All of Marina Stern’s work is weighty. The objects in her intensely matte, sleek oil paintings and densely packed graphite drawings receive an egalitarian touch. In contrast to often airy and delicate subjects—paper, string, and flowers—Stern’s quality of paint is...
At first, the installation in London’s Whitechapel Gallery seems childish: flimsy cardboard walls covered in forests, foliage and animals, all painted with loose brushwork, like set design the adults painted for their kids’ school play. In Candice Lin’s world of...
The Smithsonian, the nation’s cultural voice established by Congress in 1846, is under attack. Financially seeded by Englishman James Smithson, who was ostensibly enamored by the great American Experiment, it has since morphed into the world's largest museum,...
The title of this exhibition, “Disappear Here,” is a reference to Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Less Than Zero. It alludes to the reality of anonymity in a city in which fame and glamour are the reigning myths. However, the works on hand only reflect these themes in a...
“Thus time goes by,” Robert Filliou writes at the end of Whispered Art History (1963), the short document in which he declares January 17th the official birthday of art. In Filliou’s telling, art begins not with genius or mastery but with an ordinary gesture made...
At the center of “Dew Point,” the current exhibition at François Ghebaly, hangs artist Lily Clark’s Inyo (2025), a sculpture of much poetry and power. Clark suspends a large hunk of alabaster from the rafters where water drips from the rock, filling up a steel basin...
I saw the sun saved and erased at the same time. In Zoe Koke’s recent paintings, oil becomes a way of holding sun. Here oil paint behaves like a desert light fixed in place, absorbing rather than illuminating. In one of her new paintings, Rainbow (2026), the desert...
Few exhibitions make the gap between the United States and the rest of the world’s art capitals so blatant than “Sandra Vásquez de la Horra: The Awake Volcanoes” at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Pegged as the artist’s solo debut in the US, the exhibition...
R. Crumb’s “tales” (even filtered through psychedelics and cannabinoids) weren’t always so paranoid—though they were frequently calamitous. The street-hip graphic domain Crumb freely improvised during the 1960s and 1970s across densely cross-hatched black-andwhite...
I felt dizzy at mosie romney’s show “every Spiral has its law” at Sebastian Gladstone. I could chalk it up to external factors (fatigue, harsh gallery lighting), but I suspect that the work itself was the incubator of disorientation. My previous visits to the space,...
Entrusted to the sprawling Skirball Cultural Center in Brentwood by New York’s Jewish Museum, “Draw Them In, Paint Them Out” presents a handful of Philip Guston’s depictions of cowled Ku Klux Klan figures, alongside Trenton Doyle Hancock’s ambitious, mixed media...
150 years after the Civil War, it seems American art institutions are finally ready to discuss Confederate statuary. Seizing this opportunity, curator Hamza Walker (along with co-curators Bennett Simpson and Kara Walker) has gone to unusual lengths in his sprawling...
Though I grew up with pets, I’ve never taken to them. As a boy, we had a beast of a dog, Soxy. She was scary and insane, except for when my older brother could tame her long enough to let me ride her around like a pony. My mother preferred fish, silent and remote,...
You get a brief shot of Matinée, a new project space thought up by Los Angeles-based artist Andrew J. Greene, at around minute one of a video posted by a daredevil urban explorer YouTuber, Davy, titled “EXPLORING THE ‘WARNER BROS’ THEATRE IN DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES.” In...
Ah, yes, the front room at Hauser & Wirth: the room you usually walk past on the way to the better shows in the back. There’s a certain type of painting one expects here: Blue Chip filler, the type of young artists who get mentioned in Vanity Fair articles. Where...
Self-taught photographer Luis Garza began his career as a photojournalist documenting the turbulent social events of the 60s for La Raza magazine, which was a counter-balance to the prevailing conservative and often racist media narratives. His latest exhibit of 63...
Abe Odedina’s “You Give Me Fever” embodies the spirit of a universal human emotion: desire. In his Los Angeles solo debut on view at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, the architect-turned-painter considers desire with a kaleidoscopic gaze, depicting deep-seated longings for...
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