Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Meditations on the Mystical Sublime in Kourosh Beigpour’s Mandal

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at Advocartsy, Los Angeles (through 4 February 2023)
Reviewed by Christopher Ian Lutz

The human mind seeks connectivity. The writing of letters and numbers, and the drawing of lines in a painting, are acts of connecting points. Furthermore, geometry, language, narration, astrology, and philosophy are intellectual means to connect points that align with our thoughts and emotions. This symmetry of our subjective experience with the objective physical world and universal phenomenon provides us with a sense of completeness. Our nature is complete, but we do not always have a sense of fullness. We design and search for wholeness in things outside ourselves to understand our identity. Even with such a sense of self-realization in our minute incarnation, there is a need for absolute truth to understand our relationship with the greater wholeness of the universe. Therefore, we extend a connection to all things to conceive of a divine form. However we conceive of divinity, whether spiritually or materially, the source of creation is pertinent to our sense of self. It is fundamental to our conception of perfection, for which we shape morals and law. The letter, the number, and the shape are not merely instrumental marks but are philosophical arguments that are elemental to our religious, political, and social ideologies. [Read more…]

Glenn Hardy’s Who Am I If I Don’t Represent?

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at Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles (through 11 February 2023)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Glenn Hardy’s second solo exhibition, aptly title Who Am I If I Don’t Represent? — at Charlie James Gallery in LA’s Chinatown — comprises a visual investigation into the complex nature of black identity while also standing as positive visual documents of daily activities, personal victories, triumphs, and moments of deep introspection as well. Hardy is a master of the nuanced narrative, telling stories of seemingly ordinary occurrences, like playing basketball, for instance, or drinking Pina Coladas in the pool, or enjoying a day in the sun at a family reunion. Yet beneath the surface of these apparent innocuous actions is, on the part of the artist, an abiding commitment to social justice. Deeply affected by the barrage of negative images that horribly misrepresent the black experience within social media, Hardy has chosen to amplify the positive aspects of his own lived human experience, declaring a personal and communal commitment to reassert his personal identity and to “live unapologetically and without fear” within today’s troublingly present moment. [Read more…]

An Interview with Pae White

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Slow Winter Sun, at Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco (through 25 February 2023)
by Amadour

Artist Pae White captivates her audience with a solo exhibition, Slow Winter Sun, at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco, featuring new monochromatic paper-clay paintings on wood, iridescent ceramic sculptures, and tapestries. Timed in proximity to the city’s FOG Design+Art Fair, this show centers on the relationship between humanity, nature, and technology. We discuss the artist’s connection to California, her shapeshifting materials, and her processes in the studio. [Read more…]

Ibrahim El-Salahi: Pain Relief Drawings

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at The Drawing Center, NYC (through 15 January)
Reviewed by Robyn Creswell

Pain Relief Drawings
by Ibrahim El-Salahi
Contributors: Laura Hoptman, Hassan Musa
Exhibition Catalogue, 157pp, $35.00
NYR

The face is a mask, vaguely leonine, narrowing from its enormous eyes to a snout of flared nostrils and a small mouth, twisted into what might be a grimace or a grin. The contours of the nose branch up into a network of wrinkles around the eyes, then extend out into fiddlehead ferns sprouting from the temples. The gaze is so insistent that it is easy to ignore the virtuosity of all the little lines: the sagging pouches of the eyes, the subdued yet prickly whiskers along the jaws, the dots of stubble on the upper lip and double creases at the knuckles, the striped upholstery of the chair. Strikingly, the sitter’s left arm seems to reach out beyond the frame, which crops the arm at its wrist. Is he holding up a mirror to himself (or a phone)? It is a self-portrait of the artist in an armchair, examining himself—and us—through a screen. [Read more…]

In Conversation with Artist Jim Shaw

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Jim Shaw: Thinking the Unthinkable, at Gagosian, Beverly Hills (12 January – 25 February 2023)
by Amadour

Artist Jim Shaw captures the tantalizing spectacle of Hollywood in a new series of paintings and sculptures in his exhibition Thinking the Unthinkable, opening at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. Last month I visited the artist at his studio in Highland Park, Los Angeles, to view the work for this show and to speak with him about his many muses. A prolific drawer, Shaw has mountains of sketches from which he prepares his ideas for forthcoming paintings. In this interview, we plug into his infatuation with film, stories of Hollywood personalities, and secret societies. [Read more…]

Freedom and the Postwar Avant-Garde

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Reviewed by Erik Hmiel

The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War
by Louis Menand
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 880pp., $18.89

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I played in punk-rock bands. Not just punk-rock bands, hardcore-punk-rock bands, bands you might even call post-punk. We played shows in basements and garages, record stores and art spaces, cafes and homeless shelters. We played to 100 people and to zero. We hated the radio and were enthralled by our involvement with a national network of young people who made music outside of the confines of a commercial ecosystem. I even came to disdain the calls of older independent musicians who–suddenly confronted with a loss of revenue from illegal downloading services like Napster and the bootleg copies offered by the CD-R—made genuine, heartfelt appeals to the connection between artistic labor and material compensation. Punk was “beyond” such an outdated way of thinking about art. What was truly radical and inspirational about punk-rock was that no one cared about money. We existed in our own ecosystem, played to each other, patronized specific record stores, and otherwise went on with our lives without the metaphysical baggage associated with being ‘Artists’. Without knowing it, we simultaneously embraced the abiding ideal of the historical avant-garde’s sense of radicality—art as oblique challenge to staid conventions—and what the German art historian Hans Belting, writing in 1987, called ‘The End of the History of Art.’[1] [Read more…]

An Interview with Gerard & Kelly

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by Amadour
.

Artist duo Gerard & Kelly personify the collaborative nature of art making. Their exhibition, Panorama, at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, displays a dynamic video with three dancers questioning the colonialist narratives on the ceiling mural of the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, now the Pinault Collection. The artists also work with silkscreening in their Glyphs series, which explores notions of  “orientation” and the multilayered works of composer Julius Eastman. In this conversation, we discuss the duo’s many collaborators and influences, how they articulate their vision for performance, and their time in art school.

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Henry Taylor’s B Side: Where Mind Shapes Itself to Canvas

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Henry Taylor: B Side
at MOCA Grand, Los Angeles (through 30 April 2023)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Ages ago when there were LP records and 45s, the B side of a popular single made allowances for experimentation and could be counted on as an alternative vision to the more mainstream and compulsory hit single. B sides were not the reason you bought the album, but they were perhaps a more authentic representation of the artist’s vision, and every so often a great B side would feel akin to unearthing gold. Henry Taylor’s thirty-year retrospective at MOCA Grand pays homage to the unexpected, the visceral, and the odd man out, and like any successful B side, you want to keep listening. [Read more…]

On Wing With Word Through Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus

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Gagosian at Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (through 25 March 2023)
by Rachel Reid Wilkie

Los Angeles poet Rachel Reid Wilkie was given the task of walking into Anselm Kiefer’s Exodus — a literally monumental exhibition, in that each of these paintings are upwards of 30’ tall — and addressing the colossal artworks “cold,” as in spontaneously on the spot. Below is her 7-part response, with each video speaking to one painting as Wilkie circles through the cavernous, faintly-lit room: [Read more…]

Yehonatan Koenig’s Subversion of the Ordinary

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Knowing Not Knowing, at Matt Drey Arts (presenting with the Kava Collective)
by Mat Gleason

The art of Yehonatan Koenig is a subatomic soiree, every mark-making molecule involved in contributing to a higher purpose along the way.

There is form and structure revealed here, an elegant point in the digressions of a thousand or more marks, each its own act of lending to the whole. [Read more…]

Communication Breakdown: Grant Wallace, His Heirs & the Legacy of a Forgotten Genius

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Grant Wallace: Over the Psychic Radio
at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, NYC (through 3 December 2022)

By Michael Bonesteel

Freelance writer and editor Deborah Coffin of Albany, California, was in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley in 1997 when she first encountered street musician Brian Wallace at a party. “I had a friend who knew Brian,” she recalled. “Brian was obsessing about my friend because her red hair reminded him of this drawing by his grandfather, and he wanted her to see it.”

That may sound like a rather lame variation on the old pick-up line “come up and see my etchings,” but Brian was specifically thinking about his grandfather Grant Wallace’s portrait of the ravishing celestial goddess “Zu La Zu Lé.” [Read more…]

Louise Bourgeois: What Is The Shape of This Problem?

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at University of Southern California, Fisher Museum of Art. (through 3 December 3, 2022)
Reviewed by Margaret Lazzari

Louise Bourgeois is widely recognized for her sculptures and installations, but Louise Bourgeois: What is The Shape of This Problem is a wonderful opportunity to immerse yourself in her perhaps-lesser-known prints, fabric work and writings. This exhibit contains over 100 works that are personal, experimental, and revealing. The installation is dense and full of relatively small works, mostly hung salon style. It takes patience to go through the exhibit, but it is rewarding for its psychological complexity and conceptual richness. [Read more…]

Transcendence Beyond Erasure in Mohammad Barrangi’s Dreamscape

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at Advocartsy, Los Angeles (thru 5 November 2022)
Reviewed by Christopher Ian Lutz

Fantasy requires a symbolic vehicle to transport a character from the real world into the imaginary realm, where the laws of reality are subverted or obscured to justify an otherwise absurd event. The artist might depict the vehicle as a real object or an abstract phenomenon, but within the narrative context, a vehicle functionally serves as a symbol. The symbol is required because fantasy is not merely about the sensational physical immersion of the character but is more about the subjective experience the character undergoes while on their adventure. The otherworld represents the character’s unexplored subconscious mind and deeper emotional state. Furthermore, the entire narrative itself is symbolic for the audience. Within the narrative, the fictional “real” world and the fantastic world function as symbols to immerse the audience in their unmanifest subconscious. [Read more…]

An Interview with Idris Khan

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The Pattern of Landscape, at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles (through 5 November 2022)
by Ricky Amadour

Opening on the corner of Highland and De Longpre Avenues in the heart of Hollywood, Idris Khan’s The Pattern of Landscape is the inaugural exhibition at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles. Khan investigates color theory, text, and musical concepts through new large-scale paintings, bronze sculptures, watercolors on paper, and photography. Khan’s first Los Angeles presentation features music and text, fitting for an area predominantly known for legendary recording studios and music venues. Based in London, the artist speaks about his meticulous artistic process, lyrical expression, and affinity to architecture.

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Margaret Lazzari’s Luminous Breathing Space

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at George Billis Gallery, Los Angeles (through 8 October 2022)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“Things are not what they seem: nor are they otherwise.”
–Buddha

Margaret Lazzari’s luminous solo exhibition of paintings, entitled Breathing Space, were painted during the pandemic, and the exhibition title is indeed significant. It’s defined as a respite, a hiatus, or an interval where one takes time to recover. The paintings themselves shift seamlessly between abstraction and figuration, observation and invention evoking both delight and anxiety. Her painting process informs this ever-changing perspective that intrigues, confounds and compels the viewer upon sustained investigation of the images. [Read more…]

An Interview with Artist Eve Wood

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Eve Wood: Hanging in There to Hang On
at Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles (opening reception: Saturday, September 10, 7-10pm)

by Julie Adler

I met Eve Wood at Holly Matter, an art gallery on Heliotrope in East Hollywood, 22 years ago now. I recall she got up and read some of her poems. Incisive, cutting, direct, I thought, “wow, what a master,” and also “ouch,” but in a good way. We became friends there, and a few years later she brought out some drawings at a meal we were having, of people, animals with wide eyes, craggy lines. Sparse, comical and awkward, eyes staring back at you or away. Up until that point I had no idea Eve was also a visual artist. I had come from a performance art background but was also starting to get more engaged in 2 dimensions. She was eager to do a trade. It seemed we shared a similar concern for the human condition. And because we humans are funny in our grotesqueness, our derangement, our folly, we didn’t think it unusual to portray that. We also felt the comradery of being outsiders, even though we both grew up here in LA and went to art school here.

So, when Eve asked me to interview her for this publication, I did not hesitate. It’s been wonderful to burrow in with her on the ways and means of her process. She’s really not an outsider (nor am I.) She is as inside as it gets. [Read more…]

John Lurie’s The History of Bones

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Reviewed by Cintra Wilson

The History of Bones: A Memoir
by John Lurie
Random House, 435 pp., $28.00
NYRB

It was 1989 when I saw John Lurie on TV in a late-night advertisement for the new Lounge Lizards album, Voice of Chunk, which was “not available in stores” and selling exclusively through an 800 number. Operators were standing by. It was a charming, homemade ad, shot on grainy video, full of beautiful women dressed in international garb like they were animatronic dolls in Disneyland’s It’s a Small World ride. [Read more…]

Marlene Dumas’ Masks of Inborn Gods

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open-end, at Palazzo Grassi, Venice (through 8 January 2023)
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

Four relatively small artworks greet the visitor in the first room of the Marlene Dumas exhibit, open-end, at Palazzo Grassi. D-rection shows a young man contemplating his rather large and purple erection. A bluish white face and a brown face unite for a kiss in a nearly abstract closeup, Kissed. The subject of a Turkish Girl exhibits her vulva by holding up her legs at an unlikely angle. Finally, in the small loose drawing About Heaven, unidentified objects are flanked by a Dumas poem about death and eroticism. The visitor is warned: the exhibition shows sexually explicit works, contemplates issues of our common humanity such as race, and does not shrink from the esoteric. Anyone seeking a comfortable experience better turn back. [Read more…]

Donna Ferrato’s Magnificent Holy

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at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, NYC (through July 29 2022)
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

The small scale of Donna Ferrato’s snapshot-like black-and-white photographs belies their personal and political power. Whether they document the medical sinks and shelves in a now-shuttered Texas abortion clinic, or hone in on the badly bruised face of a domestic violence victim, they pack a sucker punch directly to the gut. [Read more…]