If one thinks of the essence of Modernism as being about direct experience rather than recreated experience, the artist who has really continued to expand possibilities is James Turrell. A striking aspect of his retrospective exhibition at the Los Angeles County...
In 1987, the year his son Brady turned two, Abelardo Morell lay down on the nursery floor in order to see the world the way a wriggling baby would. From that vantage point he looked up at a stack of blocks towering over him as if it were a BCE column or stele, and he...
In many Japanese artistic traditions, from sword making to ceramics, creative techniques have been passed down from generation to generation. Some artists today can boast that they are the 15th generation of an artist family, tracing their roots to the 17th century....
As I meandered through Marisol Rendón’s installation, “So, Dragons Do Exist?” at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles gallery last summer (this was before I had even glanced at the contrarian, almost self-negating parenthetical subtitle, “Considerations of the Unavoidable...
Painting is like the proverbial zombie. It’s supposed to be dead but it won’t lie down. The last 50 years in British art has been something of a paint-splattered war zone. Against the odds of prevailing abstraction, Pop and Conceptualism, painters such as Francis...
There is a popular stereotype of the 20th-century artist as a hard-living bon vivant who lives to paint and leaves a trail of broken hearts. Most current versions this type have a brand to maintain. The last thing you can imagine such a person wanting is privacy....
Something special but virtually hidden exists here in SoCal, and it’s a reminder that visual art, despite the occasional headline-grabbing event, is essentially an underground activity operating on the margins of our society. The Pete and Susan Barrett Art Gallery of...
Now that musicals are getting popular again, it’s a good time to revisit the work of Jacques Demy. Although he is considered part of the French new wave, most of his work owes more to Hollywood musicals and live-action fairy-tale films. His first musical (The...
I heard a rumor that some artists went to visit Henri Rousseau and were shocked that he put one of his paintings on the floor for them to walk on because he didn’t have a rug. Was he naive? Crazy? Suffering from low self-esteem? It doesn’t matter. He was unique and so...
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the weird inversions of mainstream and underground culture, particularly as regards formats—the vinyl record for example. Talking with Rick and Joe Potts and Dennis Duck (all founding members of the Los Angeles Free Music Society) on...
Since its inception in 2002 The Wende Museum’s corporate park location has had a discreet charm. The easy-to-miss suite is tucked behind a landscaped parking lot in a hive off Slauson in the former Fox Hills Mall— Culver City adjacent. Its charms unfold as you make...
A special place exists within those fleeting moments transitioning from slumber into an awakened state. In those few seconds when dreamscape combines with reality, both a mild confusion and an eerie comfort sets in. Our mind sifts, sorts and makes sense of what is...
Years of hard work and experimentation by April Street have coalesced in her most recent solo exhibition of four paintings and two sculptural installations titled A Vulgar Proof, after an Elizabethan phrase meaning “a common experience.” Dark, sultry and...
In artist-filmmaker Morgan Fisher’s fourth solo show with International Art Objects (formerly China Art Objects), vintage 1930s house paint samples are enlarged to three-by-four-foot panels and rendered in modern acrylic house paint. These color fields are taken from...
The photographs by Miles Coolidge recently on display at ACME, Los Angeles, are magnificently beautiful examples of the photographer’s craft. Simply as aesthetic objects, the photos are compelling: composed according to simple underlying geometries, they nonetheless...
Fischli and Weiss are up to some elaborate shenanigans. Walking in from the street, under the severe brow created by the Ellsworth Kelly block style building-remake of the Matthew Marks Gallery façade, a viewer might think that they were accidentally let in between...
German filmmakers Christine Lang and Constanze Ruhm have thrown movie-making ingredients intelligently into a blender. After 15 minutes of imbibing this concoction, questions as to whether your taste agrees with it, and a curiosity about what specific elements are in...
Small municipal museums are hard pressed to coordinate their programming into coherent wholes; if a local museum doesn’t fill its walls with a single exhibition, its variety of shows comprise confusing, sometimes clangorous gallimaufries. Lancaster’s MOAH has devised...
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