We are accustomed to sight as an experience of things coming into clearer focus the longer we look at them. Images seem fuzzy, we stare, maybe squint a bit, and they sharpen up. One of the special features of paintings by Peter Lodato is that they enact the opposite....
Straddling all sorts of categories, Nick Lowe's pictures are defined by their byzantine intermediacy between stretched canvases and works on paper, paintings and drawings, fanciful dreamscapes and pedestrian scenes. Lowe possesses an uncanny knack for agglomerating...
Group shows are like parties: overarching themes can help ensure memorable experiences; but sometimes the most engaging are those where unexpected connections form fortuitously among diverse invitees, rather than being engineered. "Hot Time, Summer in the City"...
In a former hanger at the Santa Monica Airport, now home to the perfectly stationed Arena 1 Gallery, the question of the evening—Because who doesn’t appreciate repurposed space? —quickly ran its course, giving way to considerations of how the past intersects with the...
With three distinct exhibition spaces within its massive Boyle Heights gallery, Ibid Gallery has reserved its smallest space, a jewel box of a venue, for the most engaging work on view, an exhibition entitled “slow relief” (the title of this show and all of the works...
Can cinema be a safe space? This is the question that drove filmmaker and PhD candidate Nerve Valerio to curate the Action! Cinema as Sanctuary series at the Echo Park Film Center in the heart of Echo Park. Following the election of President Trump, Valerio, like many...
In timeless spirit and simple form, Julia Haft-Candell's ceramic sculptures recall the mystical austerity of primeval petroglyphs, carved totems and cave paintings. Yet their painted embellishments and surface textures are unmistakably modern, evoking graphic novel...
Abstract but character-driven, tertiary and bright, super flat and deeply funny, the paintings and sculptural installations in Andy Kolar’s “Easy now.” speak to conceptual and material concerns in a uniquely satisfying, engaging dialect of modern color theory. The...
The current seasonal treat being enjoyed by local Angelenos and tourists alike is the free evening concerts happening at several art institutions across Los Angeles, including the Getty Center. Deciding to visit a museum on a summer weekend can an ominous...
Have you ever been at a party, laughing convulsively while draining your second glass of prosecco, and then suddenly, with a cold, horrified shiver, thought—wait, oh no, someday I’m going to be dead? That’s what the work of Takashi Murakami is like. Murakami, the...
I walked into the Resnick Pavilion and into the swirling world of color and fantasy that Marc Chagall created for the theatre and remembered again what made me want to live. Much of the work exhibited in this show was actually made in New York. But it’s...
Alluding to the postmodern architecture of her Polish homeland, Monika Sosnowska’s first solo show at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles is comprised of six structural installations, which despite their rigid physicality and mass, are warped with drama, yet seem...
What is Chinatown, and what does it mean to a younger generation who can’t even speak Chinese? The play “King of the Yees” (through August 6) makes an attempt to address that issue, via the story of a father-daughter relationship at the crossroads. It is also about...
The recognized History of Art is marked by a movement, our blue-chip Art Stars and our institutions. Often more interesting and dynamic, the smaller histories of a regional art community are established by the galleries, art spaces and the people who support them. The...
Every five years the sedate city of Kassel, Germany, launches an art expo that attempts to capture the zeitgeist of our times, documenta. This 14th edition was an ambitious one, costing over $36 million, with one part opening in Athens, Greece, in April (ending July...
Alice Cooper has discovered an Andy Warhol artwork, more than 40 years after it was given to him as a gift. The rock musician had forgotten about the work, which was being kept in storage, until it was found "rolled up in a tube" in a locker along with a collection...
So, the event I’m about to gossip with you about was brought to you by Art of Freelance —a “10-week online course for creatives who want to push themselves to the next level.” I feel obligated to say the following; the emergence of the word “creative” as a title to...
As noted in an Artillery Pick quite recently, portraiture is the oldest form of ‘identity art’, and moreover, representation itself. It is ‘naming’ in the largest sense – placing, identifying, classifying, narrating, and implicitly conceptualizing, though without...
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