A man sits center frame, drowned within an interior sea of red hues, arms spread as he pensively gazes against our direction into the distance of the frame. A woman laughs cross-legged on a stool, mouth wide open as if paused mid-speech or laughter, as a grinning fox...
Rina Banerjee's assemblages are fantastical potpourris of color, texture and cultural references. The title of her 20-year retrospective, "Make Me a Summary of the World," encapsulates her ambition of laying bare the fluid interdependency of ostensibly discrete...
In life (1922-1995), Cameron's art was often overshadowed by her colorful bohemian persona as occultist and wife of Jack Parsons. But one need know nothing about her to appreciate her drawings and paintings, each of which exudes an intense bewitching presence. Some of...
Nicolas Party's imaginary world contains no wilderness, only bright graphic artifice based loosely on nature and historical art. In his depopulated landscapes such as Trees (all works 2020), tree trunks and branches are smooth cylinders whose leaves fall like confetti...
The economy is crashing; coronavirus and panic are spreading like wildfires; and political lines are being drawn in shifting sands. What better time to enjoy the near-apocalyptic visions of Lisa Adams and Kelly McLane? "Unreality," their first joint show, arrives at...
Evoking life's inconstancy, little is certain in Gracie DeVito's paintings, which seem to shift in the blink of an eye from abstraction to representation and back again. Even the edges of her shaped canvases seem to sway, slump, wiggle and distend as though struggling...
Irvine-based painter Francis DiFronzo has a knack for capturing the eerie desolation of the Mojave Desert. The title of his show, "Proof of Life," speaks to the fact that his paintings are devoid of people, yet replete with signs of civilization and the desert's own...
"Celebrate the Bizarre," urges the header on postcards for "Morph" at Mash Gallery; and the 12 artists in this show surely do. More specifically, they revel in distorting human form for metaphoric and emotive effect. Heads are sundered, patched and obliterated; bodies...
Lush foliage abuts geometric abstraction in Carolyn Castaño's vibrant paintings bursting with tropical flair. The Colombian-American artist amalgamates motifs from Latin America and the U.S so harmoniously that it's often difficult to pinpoint the origin of any given...
The dotty surfaces of Gerald Davis' paintings seem to flicker like tangled strings of tiny lights, amplifying the visionary eeriness of his eccentric renditions of classical subjects such as bathers. The LA painter's expressionistic pointillism recalls a wide range of...
Titled "The Sick Rose" after William Blake's 1794 poem and engraving, LA painter Laurie Nye's current exhibition is like a garden of botanical specimens evoking romance and malady. Describing a rose afflicted by the pernicious love of an invisible worm, Blake's...
What we take as concrete reality often seems as changeable as a hologram: a door appearing orange in the morning looks yellow in afternoon light; former familiars refashion their characters beyond recognition. Inklings of such slipperiness with regard to perception...
Sayre Gomez extracts strangeness and cultural significance from prosaic architectural facets of Southern California. The life-size paintings in his current show evoke banal intersections between commerce, fantasy and nostalgia: strip mall facades are romantically...
Few artists crisscross high-low categories as deftly as Kenny Scharf, whose whimsical work inhabits a gallery as strikingly as it does a street. Just down the road from his tire-shop mural, the exterior of Honor Fraser is currently festooned in a tacky crown of...
Dark humor pervades provocative works by Jesse Draxler, Jordan Weber and Mark Mulroney in "Don't Just Do Something, Sit There" at NO Gallery. These artists hail from different regions yet overlap in their hard-bitten manners of exploring mortality and contemporary...
Jasmine Little's ceramics and Robert Nava's paintings both incorporate breezily limned imagery of fantastic creatures and people. At a distance, the large stoneware vessels in Little's show, "Retrograde," appear deceptively old-fashioned; their brown-and-white palette...
Alejandro Cardenas' paintings present surreal myths woven partly from the artist's personal memories. The title of his show, "Calusa Garden," refers to a park near his childhood home on Key Biscayne, Florida. The periwinkle blue skies and green forests in paintings...
"Life Still," the title of Kirsten Everberg's show at 1301PE, underscores her paintings' implied precariousness. Bringing to mind the line from Shakespeare's Hamlet, "All that lives must die," Everberg's animal subjects appear quite animate; yet as in Dutch vanitas...
Subscribe to our weekly Gallery Rounds Newsletter for new Reviews, Art opps, Art Events, & More every week!