to the fore in recent years, most recently in a residency at the CSULB Center for Contemporary Ceramics, which yielded the expansive circular wall piece at the center of this show—simultaneously a mapping (interior as well as exterior), landscape, and exegetically expressive exorcism. However central to Perret’s ‘sheltering sky’ vision, this title work could not eclipse other works in the show which evinced a similar visionary genius. Words cannot touch it, thought cannot reach it (her haiku-like title for a 2022 work)—yet somehow Perret did just that.
Martha Alf, Four Pears (1989) Verithin colored pencil on paper (22-1/4 x 30 in.) Courtesy Michael Kohn Gallery. Martha Alf: Opposites and Contradictions
Michael Kohn Gallery
June 24, – August 26, 2023Alf summarized her approach and intention: “It is about the perfection of the banal and the seriousness of the ridiculous.” This show was that and a whole lot more—really a phenomenology of perception and intention, variously influenced by Minimalism, Pop, and Fluxus, but unique and far more rigorous. She tested spatial and perceptual relationships to their limits and made magic of them. This superbly curated exhibition was nothing less than a poetics of perception.
Installation view, Barbara T. Smith: Proof, ICA-LA” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. 
The Way to Be, performed at various locations between San Francisco and Seattle, 1972. “Barbara T. Smith: The Way to Be” at The Getty. Barbara T. Smith: Proof
Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
October 7, 2023 – January 14, 2024Barbara T. Smith: The Way to Be
The Getty [Getty Research Institute] February 28, – July 16, 2023The personal is both political and cultural—need proof? Really two shows, taken in conjunction with the Getty Research Institute’s extensive archive of Smith’s documentation, Xerox art and books (or “Coffins”), photographs, objects and memorabilia, Proof, alongside The Way to Be (originally a peripatetic performance repeated in locations between San Francisco and Seattle in 1972 and now the title of her memoir), is effectively a reconstruction of the scaffolding of an artist’s life. Born out of curiosity and inquiry, the feminist second wave, Fluxus, and the frustrations of a one-time suburban homemaker in a broken relationship (a story that could be a template for Six Feet Under’s Ruth Conroy), Barbara T. Smith wrote her second, third, fourth and final acts on her body (almost literally), pioneering performance art, and assembling a body of work to stand alongside a pantheon of her peers.
Faith Ringgold, The United States of Attica (1972) offset litho. (21 5/8 × 27 3/8 in. / 55 × 69.6 cm). Faith Ringgold: A Survey
Jeffrey Deitch – Los Angeles
May 20, – August 19, 2023Summer isn’t exactly the season it used to be, and aside from being an ‘off-season’ for the commercial art world, our calendars are as likely to be taken up with disaster preparation as vacations. Deitch’s concise but surprisingly comprehensive survey—the first in L.A.—of Faith Ringgold’s ground-breaking work—an authentic protest art at its best and most impactful—was the perfect corrective, distilling the last decades’ human social and political disasters, and simultaneously dissolving distinctions between art and craft into story-telling and perhaps a kind of prayer—anticipating the disasters just around the corner.
Dike Blair, Untitled, 2020, oil on aluminum (18 x 24 in.; 45.7 x 61.cm.) Courtesy KARMA Los Angeles Dike Blair
KARMA – Los Angeles
September 16, – November 4, 2023Dike Blair’s uncannily recomposed photo snapshots rendered in various pigments and supports (in this show, mostly oil on aluminum) remind us of something about the way life actually unfolds, how we remember it, and how we piece it back together. It’s a flash that’s a shadow—or that we might be a little too comfortable relegating to the shadows. It’s about moments and pictures that don’t necessarily tell a story—the interstitial, the in-between, but somehow indelible. This is an art of imagery that doesn’t flinch from banality, yet remains luminous, even incandescent.
Soumya Netrabile, The Water Hole (2023); oil on canvas (72 x 86 in. / 182.9 x 218.4 cm.) Courtesy Anat Ebgi Soumya Netrabile: Between past and present / Between appearance and memory
Anat Ebgi – Wilshire Boulevard
September 16, – October 21, 2023We’re spoiled for great painting in Los Angeles of the 2020s, and for that reason we’re impelled toward making ever more expansive, almost capricious demands on it. But beyond the formal persuasion of the masterpiece that will not be denied is the delight of being taken by surprise—which is what really keeps us coming back. Nor is it necessarily about something entirely new. (The shock of a recovered memory may be sufficient.) Netrabile has her finger precisely on this pulse—recovering a space, a landscape, its features and objects, but reconstructing it without inhibition; retracing steps, but also reinventing her trajectory through it—committing the memory to dream. That approach extended to her palette throughout this show, which recalled Post-Impressionists from Bonnard to early Matisse. Hard to imagine recovering that mythic ‘bonheur de vivre’ anytime soon, but it was alive in this show—and (no doubt) Netrabile’s imagination.
Angeline Rivas, Temporal Narcosis (2023) Acrylic on canvas (36 x 48 in. / 91.44 x 121.92 cm.) Courtesy Chris Sharp Gallery. Angeline Rivas — MKUltramarine
Chris Sharp Gallery
June 24 – July 29, 2023The intersection of memory and magic (or at least its invocation) is a complicated, even treacherous domain. I never saw the Joseph Sorrentino film, MK Ultra (2022—although Rivas’s show prompted me to look it up on-line), but I’ve read Philip Agee and listened to a lot of Frank Zappa’s music, which will probably suffice. With airbrush and fluorescent gradients of pinks, blues, greens, and all those colors you thought were liquid sunshine, but were actually just a grease puddle, Rivas channeled the visual dynamic of Kenny Scharf, the spirit of Judy Chicago, a Guimard-nouveau whiplash frenzy and that five-alarm fire where the transcendental gives way to sheer chaos in the most auspicious solo debut of the year.
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ARTILLERY 2022 TOP TEN
There has never been a year in Los Angeles—certainly not in this century, more probably the last 30 years—when our artists haven’t delivered something surprising, extraordinary, something to change the way we talk and think about and look at the world. This year was no different—but somehow it felt more urgent; and on one level or another it was. We’re in trouble. The biosphere continues to collapse catastrophically. An era of trans-national and global migrations is upon us. Throughout the West, our constitutional democratic republics are under threat. Autocrats rain death and destruction upon neighboring states far and wide pursuing strategic dominance and sheer psychopathic fantasy.
Both individually and institutionally, we’re more demanding in recent years simply because the stakes are so much higher. Yet in one show after another, we could see artists peering through this twilight fog, cracking the codes of our cultural pathologies, navigating an evolving semiotic landscape to show us something new—a way of looking, seeing, listening, experiencing or understanding something; or simply drawing our attention to the extraordinary in plain view.
Kaari Upson, Kris’s Dollhouse (detail), © The Art Trust created under Kaari Upson Trust. Courtesy of Sprüth Magers Kaari Upson – never, never ever, never in my life, never in all my born days, never in all my life, never
Sprüth Magers – Los Angeles
August 4, – October 15, 2022In a video performance that constitutes part of the work, Kris’ Dollhouse (2017-19), Upson (in heavy, mask-like maquillage) guides us through portions of her over-scale domestic ‘dollhouse’ interior, accompanied by ‘Kris’ herself (similarly made-up), who bears an odd resemblance to Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. I’m sure it wasn’t, but there was something oddly fitting about one of the songwriters of songs like “Ghost Bitch” and “Society Is A Hole” getting a guided tour of a place she would have understood down to her bones. Upson was, among many things, a kind of necromantic theoretician of the symbiotic construction of identity, place and habitat, also their ultimate entropic decay. She understood the fantasy and violence underlying this peculiarly human cultural construction and the not-so-indelible but corrosive stain it leaves behind. This was a forever never for the death days.
Catalina Ouyang, Debt, 2022 (detail). Image courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles, and Make Room Los Angeles. Photo: Nik Massey. Catalina Ouyang – forgive everything
Night Gallery (in collaboration with Make Room Los Angeles)
November 12, 2022 – January 21, 2023The scope of Ouyang’s installation was immersive—not unlike the ‘restricted’ version of the three-body problem—the conceptual armature of the exhibition—that essentially underlies our physical existence on this planet. Video footage of dancers in flowing costumes (Syzygy, with choreography by Eloise Deluca and Lu Yim) swirled around gallery walls and scrims separating the space into three discrete zones (by way of spinning projectors), as if to simulate the ‘bodies’ in motion. Within the spaces, surreal assemblage configurations seemed to elongate and articulate moments in these trajectories—as history, allegory, legacy, both illuminating and mysterious—discrete events, yet conceivably connective tissues that may never properly join in this serious, delirious and above all, generous vision.
Wassily Kandinsky, Heavy Circles, 1927. oil on canvas 22-1/2 x 20-1/2 in. (57.2 x 52.1 cm). Norton Simon Museum, The Blue Four Galka Scheyer Collection Drawing Down the Moon
Hammer Museum
June 19, – September 11, 2022This was a show that seemed to take us completely by surprise and I almost wondered if it had been deliberately programmed to offset the grim here-and-now of its (fine) neighboring exhibition. But then this, too, was work which invoked or acknowledged an elemental struggle—this one implicated in both the shaping of the planet and its capacity to generate and sustain life. Of course the moon evokes myth and magic—and we need reminding of it at a moment when the tides have turned against us. That these exhibited treasures were drawn almost entirely from local institutions was somehow reassuring (it’s not all magic) and brought further delight.
Cy Twombly, “Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves (IV)” (detail) (2009) acrylic on canvas (267.4 x 212.4 cm.) Private collection, courtesy Gagosian Gallery and J. Paul Getty Museum. © Cy Twombly Foundation Cy Twombly: Making Past Present
J.Paul Getty Museum – Getty Center
August 2, – October 30, 2022Regardless what first drew Twombly to the Eternal City and held him there, when you come down to it, neither abstraction nor expressionism could ever be enough for him (nor would it be even for most artists labeled as such). He was pursuing a kind of free verse mythography in drawing, painting, and the kind of mark-making we once simply called graffiti, and naturally went straight to the source. Virgil was clearly an inspiration, but as we saw in this ecstatic show, he made himself his own Aeneas.
Amir Zaki, “Built in 1874, Damaged in 1889, Renovated in the 1920s X” (60 x 48-3/4 in., framed), © Amir Zaki, Courtesy of Diane Rosenstein Gallery Amir Zaki – On Being Here
Diane Rosenstein Gallery
June 4, – July 16, 2022The sea, the endless sea; the limitless horizon line; and that final jumping-off point, our perch at the shore’s edge—and how do we get from here to there, where we finally tip over the vanishing point of the planet’s curvature? There’s loneliness and longing in these brilliant bisected views of our place of (mostly imaginary) voyage out—and voyage home. (Look to the birds for clues.) The title sums it up perfectly: this is where we are.
Nancy Evans, San Joaquin Series #3, 2018-2019. Transcendent
Louis Stern Fine Arts
December 10, 2022 – January 28, 2023Anchored by stunning masterpieces by Frederick Wight and Lee Mullican, and featuring outstanding recent work by Nancy Evans, Khang Nguyen, Kymber Holt and more, curator Michael Duncan makes a persuasive case for the transcendental mode as a constant through contemporary non-objective abstraction and well beyond, embracing organic, biomorphic, and mathematical dimensions.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, GAPE, 2022. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley – GET HOME SAFE
David Kordansky Gallery
May 27, – July 1, 2022The masterpiece art encounter is, whether we realize it or not, a participatory event (which should be apparent from all of the foregoing). Not surprisingly game design (as with film, video, performance, other media) has entered the fine art domain—here integrating personal and panoramic aspects to create a simultaneously immersive and hypertextual (and textural) experience. Brathwaite-Shirley’s focus here is a very specific passage: the evening walk home, with black trans persons as her central subject. Race and gender fluidity magnify the stakes here, but also the community landscape, social markers, the manifold of individual and collective consciousness—all of which Brathwaite-Shirley has brilliantly illuminated.
Victoria Gitman, “Untitled,” 2013. Private Collection, Courtesy of François Ghebaly Gallery. Photo by by Paul Salveson. Victoria Gitman – Everything is Surface: Twenty Years of Painting
François Ghebaly Gallery
April 2, – May 2, 2022Once encountered, you can never have enough of these paintings (and drawings), these objects, these jewels. A few of them were just that in their pre-Gitman lifetimes. They draw our gaze, our desire to hold, to possess—invite us to venerate their preciousness. But more importantly they demand we linger with (in Gitman’s own words, quoted in Debra Singer’s essay on the show), the “circuits of desire” that connect our gaze with such work; furthermore, the potential disruptions of such ‘circuits.’ These are, after all, specimens, objects, facets, paintings—each one a masterpiece. This was a museum quality survey that would have been right at home at the Met.
Tala Madani, O, 2015 (detail). Image courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles. Tala Madani: Biscuits
Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) – Geffen Contemporary
September 10, 2022 – February 19, 2023There is something almost brutally frank about Tala Madani’s paintings and animations; and it’s sometimes hard to figure out how and where it starts and if it ever really comes to something we can call an end. It was apparent early on that Madani drew and painted in a particularly unfiltered way. At the same time there’s almost always something tremendously articulate about it—she’s speaking to us as directly as painting can. Beyond whatever influences one might read into her particularly fluid and more than slightly scatological style, she may be the ultimate action painter. Call them turds or ‘biscuits’ (same thing ultimately), she paints the landscape humanity has fashioned for itself
Djanira da Motta e Silva, Bahian Market, 1956. Collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Afro-Atlantic Histories
LACMA – Resnick Pavilion
December 11, 2022 – September 10, 2023This is a sprawling—not to say exhaustive (though it is exhausting)—exhibition of art depicting, describing, reflecting, agonizing, protesting, denouncing, and/or otherwise documenting humanity’s recurring impulse to subjugate fellow members of their species (distinguished by whatever status classification they can think to devise—race, culture, language, location being fairly obvious characteristics to single out—with a specific focus on Europe’s and its former colonies’ human traffic from the continent that is mother to us all) to the state of insects, and thus establishing pretty definitively that, 5,000 years of civilization notwithstanding, there’s not a whole lot to distinguish our anthills from theirs. It should be required viewing for all students over the age of 12 and the entire state of Florida.
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SHOPTALK: LA Art News
LA Gallery Migration, Museum Make-overs, and more.New York, New York!
The art market is back, and here in SoCal we’re seeing it with a slew of New York galleries moving in. Pace’s “mergence” with Kayne Griffin is official, and I hear the new signage now bears the Pace name. Sean Kelly gallery is occupying a 10,000-square-foot space on N. Highland—to open anytime now. Looking ahead, another New York mega, David Zwirner, is planning on a three-building complex at 606 N. Western, slated to open next January. Two pre-existing buildings will be renovated, with a completely new one built from ground up. They have already announced the opening exhibition—a solo by LA-based Njideka Akunyili Crosby, whom they started repping in 2018. All this will be a real game changer for LA, and maybe now collectors won’t feel the need to seasonally jet off to New York to get their art shopping in.
One gallery is actually jumping across the pond and the continent to get to us—the influential New York and
London-based gallery, Lisson, is set to open in the fall in the Sycamore District of Los Angeles in a two-story building with over 8000 sq. ft., including outdoor patio, near a number of other existing galleries. Their opening show is Carmen Herrera’s “Days of the Week.”Meanwhile our own homegrown David Kordansky Gallery is expanding east, with a New York space opening May 6, featuring an exhibition of new work by LA-based artist Lauren Halsey. “Opening David Kordansky Gallery in New York has always been part of the dream, for both me and our artists,” said Kordansky in his announcement. “I’m excited to provide a new platform for our growing program and to merge our sensibilities with the rich history and cultural trajectories of New York.” The new gallery will be located on W. 20th Street in Chelsea.
Post-renovation façade of MCASD, photo by Maha Bazzari La Jolla Museum Redux
Over the years I’ve enjoyed visiting the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) in La Jolla, but always felt there was a problem with the choppy flow. The building was born as a private home in 1916, became an art center in 1941, and went through various remodels over the decades. This time they hired world-class architect Annabelle Selldorf, currently overseeing the expansion and renovation of The Frick Collection in New York, and acquired an adjoining building to quadruple exhibition space. The result, unveiled in early April, is glorious, a contemporary art museum that feels comfortable to stroll through, designed in a way you can see everything without getting lost.
The latter is partly accomplished by a number of windows opening to the local landscapes. From the lobby you can see Prospect Street and other parts of town, from side windows you can see old bungalows, and in the rear there are many views of the seaside walk and the churning Pacific. “We decided to embrace our spectacular location on the edge of the Pacific Ocean,” said museum Director Kathryn Kanjo during the preview. “We were thrilled to take it all in,” said Selldorf. “We don’t think the windows are a distraction. It’s good to look out and be oriented.” Petite and soft-spoken, Selldorf is constantly thanking her collaborators, a refreshing departure from the egoism of many starchitects.
The elegantly spare design helps you appreciate the art, and for the first time I see what a really superb collection MCASD has. That includes the multicolor polka-dotted Kusama Yayoi pumpkin in the entrance, John Baldessari’s deadpan painting Terms Most Useful In Describing Creative Works Of Art, and Charles Gaines’ Airplanecrash Clock.
The special exhibition is “Niki de Saint Phalle in the 1960s” (through July 17), and it was a revelation. I knew of her early “shooting paintings” and of her colorful “Nana” sculptures—one of which is dancing in the center of a lower gallery. However, I was unaware of her assemblage and multi-media paintings of this period which often showed grim skyscrapers, sometimes being attacked by fighter jets and Godzilla-like creatures, and often on fire. Also included are several results of the “shooting paintings.” This is a show you may never see again, since much has been borrowed from European collections and some works are very fragile. Major kudos to the curators—Michelle White, senior curator at The Menil Collection, and Jill Dawson, curator of MCASD.
Jack Pierson, The End of the World, Twentynine Palms, High Desert Test Sites. Desert News
You know how I love an excuse to drive through the desert, and High Desert Test Sites (HDTS) has finally returned. Celebrating its 20th anniversary this latest iteration, “The Searchers” (through May 22), features nine art installations dotting the high desert region around Joshua Tree and Coachella Valley. The curator is Iwona Blazwick, director of London’s Whitechapel Gallery, who brought six artists from the East Coast and abroad, to add to the three regional artists in the mix.
Here are a few highlights, and the fact that they have stuck in my mind a week later is testament to the smart thinking that has gone into curating HDTS 2022. A work that injects some black humor into its commentary is Jack Pierson’s The End of the World, gigantic all-cap letters that loom large in the desert behind The Palms Restaurant in Twentynine Palms. They’re constructed of chipboard and painted silver, and make a great Insta grab. I have always thought that deliberately divey bar had an end-of-the-world feeling, a great place to grab a few drinks and have a few laughs before The Bomb goes off.
The two videos are really really good ones, by the way, and worth driving down some uneven dusty roads. In Harese, Erkan Özgen worked with Marine vets from the Corps’ nearby training base for a film short in which they slap their bodies, ready rifles, and flick bullet shells to a hypnotic beat. In Other Dessert Landscapes, Dana Sherwood worked with Joey’s Home Animal Rescue in Yucca Valley to provide horses for her dreamlike video, in which they nibble on lavish desserts set on outdoor tables, with a shot of humans thrown in now and then. It was captured with an infrared camera and it’s surreal—I’m still thinking about it.
Stop by Kate Lee Short’s Respite, a small building partly sunken into the ground. If you go on a day when the wind is blowing, you’ll hear a little concert, because there are pipes built into the roofline. This, like Rachel Whiteread’s cement-cast Shack I and Shack II, are pre-existing structures, but generally aren’t open to the public outside of HDTS. Other artists in the event are Dineo Seshee Bopape, Alice Channer, Gerald Clarke Jr and Paloma Varga Weisz.
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GALLERY ROUNDS: Jonas Wood
David Kordansky GalleryJonas Wood’s highly patterned and flattened paintings take up all four gallery rooms at David Kordansky Gallery. Evoking the decorative arts, their inherently “attractive” quality reminds one of a painted mosaic. Wood created this affect by using deliberate linear brushstrokes atop flattened fields of opaque colors, to create a highly ornamented painted surface. The result is work that feels more along the lines of tapestry than paintings. Although the paintings are playful in character, the stylization and methodical application remove any semblance of expressivity from the paintings, leaving no room for error and nothing at stake.
As the name of the show suggests, the content of the paintings largely focuses on “Plants and Animals” inhabiting the domestic living spaces of the bourgeoisie. The point-of-view of the paintings are from inside or outside affluent architecture. The general feeling is too comfortable and well-situated to feel voyeuristic—and ends up suggesting the social status of Wood himself. Unlike the Post-Impressionist genre that the paintings are referring to through his compositions (homage to printmaking and flattened patterned brushwork à la Gaugin or Matisse), Wood’s paintings do not feel like they are painted for fellow painters, but rather for his established collectors.
Jonas Wood, Deer and Picasso, 2019, oil and acrylic on canvas Allusions to high living and designer tastes are frequently dispersed within the pictures. Privileged pastimes are hinted at, for example the painting Deer and Picasso from 2019, feature a Picasso painting on the wall, a pet deer lounging on a wicker sofa and a SURFER magazine atop a coffee table in the foreground. In the painting Patterned Interior with Mar Vista View (2020) the painted plants are ripe, alive and full with saturated colors. The mirthful pattern of the drapery and sofa create a visual kinetic energy that buzzes above the picture plane. This painting—like many others in the show—use an opened window motif; the paintings themselves are like open windows into a fabricated LA paradise, accessible only to the happy wealthy people that will in-turn own these happy expensive paintings.
Jonas Wood: Plants and Animals
January 22 – March 5, 2022
