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Tag: LA
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Pick of the Week: Jane Margarette
Anat EbgiJane Margarette’s otherworldly sculptures and installations mine the tensions between the rough and the sensual, the realistic and the fantastical, the mechanical and the organic. In her exhibition at Anat Ebgi, A Honey of a Tangle, Margarette has created a suite of wall-mounted ceramic sculptures that are spirited in color and form yet retain an undeniable hardness and foreboding. Seeing distinctive forms of locks, pocket watches, insects and birds rendered in huge, 3-D scale, I was instinctually compelled to see these artworks as playful, even cutesy. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Margarette’s fantastical flora and fauna are imbued with more sinister elements, resulting in a paradox of allure and aversion for viewers. Miserable with Carefulness, a large sculpture of a butterfly, is adorned with childish charms of fruits and smaller butterflies on chains. But the butterfly also dons a basket full of loose ceramic teeth, and something has taken a bite out of its right wing. Sing Me a Spell / Drowsy Dreamer takes the form of a bat with a locking apparatus held together by a knife in its chest. In other works, pastel colors and delicate forms belie more threatening components like spiked collars, bear traps and locks. Although there are certainly signals of outside threats and the sculptures largely feature symbols of self-defense, Margarette still manages to make them feel harmless in their absurdity.
The latches and hinges accenting each piece give the implication of movement, like each sculpture is meant to be interacted with. It was easy to imagine playing with each piece like a blown-up sensory board for toddlers to tinker with locks, switches and gadgets. Softness and hardness, weightlessness versus bulkiness were also at odds, as if each butterfly and bird could fly away in the blink of an eye, if only they weren’t weighed down by chains and hardware.
Throughout, I felt like I was walking through an Alice in Wonderland-esque realm, where the natural world exists, surreal and dream-like, without regard for constraints physics or logic. And where the most innocent concepts and creatures may reveal their ominous intentions at any moment, but there is the luxury of waking up and realizing how silly you were to have ever thought there was any real danger in the first place.
Anat Ebgi
2660 S La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90034
Thru Feb. 12th, 2022 -
Pick of the Week: Shrubs
Night GalleryUpon entering the stunning new group show at Night Gallery, one of my first thoughts was: Why is it called Shrubs? A shrub conjured in my mind a certain nondescript, low-growing bush — nothing memorable and certainly nothing to write home about. But after walking through the galleries twice, I realized just how aptly and brilliantly the show was named; shrubs encompass an impressive breadth of earthly flora characterized by their resilience and diversity. As a title, Shrubs connotes a certain manifold spirit and quotidian quality captured perfectly across geographies and mediums by the 37 contemporary artists in the show, all of whom intimately explore human relationships with the natural world.
There is nothing new about art that reacts to nature, but Shrubs somehow introduces a groundbreaking approach by coalescing an array of inventive artists working in sculpture, photography, landscape painting, still-lifes, and more. Each work is breathtaking in its own right and deeply personal to its creator yet contributes deftly to an overarching contemplation of how nature exists both in opposition and in tandem with the modern world.
We see calmative scenes of everyday interactions with the outside world, such as in Hayley Barker’s Side Yard with Kali (2022), an oil on linen portrayal of a flowering yard replete with potted plants. Melanie Schiff’s suite of three pigment prints (all 2021) of chamomile buds scattered atop silhouettes of limbs invoke the inextricability of nature, humanity and art. Meanwhile, Sterling Wells’ watercolor Agaves of Auto Zone (2022), which depicts garbage nestled under succulents in a parking lot, is an indictment of human intrusions affecting the plant species native to Southern California. And we see Sam Moyer’s While I’m in Paradise (2021), a plaster-coated canvas inlaid with marble fragments in a skeletal formation, in conversation with Beatriz Cortez’s unyielding wiry, steel sculpture of a tree, Roots 6 (2021).
There are simply too many notable works for me to do them all justice, but what I found especially refreshing about Shrubs is that the show doesn’t favor any one perspective or mode of meaning. Instead, the show honors each artist’s relationship to nature equally and celebrates a miscellaneous collection of responses to a world rife with spectacles. It’s exhilarating to see how so many talented artists view the world we inhabit and conjure abstractions or representations of it in so many different ways.
Night Gallery
2276 E 16th St
Los Angeles, CA 90021
Thru Feb. 5th, 2022 -
Pick of the Week: Kentaro Kawabata
Nonaka-HillTo walk through Kentaro Kawabata’s solo exhibition at Nonaka-Hill is to be constantly excited by original and unexpected forms around every corner. Working with porcelain clay, Kawabata creates an alchemical wonderland by amalgamating innovative materials into sculptures that range from graceful to awkward, otherworldly to earthy.
I was immediately drawn into the fine details of the works and his ability to transform porcelain by adding new materials to achieve a fascinating fusion of forms. His sculptures are each accented with bits of glass, stone, metal or sand worked into the surface of the porcelain at various stages of their production. The most striking effect is that of the pulverized stained glass which creates beautiful cascades of color when pressed into the white porcelain and melted in the kiln. Some works are glazed to a sheen while others are coated with silver and dipped into a sulphurated hot spring to achieve a matte iridescent varnish. Other works still are finished with a wash of oxidized silver that turns dry and brown, like rusting metal.
This latest series, titled Soos, is a play on the Japanese pronunciation of the word “source” as well as a reference to how Kawabata answered the SOS call for attention from his unfinished clay projects. All the sculptures are made from leftover clay from previous pieces that Kawabata felt compelled to recycle and give new life to. This sense of cyclical energy and renewed vivacity is abundantly clear in the way his forms masquerade as decorative objects or traditional sculptures but are revealed to be something else entirely upon closer inspection.
The works feel simultaneously improvisational and cohesive, clearly from the hand of a master with reverence for his craft and the courage to experiment. Knowing that the artist worked with his hands to crimp and manipulate the material, the works are (literally) imbued with a deeply personal touch. There is an unmistakable delicacy to the porcelain, but there is also an unprecedented roughness in the surface textures, fractured edges and gilded platinum studs hiding in the crevices, thus revealing a darker side of a traditionally exquisite material or perhaps of the artist himself.
I thought I was seeing the forms of serving bowls, deep sea coral or collectible trinkets, but I didn’t fully begin to appreciate Kawabata’s innovation until I discarded my own preconceived notions of what his sculptures should be. While they do recall organic shapes in flora and anatomy, in truth, his ceramics defy all characterization and are best seen as brand-new harmonies, whimsical and unique in their own right.
Nonaka-Hill
720 N Highland Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90038
Thru Jan. 29th, 2022 -
GALLERY ROUNDS: Tim Hawkinson
PRJCTLATim Hawkinson is full of surprises. He is an idiosyncratic artist who is at once a master craftsman, a scientist and a tinkerer who has an amazing facility with a wide range of materials and mediums. His works are precise and cerebral, yet often about the imprecisions of the body (specifically his body) and how it relates to space. Hawkinson embraces and elaborates upon the process of creation. He has filled galleries and museums with mechanically wondrous machines that are simultaneously humorous and complex. His latest project —Drip Drawings— is a series of works on paper where black ink is applied large sheets of synthetic paper via a hand-made “contraption” Hawkinson devised for this very purpose. The machine approximates a modified tattoo gun and allows Hawkinson to control the flow of ink as documented in a short video that accompanies the exhibition. Once the process is revealed, the works become more rather than less fascinating.
The vast gallery is filled with single works, as well as grids of drawings, each with a specific pattern made from a combination of precisely spaced horizontal and vertical parallel lines. The patterns oscillate while also forming complex shapes that when presented in combinations appear to become letters or words. The pieces pay homage to Op art and share a kinship with works by Bridget Riley, Victor Vasarely and even Yayoi Kusama— artists interested in patterns and the creation of kinetic illusions. Hawkinson appears to follows suit, however his Drip Drawings are just as much about the mechanics of their making and how a succession of lines become shapes and how those shapes in turn, become complex dynamic forms. The drawings have the appearance of ruled lines, but are wavy because they are drips that rely on gravity and the smoothness of the paper surface, as well as the viscosity of the ink.
Tim Hawkinson, Valival, 2020 It is usually a somewhat futile exercise to try to reconstruct Hawkinson’s process. For example, in seemingly simpler works like Sulus (2019) and Valival (2020), it is possible to imagine Hawkinson moving from left to right across the large paper applying dripping ink lines gradually become shorter as they reach the center, then become longer again as they approach the right edge. The video depicts how Hawkinson spins the paper 90 degrees to finish the drawings and connect all the lines which then cohere into curvilinear shapes creating an illusionistic form. Similarly, when trying to reverse engineer Valival, it is possible to imagine Hawkinson gliding his machine across the surface making shorter and longer lines and then filling in the spaces with more lines that flow in a perpendicular direction.
While each individual work is a marvel to view and a puzzle to deconstruct, together (as many are hung in large grids that span the length and height of the gallery walls) the scope and complexity of Hawkinson’s endeavor becomes apparent. It is a pleasure to get lost in the lines and ponder the patterns, as well as marvel about how he created a machine that seemingly defies gravity and precisely stops ink from its inevitable cascade down the page. These works play on notions of control and reveal the endless possibilities within a fixed system.
Tim Hawkinson
Drip Drawings
PRJCTLA
November 13, 2021 – January 15, 2022
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Pick of the Week: Paolo Colombo
Baert GalleryAs the omicron variant tightens its grip on the world, it seems like the light at the end of the tunnel is receding, evading us once again. For the first time in a long time, I recalled the anxious uncertainty that became all too familiar to us all in the early throes of the pandemic. Many of us again sought out ways to comfort ourselves and find solace in the little things. My search for calm led me to Baert Gallery where, upon seeing Paolo Colombo’s works, I immediately knew he was an artist who captured the essence of balance and meditation we all so desperately need.
In his second exhibition at the gallery, Colombo presents several large-scale watercolors that merge abstract forms with organic subject matter. Poppies, small forest creatures, and levitating circles are carefully inlaid over colorful panels of fine freehand crosshatching. We see hummingbirds reaching for floating flowers, a hedgehog curled playfully on its back, a woman’s face wearing a soft smile — all suspended in an enigmatic, figurative dreamscape.
The watercolor works are painstakingly detailed, best viewed as closely as possible, with each panel taking up to weeks to complete. It’s easy to imagine the 72-year-old artist hunched over a sunlit table with nothing more than paper and watercolors to occupy his mind for hours on end. The lines are perfectly imperfect, thicker in some places and wavier in others, signaling a more lighthearted approach to an otherwise mechanical technique. Sober and delicate, the lines also give the impression that everything harmoniously coexists within the artist’s abstracted realm of consciousness, that this strange dimension of colors and lines is no less alive than the fully formed animals and flowers that occupy it.
It was explained to me that the artist spent hours and hours at his studio during the pandemic, patiently sketching fields of crossing lines and shading hares. I can only presume that he regarded this extra time to create as a privilege, for every meticulous stroke is applied with such thorough care, a true labor of love. I was drawn into every intimate detail as if I could feel exactly how his hands once gestured across the page. For Colombo, to create these works must have been just as meditative an experience as it is to view them. For me, the artist’s tranquility became mine by invitation.
In a recent interview, Colombo, who was first an established curator before resuming his work as an artist, refers to curating as a discipline and art as a practice. “I like curating, but painting is like breathing,” he says. Well, thanks to his calmative compositions and the refreshing sensation Colombo so fluently distills, we can all breathe a little easier.
Baert Gallery
1923 S Santa Fe Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90021
Thru Jan. 22nd, 2022 -
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 that had intrigued me enough to write, review, recommend, it was clear there were more than 20 of them. There are a number of reasons why this might be, beginning with the fact that artists and curators both understand that there is no time to lose; that anything is possible; and that there is no point in risking less than everything.
Still a few criteria may apply. As Samuel Goldwyn once said, “If people don’t want to go to the picture, nobody can stop them.” The same thing applies to public or private art spaces and museums. Should there be any rules to it anymore? Great art is the donné, the baseline, the given. A good narrative helps—a strong, resonant theme and throughline; a provocative theoretical armature—something that moves the conversation forward, but is also ahead of it; something that suggests where we might be going—but also something that excites that conversation—a sound, image, idea, obsession—something you need to invent new ways to think about.
To the extent the list reflects my tastes and biases, I’m saved by the fact that many of the shows provided their own corrective—to the extent they knocked me off-guard with their sheer originality, the electricity of their provocations, their passions, even perfection—rendering bias almost beside the point.
Installation view, Queer Communion: Ron Athey. Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, June 19–September 5, 2021. Photo: Jeff McLane/ICA LA Queer Communion: Ron Athey
curated by Amelia Jones
Institute of Contemporary Art, Los AngelesConceivably not only the most important art exhibition of the year but the decade and certainly one of the most original—with the willing cooperation and participation of her genius subject, Ron Athey (whose artistic project might be described as the agony and ecstasy of human reinvention and the social pyrotechnics of creating a mythos for it), curator Amelia Jones curated an exhibition that (paraphrasing critic and theorist José Esteban Muñoz) “contest(s) and rewrite(s) the protocols” of such curatorial work and historical interpretation and exploded notions of what an exhibition of performance art might address or encompass.
Las Nietas de Nonó, Ilustraciones de la mecánica, 2016–19, performance, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, June 28–30, 2019. Photograph © 2019 Paula Court, courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York No Humans Involved
Group Exhibition curated by Erin Christovale
(Eddie Aparicio, Tau Lewis, Las Nietas de Nonó, Sondra Perry, Sangree, Wangshui, Wilmer Wilson IV)
Hammer MuseumTo the extent art affords access to its exceptionally dark foundational legacies (“N.H.I.” functioning as a post-colonialist legacy of subjugation and oppression), the work of contemporary art must ineluctably dissect them and their underlying values and myths, which entails nothing less than a new vocabulary, a language recalibrated and reconfigured to describe new ways of seeing and navigating the freshly exposed terrain. The artists curated into this exhibition brilliantly dismantle such legacies (and their ‘alibis’) with a view to horizons beyond these exorcisms and excavations.
Installation view of Karen Carson’s Middle Ground at Gavlak Gallery – Los Angeles, 2021. Karen Carson: Middle Ground
GAVLAKWithin the context of the ways and whys of seeing, Carson’s formal exploration of the juxtapositions of real and illusionistic space, and the ways both physical and virtual dimensions play with our perceptions and preconceptions and undercut any assumptions we may try to make about them, was both cheering and a bracing reminder that the hypothetical ‘middle ground’ between the ‘single thing’ and what might be open and ever expanding, might be the grandest illusion of them all.
Roland Reiss, The Castle Of Perseverance, 1978 ©Estate of Roland Reiss Roland Reiss: The Castle of Perseverance
curated by Jorin Bossen
Diane Rosenstein GalleryI arrived late to the party that was the work of Roland Reiss and I regret that I never told him directly just how much joy his phosphorescent (he called them “unapologetic”) flower paintings brought me. I wrote on a 2018 Instagram post that those paintings “let us celebrate the beauty even as we cursed the darkness.” But that’s life, baby; and Reiss’ work celebrated the whole of it—from its ‘castles’ to the private hells our myths and morality tales construct for us. Reiss captured us in the maze—with all our tools, devices, pleasures, ideals, hopes, ambitions, anger, vices and detritus; and from the show’s title work to its “fairy tales” and “morality plays,” I never wanted to leave.
Michelle Stuart, Xochitl II, 1988, encaustic, plants, pigment, 55 x 99 inches. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy of the Artist and Marc Selwyn Fine Art. Michelle Stuart: An Archaeology of Place
Marc Selwyn Fine ArtSimply walking into this show of Stuart’s most recent work was to be instantly struck by a sense of connection, not simply with a “place,” but with Earth itself—with its crust and living surface, its plant life, and the cosmos surrounding us. Stuart’s approach is both material and tactile and analytic; archaeological in terms of the human relationship to the earth and its duration—and awareness of its fragility and ephemerality. This was work that whispered with the impact of a scream.
Susan Silton: WE, Installation view. Courtesy of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. Photography by Paul Salveson. Susan Silton: WE
Luis De Jesus Los AngelesThe confrontational aspect of contemporary art does not usually ‘shout to be heard’; nor do its masterworks announce themselves with fanfare or fireworks (or even neon—although the last one I saw did). Silton’s elegant suite of 16 photographic prints taken at the Armstrong Redwoods Preserve (with pendant text contributed by writer Dana Johnson) were a deep structural dive into the perceptual divide that conditions what we see, and the ways we understand and talk about it—and where that might take us. “Into the woods without delay / But careful not to lose the way.”
Installation view of Emblazoned World at Bel Ami, 2021. Photo credit: Paul Salveson Emblazoned World
Group show curated by Lucy Bull
(Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Guillaume Dénervaud, Elizabeth Englander, Nik Gelormino, Joseph Grigely, Luchita Hurtado, E’wao Kagoshima, Kentaro Kawabata, Kinke Kooi, Nancy Lupo, Lee Mullican)
Bel AmiThis was the show that provoked that question posed above: are there any rules to this? And here’s the answer: wherever you find something that freshly awakens a sense of the possible. It helps if there’s a personal connection. It can be a space between the utterly commonplace and the fantastical, what curator Lucy Bull referred to in her statement as “the precious detritus of daily life;” though also the “obsessive process” that allows the thought around it “to render,” to wander into “the subconscious.” So here’s the take-away: If you happen to find any rules in your subconscious, think about throwing them out.
Installation view, Kelly Akashi, Faultline, 2021, François Ghebaly, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly Gallery. Photo: Marten Elder Kelly Akashi: Faultline
François GhebalyDo you remember that penultimate scene in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where, after his solo space vessel has plunged a few zillion light years through a space portal, Captain David Bowman walks into a room that seems suspended between a kind of Renaissance earth moment and infinite space time? Akashi’s show had similar effect—with its constellation of objects, “crystallographs” (which have an X-ray/scan effect), tree branches, stone and cast crystal—holding family jewels and heirlooms—and a flower-strewn effigy of the artist herself. In short, the artist was present—passing through us in the very atmosphere we breathed.
Kazunori Hamana in collaboration with Yukiko Kuroda, Installation view, 2021, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles © Kazunori Hamana and Yukiko Kuroda, Courtesy of the artists, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo, Photo: Dan Finlayson Kazunori Hamana
in collaboration with Yukiko Kuroda
Blum & PoeThe show of Hamana’s tsubo vessels—borne out of the earth, embellished (or simply patched, by Kuroda) with recovered metals and bits of ceramic or the remains of similar vessels, detritus or simply the stuff of everyday life—might easily have been called a collaboration with nature itself. It transformed the gallery space into a kind of meditative space—really a garden missing only foliage, yet somehow conjuring it—along with courtyards, fields, forests and the infinite horizon beyond.
Otobong Nkanga, Double Plot, 2018. Woven viscose bas, polyester, bio cotton, cashwool, acrylic, with photography. (265 x 770 cm). Installation view, Zeitz MOCAA, Nov 2019-FEb 2020. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Dillon Marsh Witch Hunt
Group Exhibition curated by Connie Butler and Anne Ellegood
(Leonor Antunes, Yael Bartana, Pauyline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Candice Breitz, Shu Lea Cheang, Minerva Cuevas, Vaginal Davis, Every Ocean Hughes, Bouchra Khalili, Laura Lima, Teresa Margolles, Otobong Nkanga, Okwui Okpokwasili, Lara Schnitger, Beverly Semmes)
Hammer Museum /
Institute of Contemporary Art, Los AngelesAs a political “action,” as curators Connie Butler and Anne Ellegood characterized their exhibition of 15 international artists, Witch Hunt is about four or five years late to the demo—but this is more than made up for by the exhibition’s cultural and political scope and an uninhibited, transdisciplinary range of philosophical perspectives, strategies and media to match its transfeminism. Standout work included that of Shu Lea Cheang, Laura Lima, Teresa Margolles, Lara Schnitger—as well as Vaginal Davis, who alongside Andrea Dworkin, might be called the exhibition’s patron saints.
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Pick of the Week: Hugo McCloud
Vielmetter Los AngelesWalking into Vielmetter Los Angeles’ sunlit loft, it’s easy at first glance to overlook the series of flower paintings inside as traditional floral still lifes. But the stark white backgrounds, untraditional choice of medium, and emotive compositions belie Hugo McCloud’s skillful mastery of manipulating abject materials into visually stunning forms.
Self-taught with a background in industrial design, it’s obvious that McCloud is a restless experimenter. In “translated memories,” McCloud continues his practice of incorporating plastic merchandise bags to investigate connections between industrialization and the natural world. Delicate slivers of colored plastic making up pots, leaves, and petals are cut with a razor and applied with heat piece by piece — at the end of the painstaking process, the plastic looks as liquid as a brushstroke.
As I inspected the surfaces of the works, I found it nearly impossible to discern where the swaths of plastic ended and the paint began. To me, the ease with which the plastic blends into the oil and wood panels echoes the lack of separation between the natural world and manmade pollutants. The temporality of the flowers contrasts beautifully with the tenacity of the non-biodegradable plastic to create tension and meaning beyond their physical forms. In turn, the works double as collaged records of urban decay and economic displacement in the communities from which the materials were collected.
The most compelling aspect of the exhibition aside from the exquisite use of plastic is the multifaceted biographical interpretations of McCloud’s upbringing and his time in quarantine. Inspired by elements of his father’s sculptures and his uncle’s floral still lifes, McCloud mimics artistic lineages on both sides of his family and marries disparate practices to pay homage to his culturally mixed identity. By titling the works after the dates they were created, the artist also creates a visual diary of his quest for calm and beauty over the last year of his life.
Further, McCloud capitalizes on universal memories of seeking stillness and reprieve from the chaos of the pandemic years. The flowers, their fleeting beauty suspended, capture the feeling of the entire world grinding to a halt and provide a meditative viewing experience. Still, the flowers are in flux. Budding stems and unfinished lines suggest the potential for newness and growth. Different views of the same bouquets over time signal the ever-forward passing of seasons and a sense of long-term hope. We too, McCloud reminds us, will change with the times.
Vielmetter Los Angeles
1700 S Santa Fe Ave, #101
Los Angeles, CA 90021
Thru Jan. 8th, 2022 -
Pick of the Week: Wolfgang Tillmans
Regen ProjectsIn our post-truth age, where it’s easy to assume any image has been digitally manipulated, photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’ stands out from the pack for his striking candidness. In his eighth solo exhibition at Regen Projects, the German artist presents a diverse array of works ranging in genre from portraiture and landscape to architectural and abstract photography, and enunciates his longstanding commitment to capturing the truth of how it feels to be alive today.
Spanning nearly three decades, the photographs in the show are a natural evolution, decidedly not a revolution, of Tillmans’ famed practice as a zeitgeist documentarian. True to his roots, the show is punctuated with astrophotography and snapshots of underground counterculture that become poetic through Tillmans’ lens. In turn, these vignettes of his childhood passion and social life unwittingly transcend his personal history and become part of a shared cultural experience with the viewer.
Other works in the show of found objects and settings feel like they were captured offhand in the artist’s everyday adventures but remain deeply personal and honest. Tillmans sees life everywhere; in the industrial, the natural, the photomechanical. To Tillmans, every nook and cranny of the world is worthy of artistic investigation and every seemingly trite or random image has value in forming a holistic perspective.
With clear reverence for the aesthetic and conceptual capacities of the photographic medium, Tillmans is also interested in portraying transient moments of matter in motion. The exhibition’s titular work, Concrete Column, captures a pillar of wet concrete being poured, freezing the substance in its transitory state between liquid and solid and giving it eternal life in an otherwise ephemeral split-second. Through restless seascapes, shifting shadows, and celestial movements, Tillmans magnificently makes the impermanent permanent.
The exhibition is complemented by the soundtrack to Tillmans’ debut full-length album, Moon in Earthlight, which effectively heightens the imagination and senses by making the viewing experience more intimate and immersive. Accompanied by a film playing on loop in the gallery’s listening room, the 53-minute audio project fuses divergent production methods in the same vein as Tillmans’ photographic practice.
No one understands better than Tillmans that the truth is elusive because it is subjective. Recognizing the inconsistency of our lived experiences, he then seeks to depict common grounds and explore existential queries that plague us all: Who are we? Where did we come from? How are we all connected? Perhaps Tillmans’ greatest genius lies in his ability to imbue the ordinary and the familiar with a renewed sense of wonder and universality, a reminder we all need now more than ever.
Regen Projects
6750 Santa Monica Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90038
Thru Dec. 23rd, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Anna Valdez
Ochi ProjectsSince moving out of my hometown, I have amassed a small trove of Polaroid photos documenting the clutter in all my living spaces. I’d always liked the idea of keeping pocket-sized time capsules of the things I used to own and person I used to be in those places. Walking into Anna Valdez’s exhibition My Own Private Arcadia at Ochi Projects, I immediately knew that this impulse to document our environments and ephemera was something we shared.
At first glance, the subjects of Valdez’s richly hued paintings seem like curated collections of found objects, the canvasses crowded with patterned fabrics, conch shells, houseplants, art books, and decorative vases. But closer inspection reveals that, altogether, these items of personal significance conjure narratives about the artist’s own domestic life and serve as autobiographical records of her human impact on places and things.
Valdez’s mastery of painting across genres is abundantly evident in the way she reinvents and honors its lineage. She gives a nod to the Dutch still life tradition by incorporating cultural objects and animal skulls, symbolic reminders of contemporary life and mortality. Across paintings, ceramics, and one sweeping mural, Valdez boldly commands a hyper saturated spectrum of colors and creates compositions that are endlessly stimulating without being overwhelming.
Certain objects take on multiplicities of meaning, too, and seem to coexist in parallel realities — such as the same flowerpot or red bandana being depicted several times in different mediums and varying levels of realism. Valdez thus blurs the line between representation and abstraction and reminds us à la Magritte that the image of an object is not the object itself.
Although Valdez offers a generous peek into her sacred arcadia, there is also the uncanny feeling of absence and lack of human intervention in her representative spaces, leaving me wondering who or what might be hovering just out of the artist’s gaze, remaining forever unknown to the viewer.
I could never fully explain why I so dutifully photographed all my living spaces, chalking it up to my sentimental nature for years, until Valdez showed me why she does it. She recognizes that the objects of our surroundings — the trinkets strewn across tables, the books we dog-ear and re-read, the views from our windows — have the capacity to outlive us and tell stories about who we were in those bygone moments.
Ochi Projects
3301 W. Washington Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90019
Thru Dec. 18th, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Lindsay August-Salazar
Lowell Ryan ProjectsFew grasp the power of language to be visually enthralling while expanding our consciousnesses as well as Lindsay August-Salazar, whose solo show at Lowell Ryan Projects, “There’s No Place Like No Place” brings these questions to the forefront. Employing vibrant color schemes punctuated by a symbolic lexicon of the artist’s own invention, August-Salazar challenges us to recall a poetic past and make our own meaning in the face of our ever-changing mediascape.
The exhibition opens with six large-scale, burlap-grounded paintings that showcase August-Salazar’s fearless command of color and energetic brushwork. In her animated compositions that appear to levitate off the canvas, every rhythmic swath, gesture, and shape are as cohesive and captivating as recorded choreography — vestiges of her background as a hip-hop dancer.
The paintings also feel distinctly collage-like in their amalgamation of symbols and use of cutouts that tease fragments of coarse burlap beneath the glib acrylic. In referencing collage, August-Salazar reiterates the sheer multitude of histories, meanings, and interpretations that characterize her exploration.
Up in the sun-soaked loft, August-Salazar displays a suite of 47 unframed works on paper that echo the vibrancy and linguistic themes of her paintings, furthering them through repetition. I felt like I was entering a secret playroom or ancillary studio space brimming with insights to her creative process or possibly long-awaited clues for translation. Hanging gracefully off the wall, these delicate works introduce an element of levity and evoke a sense of childish whimsy and wonder to complement the palpable intensity of the paintings below.
At every turn, certain symbols of August-Salazar’s visual vocabulary (which she fittingly titles Abstract Character Copy) jump out — a smattering of English letters, a trio of hieroglyphics, a half-crown, an arc of yellow reminiscent of a Warhol banana. Each individual element of her wide array of visual signs felt vaguely familiar yet entirely unprecedented, like faces I’d seen in a dream that I yearned to recognize.
Through the eccentricity and indefinability of her visual vocabulary, August-Salazar conceals more than she reveals and offers little more than a sparing understanding of a hidden message only she knows. She thereby creates the uncanny feeling of walking through her own personal utopia — one that I was overjoyed to have been invited into even though I didn’t speak the language.
Lowell Ryan Projects
4619 W. Washington Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90016
Thru Dec. 11th, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Unseen Picasso
Norton Simon MuseumMy first review for Artillery Magazine – almost two years ago now – was for my favorite museum in southern California, The Norton Simon. I recently went back and reread that article, and I found that my own writing was, to be kind, academic. Dry as a bone, really. There’s a strong voice, but one that is far more interested in saying something than showing something. It reduces the art to a history lesson instead of elevating it to the contemporary moment. But that’s what first steps are all about, making a place to look back and see how we’ve grown. Artillery Magazine has awarded me with that opportunity, and so for my fiftieth (and final) Pick of the Week, we’re revisiting The Norton Simon Museum and their new exhibition, “Unseen Picasso.”
I don’t love Picasso. I have a hard time liking the work of artists who I feel I would’ve disliked personally. It’s why I prefer Cézanne to Gaugin, or Caillebotte to Degas. But with Picasso, it extended further than the personal; I found his work, particularly later works, to be uninspiring and disconnected. In short, I’m a Georges Braque die-hard.
But it’s time to put old biases aside and welcome a new side to Picasso – an unseen side, if you will. Through this exhibition’s collection of lesser known lithographs, prints, and linocuts, I saw the threads of Picasso’s creativity and genius manifesting around me. In Dove (1949), for example, the bird, jutting out in sharp relief from the swirling gradations of black lithographic ink, is masterful and subtly detailed. It’s gentle gaze echoes its status as a symbol of peace.
What’s special about the prints in the exhibition is not only the technical wizardry and expert use of vibrant color (as in Bacchanal with Goats and Spectator (1959)), but the nods to Picasso’s creative process. The small inscriptions, the notes to the printers, the Roman numeral dating – these signs of the artists method in the work are personal in a way that is refreshing in a Picasso. They elevate the work as they ground it, making clear the labors of creation. In this room at the Norton Simon, Picasso is no longer a titan of Modern Art, but a craftsman, one who iterates ideas and claims perfection with a decisive “bon à tirer” – ready to print.
“Unseen Picasso,” and Picasso himself, conveys that we can all as artists and people strive for nothing but growth. I am immensely grateful for my time growing as a columnist with Artillery, and I look forward to continuing to grow and forge works that I too will proudly stamp, bon à tirer.
The Norton Simon Museum
411 W. Colorado Blvd.
Pasadena, California 90232
Thru Nov. 6th, 2021 -
Bennett Roberts
It’s About TimeBack 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 to him—before he could read it in the latest edition of Artillery—that we had panned his Kehinde Wiley show.
Roberts, unflinching, seemed to be suppressing a grin. Was it because a review in Artillery had no significance to him, or was it his absolute confidence that Wiley was already untouchable? I chose to believe the latter. He graciously invited me in to linger at the show and told me not to hesitate to raise any questions. That made quite an impression on me as a journalist; I really respected his very adult manner.
Fifteen years later, a lone Kehinde Wiley painting hangs on an empty white gallery wall, surrounded by brown-paper–wrapped canvases awaiting installation at Roberts Projects. I assumed the unopened art was Wiley’s; Roberts informed me otherwise, stating it was Amoako Boafo’s next show—the Wiley was there for a client-viewing later in the day.
The irony did not escape me as we sat down in the main gallery for the second meeting of our interview. The first time was at the Los Feliz home that Roberts shares with his wife and business partner, Julie Roberts. That was nearly a year ago (that pesky pandemic kept delaying things), and it was now September, the start of the new fall art season. Julie, a full and equal partner in the gallery, was in New York at The Armory Show while hubby stayed behind to attend to their upcoming exhibition—there’s a long waiting list for Boafo’s work—“hundreds.” The African artist who has been showing with Roberts Projects since 2018 is super-hot right now; Roberts could not afford to be away that opening weekend.
Business is going well for the gallery. Many of its artists are in high demand, and artists that have stuck by Roberts over the years are now getting their due—current art star Betye Saar for one. Roberts is in high spirits and ready to begin the interview before I even get the recorder going. He kicks off by singing high praises for LA’s current recognition as an important art center—finally. “It’s always been a great center for artists.”He pauses before acknowledging—for galleries and collectors—“not always so great.”
In the past, Los Angeles was notorious for its inferior collector-base compared to New York. Roberts recounts the LA collectors of only a few decades ago; “If they’re going to spend 30 to 50 thousand dollars or a million dollars, they’re going to buy from New York. It gave them more confidence.” That is no longer the case.
Roberts emerged in the LA art scene amidst the ’80s art-world explosion, after returning home from college in Santa Barbara. He grew up in Brentwood, a wealthy neighborhood on LA’s west side, with a producer-writer father in the film and television industry. Roberts attended Windward, “a well-known private school,” he points out, where his best friend was Richard Heller—of the Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica. In the summer of 1986, Roberts and Heller picked up where they left off and started a gallery in Heller’s father’s garage. They called it Richard/Bennett Gallery.
Within a year, they were confident enough to move into a “real” space on La Cienega Boulevard near some of LA’s hottest galleries, like Rosamund Felsen, who was debuting the likes of Mike Kelley and Lari Pittman. Richard/Bennett proved to be no slouch either: they were the first to show Raymond Pettibon, and were responsible for introducing his work to Chief Curator Paul Schimmel—who in turn put Pettibon in the famed 1992 Geffen/MOCA show, “Helter Skelter.” Running the gallery was a struggle, Roberts admits, but somehow just when they didn’t think they could cover their rent, a miracle sale would happen, or a collector would buy a few Pettibons for $250 apiece to help them out. With measured success over five years, Roberts and Heller parted ways, both continuing their own successful careers as art dealers.
Kehinde Wiley, Yachinboaz Ben Yisrael II, 2021, oil on linen, 106.5 x 74.25 x 4.25 in. framed; courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California, photo by Joshua White RETAIN & MAINTAIN
According to Roberts, a central challenge in running a successful gallery is retaining your artists. Yes, Pettibon eventually moved on; his career skyrocketed after “Helter Skelter” and today he is represented by Regen Projects in LA and David Zwirner in New York—there’s always a bigger gallery, a better offer. Roberts concedes there’s a long list of artists who got snatched up after he invested in them. But that’s typical and expected. “It’s unavoidable,” he maintains.
Take Roberts Projects’ biggest artist, Kehinde Wiley—it is by no means the only gallery representing him. Things have changed drastically since the 1980s era, when galleries had exclusive partnerships with their artists. Roberts says he prefers the new system—a more polyamorous relationship, if you will. He concurs, “I like Kehinde showing with someone different in London, someone different in New York. I make less money and get less pieces, but those people have different collectors, different curators that are interested in that program. Artists are seen differently, depending on the program they are in.” Roberts thinks that artists showing with other galleries is not necessarily a bad thing. Another newer trend is for a gallery to have multiple spaces. Galleries don’t often want to surrender their artists to another gallery and take lower percentages (like Roberts did with Wiley). He notes, “It may actually be cheaper in the long run to have another space in New York to show that artist rather than giving the artist to another gallery.”
Roberts emphatically stresses that it’s all about retaining the talent you’ve developed. “The longer you retain it, it is perceived as important…,” he interrupts himself, “I use ‘perceive’ because everything is about time. Everything in the art world is about time. Everyone thinks it’s about popularity, success, money; it isn’t. It’s about how much time you can keep that person in play.”
Roberts believes that for an artist to have historical staying power, a cultural discussion needs to revolve around that artist and their work. Until that dialogue expands outside the art world it remains “an inside discussion.” In other words, that work will not make a wider impact, nor make it into the history books.
Kehinde Wiley’s oeuvre has crossed over to become part of a cultural discussion. Two factors play a part: his commissioned presidential portrait of President Obama and, most recently, his version of the famous Blue Boy portrait hanging at The Huntington (The Blue Boy is on loan to London’s National Gallery). Roberts Projects had a huge part in making that transaction happen. Those projects propelled Wiley into a wider cultural sphere, surpassing just the art world. Most likely, he will go down in history.
Amoako Boafo, Monstera Leaf Sleeves, 2021; oil and paper transfer on canvas, 77 x 76.5 in.; courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California. BLACK ARTISTS MATTER
The Black Lives Matter movement filtered into the art world quickly; in fact, most would say much earlier than the mainstream cultural embrace. Today, if your gallery doesn’t represent Black and POC artists, or include much diversity, you might as well be showing cave paintings. Roberts had been representing Black artists long before most galleries caught up to speed. His gallery didn’t seem to get much credit for it, but he wasn’t looking for it either. The artist roster has always been inclusive, starting with Kehinde Wiley in 2002, Noah Davis in 2006, Betye Saar in 2010 and recent additions of African artists Boafo, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe and Wangari Mathenge.
The Black artist movement is thriving right now and Roberts Projects is right on target. Alongside Wiley, Noah Davis was a big hit for them. Davis, too, is engaged in that bigger historical discussion, as co-founder of The Underground Museum, an institution created to show museum-quality work in a Latino and Black LA neighborhood that was underserved in art exposure. Davis died of cancer in 2015, at the tragically early age of 32, but had left the Roberts & Tilton gallery in 2012 (Roberts’ former gallery with partners Julie, and Jack Tilton, who passed in 2017). All ties between Davis and Roberts & Tilton were severed by then, and David Zwirner obtained Davis’ estate in 2020. (Zwirner needs to hurry and check all those boxes).
Roberts isn’t upset about that, but more dismayed about the erasure of Roberts’ involvement in developing Davis from the beginning. “I helped sell pieces to fund The Underground Museum.” Roberts pauses with quiet exasperation. Zwirner produced a huge monograph on Davis with nary a mention of Roberts. “It was unbelievable to me how the art world loves to rewrite history and make it seem like only the winners write it. Not the ones that are up-and-coming, or the also-rans.” Roberts was key in putting Davis on the map circa 2007. Roberts & Tilton were participatining in an art fair when Don and Mera Rubell (serious art collectors and clients) stopped by their booth and inquired about a painting. Roberts recalls Mera demanding: Who is this great artist on the wall? “I said, ‘It’s a brand-new discovery of mine. I think it’s terrific, I think you should get something.’ They said, ‘You know what? We’re doing [a show called] ‘30 Americans.’ And he will be the final and youngest artist we include in the show.’ And I said, ‘Thank you very much.’”(Let that go down in history—you read it here first!)
Betye Saar, The Destiny of Latitude & Longitude, 2010, mixed media assemblage, 54 x 43 x 20.5 in., Baltimore Museum of Art; purchase with exchange funds from the Pearlstone Family Fund and partial gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California ONE PERCENTERS
Let’s face it, the art world is a rich man’s game now, and with the world’s wealth concentrated among the one percent, it’s a small playing field. “It is the game you play after all the other games you’ve played,” Roberts explains, “It is the final frontier.” He goes on, “It is the place that once you’ve made whatever fortune you’ve made and you have what everyone else has… you can differentiate yourself from all the other billionaires by collecting things that are not only great but are truly something that will enhance how you see your own position in things.” Pausing, Roberts surmises, “It’s a game of fortune.”
One-percenters have needs too. “When you’re that big, the richest people want to buy from you, because they feel secure buying from you,” Roberts says. That’s why mega-galleries like Gagosian can and do exist. At last count Gagosian had 16 galleries worldwide. In today’s global market, having art galleries around the world seems more shrewd than extravagant. Another factor, Roberts explains, “All of those businesses have a very, very vibrant secondary market—that’s truly where all the money is.” At that level, the competition is with the auction houses; they don’t care about other galleries at that point. Roberts acknowledges he’s not in that league—and is relieved not to be.
Roberts refers to what’s happening right now in the art world as a “sea change.” His and Julie’s gallery is rolling with the new system, and in fact thriving. “I don’t think that I even sell things anymore—I think people buy things from me,” Roberts says reflectively. “Zero pressure. I want the experience to be as clean and as enjoyable as possible.”
I’ve watched Roberts’ gallery remain fresh, relevant, edgy—top-notch for over 30 years. With Betye Saar’s soaring career, the recent Wiley accomplishments, and rising star Amoako Boafo on board, it is undeniably riding the wave.
Unsurprisingly, Roberts announced at the end of our interview that they will be moving from their space to La Brea Avenue. The new gallery will be three times larger than their Culver City venue. And no, Roberts Projects will not be adding another gallery; they just need a bigger space for displaying larger works and a nice showing room for their clients—where they can have an enjoyable experience considering the lone Kehinde Wiley spotlighted on the wall.
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Pick of the Week: Amoako Boafo
Roberts ProjectsIn his essay on photography entitled “The Decisive Moment,” Henri Cartier Bresson describes the intricacies of portraiture and the subject. He writes that the ideal portrait is a “true reflection of a person’s world – which is as much outside him as inside him.” We are just as much individuals as we are part of the larger whole. And while Bresson writes about photography, this lesson applies well to painting, where the artist can make far more deliberate choices as to what is reflected in the subject. The portraits of Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo in exhibition at Roberts Projects, “Singular Duality: Me Can Make We,” express complexities both internal and external in a vibrant celebration of Blackness.
Black portraiture – which has been routinely excluded from the western art historical canon – is a subject that has been by some of the greatest contemporary artists, the likes of Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald. But what sets Boafo apart is the personal and impressionistic style of his subjects. The textured brushstrokes of the skin, mixing tan, blue, and black to create a complex color gradient, point to the intense care that Boafo wields. These direct signs of the artist illustrate the time and thought with which Boafo approaches his craft.
Contrasted with these apparent brush strokes are the striking fields of color that act as garb and backdrop for the subjects. The backdrops in particular are intentionally plain, with near shadows which cause the sitters to pop off the canvas and into the room. Combined with their larger than life stature, there is an immediacy to their presence – they exude an effortless confidence and ease, and above all comfortable with their self-expression.
But there is more than ease in these subjects. In Yellow Throw Pillow (2021), we see a seated figure resting their head on their folded hands, staring past the artist in a moment of reflection. The plaintive, wistful air surrounding the work is in contrast to the joy of Red Collar (2021) or the decisiveness of Purple Shadow (2021), demonstrating Boafo’s interest in capturing the wide-range of emotion, particularly for Black Americans in this past year.
Amoako Boafo’s work is simultaneously deeply personal, reflected in the care with which he paints his subjects, and illustrative of the wide range of human experience. Boafo offers ledgers of Black experience both inside and out, the individual and the whole.
Roberts Projects
5801 Washington Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90232
Thru Nov. 6th, 2021 -
GALLERY ROUNDS: Tiffany Alfonseca
The Mistake Room, Los AngelesThe 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 vernacular, vintage aesthetic. Further, the works are installed in a unified field of walls painted a pale pink — the same hue that forms the foundational layer for the skin tones in all the portraits. Several threads converge across the suite of carefully rendered, large-scale images, but the mindful rendering of variations in skin tone as a metric for family resemblances and a more insidious intra-community colorism, along with the tumultuous blending of Black and Brown in her own Afro-Latinx family space, is one of the central ones. Like many of the choices Alfonseca makes, the presence of an invisible but universal underlying foundation to her nuanced palette has power in both the formal and narrative dimensions of the work.
Tiffany Alfonseca, Por Alexandra, 2021, Acrylic, color pencil, charcoal on canvas, 72 x 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist and The Mistake Room, Los Angeles. Photo Credit: Ian Byers-Gamber. Another example of this is the matrilineal armature of the intersecting storylines — women are at the center of the birthdays, weddings, vacations, chores, candid and quiet moments and formal occasions captured first on cameras, and now in generously evocative paint and pencil. The stilted headshots and defiant children, the richly textured and colorful patterns of clothes from eras and occasions, the pristine upholstery, the glittering bangles, the haircuts and party dresses, the vibrancy of color at every turn, the taut smile held for just a smidge too long — all taken together the whole “album” imparts a sense of a family that is, like everyone’s, both absolutely ordinary and utterly remarkable.
Tiffany Alfonseca, Alfonseca Rondon, 2021, Acrylic, color pencil, glitter on canvas, 72 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist and The Mistake Room, Los Angeles. Photo Credit: Ian Byers-Gamber. But Alfonseca takes all of this one step further still in her vivid and deliberative studio practice, as she makes the most effective and winsome gestures in the many opportunities to create not only exuberant color fields and patterns, but also a surprising and strategic impasto in hair and sometimes fabric and even concrete. In works like the fantastical “Dahianni” and surrealist “Por Alexandra” as well as the pageantry of a nearly Op-Art, Pattern & Decoration visual workout in “Alfonseca-Rondon,” this alleviates the flatness of the photographic spaces and re-grounds the works in an embodied presence that transcends the informational archive. In this way, Alfonseca does more than chronicle and remember, she creates new things that come directly from her own energy and hands, and she thereby informs her history with the fresh living presence of herself within it.
Tiffany Alfonseca: De las manos que nos crearon
September 25 – December 18
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Pick of the Week: Humming to the Sound of Fear
Helen J. GalleryThe Korean Peninsula is a region rooted in duality. It is a land both literally and ideologically split down the middle, a lasting result of Cold War-era proxy wars, Western imperialist action, and an on-going brutal dictatorship. And even before the interventions that created the north and south, the peninsula has long been a place of dueling characteristics. The Korean identity has been hard-fought, being constantly re-defined and altered through centuries of alternately Chinese and Japanese colonialist action. This dualistic identity is explored in Helen J Gallery’s current group exhibition of four Korean and Korean-American artists, “Humming to the Sound of Fear.”
The most immediate work upon entering the gallery is the soundscape created by YoungEun Kim. Inspired by the loudspeakers which constantly blare information across the de-militarized zone between North and South Korea, Kim creates her own speaker system. Using only the highest frequencies of famous South Korean love songs, Kim organizes a fragmented and chirping melody, reminiscent of bird calls. This creates an ambient juxtaposition between the natural and man-made, carried through in the works of the other artists.
Two in particular who carry this theme are Jae Hwan Lim and Song Sumin, painters exhibiting a wide body of work in the exhibition. Sumin’s works of acrylic on canvas capture the mountainous ranges of Korea, blanketed in thick canopies, yet streaked across in billowing clouds of smoke. In white stain (2017), we see the smoke stretch across two canvases, first appearing as benign fog until it crashes cataclysmically into the earth, revealing itself to be a missile strike. This conflation of nature and war, violence and serenity, lies at the core of many of Sumin’s works.
Lim’s examination of duality, on the other hand, lies in a simultaneously traditional and radical use of medium, as he applies traditional ink painting techniques to large sheets of plastic. The painted mountain scenes, all inspired from Mt. Kumgang, a mountain which famously acted as a reconciliatory bridge between North and South Korea until 2008. The ink paintings create a familiar mixing of natural and manmade, of new and old, and are striking reminders of the immortality not only of artistic forms but of the plastic we use every day.
Finally, we arrive at the work of Kyle Tata’s photo collage series Lookout Mountain Lab Production Notes. Diving into the archives of the US military backed film producer, Lookout Mountain Lab, Tata examines the far-reaching tendrils of war during the 20th century and the ways in which conflict and propaganda can color every aspect of life.
Across the four artists in “Humming to the Sound of Fear,” we find the myriad of ways that we interact with conflict, nature, and borders both real and psychological.
Helen J. Gallery
929 Cole Ave.
Los Angeles, California 90038
Thru Nov. 6th, 2021 -
Pick of the Week: Devin B. Johnson
NicodimGrief comes in countless forms. There are as many ways to feel the peculiar sensation of loss as there are things to lose. One can lose another, something external, and just the same – or just as differently –one can lose oneself. With bereavement, there is no wrong way and there is no manual; it is intensely personal and yet universal, one of the few things that we are all assured to feel regardless of how long we live. And one a time like the present, so deeply entwined with grief, we should confront it head-on. In Nicodim’s current exhibition, “My Heart Cries, I Set Out an Offering for You,” we see how loss and grief can manifest through paintings and sculptures from stellar young artist Devin B. Johnson
What we find in Johnson’s abstracted and ethereal paintings is not loss, but the echoes of loss. We witness the people who are still here and must meet that loss. Those who lay lilies at street corners. Those who come home to empty apartments or huddled families. Those who are haunted, as we all are, by one ghost or another. These representations of loss are more striking than others because they illustrate the subtle and quiet moments that come in its wake.
The paintings utilize a sepia-toned palette, reflecting the somber emotional state induced by his paintings. They are highly textured paintings evoke sensations of rust and ash, forms of loss in their own right. Johnson’s use of mixed-media paints for his more abstracted work, along with the understated gridlines and swaths of color, pay homage to some of the great Black abstract artist whom inspire him like Torkwase Dyson and Cullen Washington Jr.
Coming off of an unintentionally extended residency at Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock, Senegal and responding to the on-going battle for civil rights occurring in the United States, Johnson’s interest in loss, grief, and memory are deeply rooted to the current moment. An unexpected word is quietly repeated through his paintings: GLORY. It’s an odd word to be associated with loss, and reminds me of a statue that recently captivated me at the Met: Antonin Mercié’s Gloria Victis, glory to the vanquished. The work, depicting the winged goddess Pheme carrying a dying French soldier, reminds one that even in the most tragic moments of loss one can find uplifting strength. Johnson’s work reminds us that only by fighting through these darkest hours can we possibly find our destined glory.
Nicodim
1700 S. Santa Fe, #160
Los Angeles, California 90021
Thru Oct. 16th, 2021
