Almost all of Chuck Close’s paintings were based on photographs he took himself. In the mid-1980s, when I was a curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, I contacted Close with the first museum proposal he had had to do an exhibition of the photographs....
R.I.P. Chuck Close
Pick of the Week: Dysmorphia Maddox Gallery
It’s hard to imagine another time in my life when the word “home” will carry so much weight. The past year has redefined it for all of us. Home has become more vital than ever, yet home is more unstable than ever. Home is where we were told to stay, but home has been...
GONE TO THE DOGS
“Ride on the street, man.” With difficulty, I attempted to maneuver my way around a young couple who, with their three dogs, were hogging the entire sidewalk. “I beg your pardon,” I said, as I cleared these five figures, who had only made the most minimal effort to...
Remarks on Color: Lachrymose Lemon August's Hue
Lachrymose Lemon cannot stop weeping. She sobs uncontrollably at everything all the time: the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace, softball games, dinosaur conventions, the day her favorite chicken finally laid an egg. From the moment the sun rises to the last...
Pick of the Week: Andy Kolar Walter Maciel Gallery
Andy Kolar’s new show at Walter Maciel Gallery, “Head in the Clouds/Left Hanging,” is a play in three acts. Like any good play, and more so than most solo exhibitions, there is a vital rhythm and active plot – a cadence. And for good reason: Kolar’s exploration of...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Shoshana Wayne Gallery Group Exhibition "Above & Below"
Fans of Los Angeles' Craft Contemporary museum will enjoy Above & Below at Shoshana Wayne Gallery. The exhibition features twelve artists working in textile art, ranging from ethnic craft traditions to the wildly unconventional. The show marks the Los Angeles...
Pick of the Week: Bridget Mullen Shulamit Nazarian
This month, Shulamit Nazarian is putting on two shows. The larger group show, “Intersecting Selves,” is an exploration of the overlap and tension between body, identity, and art. Many of the works are notable, particularly Life (2021) by Amir H. Fallah, …for souls…for...
Pick of the Week: Frank Gehry & Nancy Rubins Gagosian
The pair of shows on view at Gagosian, Frank Gehry’s “Spinning Tales” and Nancy Rubins’ “Fluid Space,” are as dissimilar as they are masterful. Two artists, whose works are to be found in the halls of major museums and on city...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Ontario Museum Biennial Ontario Museum of History and Art
The act of self-disclosure is an intentional revelation of one’s thoughts, emotions, and feelings to another individual; it is part confession and part declaration. The 11th Biennial Ontario Open Art Exhibition at the Ontario Museum of History and Art was an aesthetic...
Pick of the Week: Ernest Withers Fahey/Klein Gallery
The gap between memory and history has never been more obvious than since the proliferation of photography. History presents a narrow view of our past: the highest achievements and the lowest atrocities – which can even be the same depending on the historian. What is...
Pick of the Week: Off the Charts Royale Projects
I feel like most people would have a tough time imagining something more ideologically opposed to art than data analytics. Even the phrase sounds unartistic, more at home in investment banking than gallery houses. Art just feels too subjective to be encapsulated by...
Alice Neel at The Met “People Come First” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
After living through the angst-laden whirlwind that was 2020, I can’t imagine a better show to see than “Alice Neel: People Come First” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Neel’s dual focus on ordinary, often invisible people and social justice issues resonates...
Pick of the Week: Psychosomatic Various Small Fires
While painting may, in most cases, operate within the mind alone, sculpture is intrinsically connected to the body. Sculpture itself has a certain corporeality. The works aren’t abstracted onto a wall, but rather exist in the world among us. We are forced to reckon...
Pick of the Week: Taewon Heo Libertine
The silencing of protest is the hallmark of authoritarian governments. While often this silencing can be very bloody, the most effective form of violence is legislative. The fight for democracy in Hong Kong – and the accompanying crackdown – is a prime example of how...
Pick of the Week: Lawrence Calver Simchowitz Gallery
Lawrence Calver’s first US show at Simchowitz Gallery, “On the Off Chance,” is one of the most fascinating studies in material of any show in Los Angeles that I’ve had the chance to review. Calver is not a traditional fine artist; his background is in creative...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Naotaka Hiro The Box
Two side-by-side paintings face the gallery's front door, awaiting visitors like sentries. They have all the elements that characterize Naotaka Hiro's "Armor" exhibition, namely colorful swatches and fervid mark-making that expands from a vertical center line. The...
Pick of the Week: Guy Yanai Praz-Delavallade
Guy Yanai is irreplaceable. Not simply his vibrant, structured style (though that too is unique,) each of Yanai’s paintings carries an air of individuality and transience. Seeing them for the first time is a new wave crashing on the shore of your subconscious, dousing...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Rebecca Campbell L.A. Louver
The radiant and complex paintings in Rebecca Campbell's exhibition “Infinite Density, Infinite Light” draw from the past, yet are very much about the present. They explore the nature of family, the freedom of being a child and the fragile nature of memory. Using found...