Gallery
SIGHTS UNSCENE
Shoptalk: LA Art News Art Fairs, Breakout Artists, and More.
On a Roll LA artist Sandy Rodriguez is having a very good year—her work is currently in a solo show, “Sandy Rodriguez in Isolation” (through April 17), at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, TX, plus she’s part of two major exhibitions in the LA...
ASK BABS BABY STEPS, BACK TO NORMALCY
Dear Babs, Back in the pre-Covid days, I didn’t mind going to art openings and events; they weren’t my favorite thing, but I knew it was essential to show up and meet people. Now, after a year of not going out, I find these activities next to impossible to endure. I’m...
Top 10 Picks of 2021
I resisted compiling this list (the limitations of which are obvious); but then thought: “Wait! In this awkward year of slow emergence from a pandemic that may never really be over, how many really great shows could there actually be?” Until, as I went over the shows...
Remarks on Color: Recalcitrant Red January's Hue
Recalcitrant Red has gone on strike once and for all, having shirked his usual duties which include the setting of campfires, blood drives, Naugahyde sex parties, riots and any activity where the devil is set to make an appearance. Recalcitrant Red has turned his back...
OUTSIDE LA: Jasper Johns Philadelphia Museum of Art
As the room unfolds before a viewer’s eyes there is a veritable procession of numbers going from one to nine through all the gyrations of being outlined, filled in or partially obscured. It is as though the sequence of this set of well-known forms is taken...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Jeffrey Deitch Group Show Curated by Kehinde Wiley
Born in 1935 and raised by sharecroppers during an era when rural Alabama was segregated, Simmie Knox persevered by making history in 2004 as the first Black artist to have his work selected for the official Whitehouse portrait collection—his rendition of former...
OUTSIDE LA: Jennifer Bartlett Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
Various sizes of square panels mostly covered with dots with groups of parallel lines and occasional fields of paint line the gallery walls of Locks Gallery in Jennifer Bartlett's installation "Recitative"—its title derived from a rhythmic free form vocal style of...
Bennett Roberts It’s About Time
Back in 2006, I approached Bennett Roberts at his gallery on Wilshire Boulevard with a bit of chagrin. The LA art dealer had always been nothing but nice, helpful and accommodating to me as a person and as an arts writer. So my heart was heavy when I had to break it...
Ilona Szwarc Reclaiming the History of Breasts
Ilona Szwarc is a Polish-American artist based in Los Angeles. Her latest show, “Virgin Soap” at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, introduces sculpture alongside her photography, documenting herself casting a model’s torso in silicone and plaster. Other recent LA exhibitions...
More Fireworks for MOCA Art Brief
One of the most memorable events at MOCA occurred when Chinese-American artist Cai Guo-Qiang exploded gunpowder from an exterior wall of the Geffen Contemporary just after sunset, setting off blinding and spectacular explosions before a huge crowd unprepared for such...
Things Art Should Be Doing Decoder
Maggie West took over a large, dark space somewhere north of Frogtown last week and filled it with massive images of flowers, pulsating time-lapse photographed in UV light. The colors have weird harmonies: bad-acid Disney-villain purples and magentas, alien and dreamy...
SIGHTS UNSCENE Artist Ewedrt Hilgemann’s Sculpture Implosion Event, Royale Projects, Los Angeles, 2017
GALLERY ROUNDS: Tiffany Alfonseca The Mistake Room, Los Angeles
The two dozen or so paintings Bronx-based artist Tiffany Alfonseca made during a summer residency at the Mistake Room not only represent a kind of reimagined family photo album, but are intentionally rendered with fidelity to those source materials and their awkward...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Louise Nevelson Kayne Griffin
Fragments of paper, cardboard, wire and foil have all been carefully orchestrated into a space that seems to float seamlessly and coalesce into a compelling quasi-geometric composition in “Collages 1957–1982” by Louise Nevelson. On closer inspection, it becomes clear...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Hanna Hur Kristina Kite Gallery
It is hard not to wonder if Hanna Hur's paintings were made explicitly for Kristina Kite's gallery space or if it is pure coincidence that the black and white checkerboard floor so perfectly complements the geometric patterns within the paintings. The way the space...
SIGHTS UNSCENE Birth of a Foothill Fire, San Gabriel Valley, CA, 2019
GALLERY ROUNDS: Leticia Maldonado Bermudez Projects
Neon is a medium that has been used over time to beckon, and Leticia Maldonado’s work viewed through the large glass windows of Bermudez Projects in Cypress Park does exactly that. Maldonado’s “Autonoetic” is a collection of mixed media that blends delicately thin...