LA ARTS DISTRICT SANS ARTISTS LA, LA, our art scene is changing so rapidly. On a recent visit to the Arts District for a preview at Hauser & Wirth, I was struck by how tidy the neighborhood is looking these days. When that gallery opened two-and-a-half years ago,...
Stacen Berg, senior director at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, joined the gallery in 2011. Founded in 1992 in Zurich by Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth and Ursula Hauser, the gallery now boasts branches in multiple cities, including London, Hong Kong and New York. When...
‘What is it with dudes and trees?’ I wonder for a second as I’m about to put this up on-line—thinking more about Shakespeare’s pastoral romantic comedy than the cool oasis of a summer group show René-Julien Praz has curated at Praz-Delavallade’s L.A. premises. (Though...
I love most animals, in fact pretty much all animals, including some species especially hostile to human life (maybe those most of all). But I’m not one to fetishize them – or many other things, either (I think). However, whether it’s because of social media or just...
In much of his work, Paul McCarthy explores juvenilia to an uncomfortably advanced degree, finding profane inspiration in all things coprocentric and aesthetically offensive. But McCarthy’s current exhibition at the Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles gallery appears to...
Roughly four years ago, Paul McCarthy opened the sprawling installation “WS” at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, platforming (and rupturing) the domestic fantasy at the center of Disney’s Snow White fairy tale while playing out a vivisection of its narrative on...
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...
Holland has an illustrious past and rich history in art, from golden age painters Rembrandt and Vermeer through modernist legends van Gogh, Mondrian and the de Stijl group, Cobra Dutch artists and expatriate Willem de Kooning, to enigmatic Conceptualist Bas Jan Ader,...
The Day of Forevermore, Marnie Weber’s first feature film, is the culmination of the artist’s long career as a weaver of macabre and otherworldly scenarios through art, film and music. Over the last 25 years Weber has created her own distinctive realm of avant-garde...
Fifty years ago—in May 1966—the Velvet Underground played their legendary West Coast debut at Hollywood nightclub The Trip as part of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. On the first night, the joint was packed with curiosity-seeking hipster celebrities; Cher...
In the late ‘70s, I would carry the Sony Portapak for my artist stepmother, Rabyn Blake, across muddy fields in Southern France as she filmed a shepherdess whose name sounded like “leg of lamb” in French, or shot shimmering vistas of Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire....
In this unnerving performance video about child abuse, McCarthy, along with Mike Kelley, who co-stars, play a “father” and “son” respectively. As Kelley cowers nervously, McCarthy performs a series of penetrations on a variety of inanimate objects — violently stuffing...
Like many practicing artists, Martin Durazo is also an educator, having taught at colleges like Otis and Pomona. But he’s made an indelible mark as a public school teacher, having taught at Inner-City Arts Los Angeles, the Montebello Unified School District. Since...
If anybody reading this is looking for a topic for an art book, I would like to suggest La Fura dels Baus. Although they are well known in Europe (they designed the opening ceremony for the Barcelona Olympics, and have had other pieces performed before audiences of...
This survey of Al Payne’s work goes back a half century and spans his entire career, establishing the late artist as an assured painter and colorist, no matter what his subject matter or his style: figurative or abstract, conceptual or retinal. That is, the survey...
BBC A huge, green, inflatable sculpture on a famous Paris square has raised a storm for its resemblance to a sex toy, with the artist attacked in the street.. . . READ MORE
Dear Readers,Lately I’ve been getting wistful for the past. It’s not that I want to go back, never to return. It’s more that I yearn for more simple and innocent times; I’m not sure I prefer wisdom to naiveté.It’s the direction art has been going that has made me...
The residential valley neighborhood wasn’t what I was expecting when I went to Chas Smith’s studio for our interview. Big shade trees lined the wide boulevards of modest houses and neat lawns. Smith has been Paul McCarthy’s main art assistant for over a decade, and...
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