Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Forgotten Roots: How Los Angeles Shaped Robert Rauschenberg

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At LACMA (Through February 10, 2019)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Revealing the divine in the forsaken and the sublime in the mundane, beloved late Neo-Dadaist Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) pens his love letter to Los Angeles in LACMA’s current retrospective Rauschenberg: In And About L.A. Although typically associated with the New York art scene of the 1950s and 60s, this iconic collagist actually derived a great deal of creative inspiration from this sprawling metropolis and its sun-drenched shores. [Read more…]

Forcella Reigns: The Men Who Play Cards

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at ZJU Theater, North Hollywood (through 9 September)
Reviewed by Hoyt Hilsman

Neapolitian painter and set designer Francesca Bifulco and her collaborator, musician and sound designer Alex Schetter, have recreated a virtual Naples streetscape that focuses on the timeless ritual of men playing cards. The title of the installation, Forcella Reigns, refers to the rundown neighborhood in Naples that is overrun with violence and organized crime. Yet amidst the poverty and chaos of the Forcella neighborhood, Bifulco has observed patterns of life that are universal in their richness. [Read more…]

In Paris: 1,2,3 Data Group Show; Suter’s Radial Grammar; and VHILS’ Fragments Urbains

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Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

1,2,3 Data group show, Batia Suter’s Radial Grammar, and VHILS’ Fragments Urbains are three exhibitions of contemporary art taking place in Paris this season. While they vary greatly in form and content, they all use found materials as the source for their art and address the relationship of humans to their environment, both natural and manmade.

VHILS, Fragments Urbains (19 May – 29 June 2018)
at Centre Centquatre, Paris

The Portuguese artist Alexandre Farto, who goes by the street tag VHILS (his favorite letters to spray as a teenager), came to fame for his street art first in his native Seixal, and then in a number of metropolises around the world. He created images by stripping, tearing, scratching through layers of posters on billboards, in what he calls an archeological process. [Read more…]

Peter Hujar: Speed of Life

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at the Morgan Library and Museum, NYC
Reviewed by Jed Perl

Catalog of the exhibition edited by Joel Smith
Fundación MAPFRE/Aperture, 246 pp., $50.00
Courtesy of The New York Review of Books

This is what the great photographer Brassaï, who spent a lifetime recording the merry-go-round of twentieth-century Paris, had to say about his work: “I hunt for what is permanent.” Peter Hujar, who photographed New York and died in the city in 1987, could have said the same thing. Hujar’s achievement, the subject of a compact, engrossing retrospective now at the Morgan Library and Museum, has a nerve-wracking power. Here is an artist who yearns for the certainty of forever while refusing to deny the indeterminacy of the present. Hujar explores a considerable range of subjects. The exhibition, entitled “Peter Hujar: Speed of Life” includes portraits of friends, erotic nudes, nocturnal cityscapes, and studies of animals in the countryside. Hujar responds to different subjects in different ways. He’s there for the subject. The work never suggests a signature style. Avidity itself is his style. Henry Miller called Brassaï the eye of Paris. Peter Hujar is the eye of New York. [Read more…]

Jess: Secret Compartments

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Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot
at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (through September 7, 2018)

A lifetime-spanning survey of works by Jess (1923-2004) is bound to be a bit meta — because the work that Jess produced across his long career was itself always already a survey of his own life and times. From his earliest paintings in the 1950s to his latter-day collage-based compositions made well into the 1990s, with drawing, sculpture, and video collaborations along the way, Jess was at every moment consciously assembling an archive of his own obsessions. These included but were not limited to literature (especially James Joyce), history, science, mythology, flowers, cats, magazines, tag sales, and interior design. His voracious visual appetite ranged from dreamy homoerotic fantasy to pragmatic current-events clippings, and above all he loved a good story. [Read more…]

Immersive Forays Into Klimt, Schiele and Hundertwasser

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at Atelier des Lumières, Paris (through 11 November 2018)
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Imagine entering a large raw space plunged in darkness. A few structures barely emerge out of the gloom, adding complexity to the basic box: a cube, a rectangular cuboid, and a cylinder. Images start fading in or flaring up on theblack surfaces. Hugely enlarged photographs of people, buildings, bridges, paintings by super famous artists such as Van Gogh and Picasso and Michelangelo fill sequentially the vertical planes. Decorative or architectural elements from every period — balustrades, cornices, columns, metal arches, clockworks are projected on the smaller structures and on the floor. The photographic or graphic elements or details from the paintings duplicate, triplicate, multiply, creating a rhythmic composition. Blown-up out of all proportions, they are then shrunk back to flash, strobe, fade-out, zoom-by at high speed, making it all the more surprising that warnings for epileptics are not issued at the entrance. The experience is not unlike standing at Times Square at night, but the honks of the city are replaced by a classical music track, and fewer people mull around gaping at the bright spectacle. In fact, there is no need to even move, as the show takes place all around, and people do sit or even lie down. [Read more…]

Rick Bartow: Things You Know But Cannot Explain

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at The Autry Museum, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face…” — I Corinthians
“In today’s world, love, art and magic are greatly needed” — Fritz Scholder

Things You Know But Cannot Explain is the poetic title of the exquisite Rick Bartow retrospective at The Autry Museum. A heady brew of neo-expressionist drawing, painting and sculpture with lashings of Bacon, Basquiat, Kitaj, Scholder and even Nathan Olivera, this is a show not to be missed. Beautifully installed, with small videos strategically placed around with the artist candidly talking of his life in illuminating ways that enhance the viewer’s understanding of his work. No art jargon here. Just plainspoken words by the artist himself, who had struggled with alcoholism, PTSD and, towards the end of his life, two strokes (from which he would recover). It seems, upon further examination, that the title of the exhibit is more specific than poetic. After his strokes, Bartow knew “things” that he could not explain. [Read more…]

The Space Outside: Sculptures by Richard Pitts

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Reviewed by Jill Conner

Over the course of five decades Richard Pitts has migrated through the margins of New York City’s art world despite a flourishing career that began in the early 1970s and lasted until the late 1980s, when the popularity of the art market crashed. Once confidence fell, figurative art lost its elevated grace, became more human as a form, more literal and translatable, reflecting different degrees of self-doubt, loathing and inner shame. The weight of pluralism led to the loss of meaning. Painting was considered dead, a new cliché at the time. Richard Pitts stepped away from figurative art and entered into a long-term reflection that focused upon works he had made in the early 1960s while living in Germany, serving in the U.S. Army. [Read more…]

Spotlight—Selections from Kehinde Wiley’s The World Stage: Israel

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at Skirball Cultural Center (Through 2 September 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Replete with royal, religious, and luscious floral imagery, Los Angeles-born painter Kehinde Wiley’s Old Master-inspired portraits not only subvert art historical tradition but also notions of power and cultural identity. Renowned for depicting traditionally underrepresented figures, typically African and African-American men, the artist envelopes these empowered subjects in Eurocentric symbols of status and wealth. With the unveiling of Wiley’s noble yet vibrant portrait of former President Barack Obama earlier this year, the timing of the Skirball Center’s Spotlight—Selections from Kehinde Wiley’s The World Stage: Israel could not feel more apropos. This intimate presentation delves into the artist’s photorealistic oeuvre through two monumental paintings, each depicting young Ethiopian men living in Israel. [Read more…]

David Leggett and Ryan Richey: Mixed Emotions

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at Various Small Fires (Through August 25, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

What is the role of humor in art? For most of human history, both fine and folk art firmly resided in the realm of the serious. It is only in the past century that artists have begun to experiment with the idea of comedy in their work. We can trace this revolutionary notion back to Dadaist Marcel Duchamp’s landmark creation, Fountain (1917). Rather than sculpt a whimsical, enchanting depiction of some goddess or river nymph, the artist simply displayed a mass-produced porcelain urinal and labeled it art. Two years later, this celebrated conceptual artist further flirted with this facetious tone in L.H.O.O.Q., a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503) complete with a penciled-on mustache. [Read more…]

Jenny Saville Still Manages To Amaze With Ancestors

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at Gagosian, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

Jenny Saville has always reveled in rendering flesh. Her earliest show at Gagosian, at the tail end of the 90s, established her ambitious scope: big, generously impasto’d gestural nudes that flew in the face of current painting trends. Lucian Freud once famously said that he wanted his “paint to work as flesh.” Saville also focuses on “paint as flesh,” but not in the  service of a heightened form of portraiture that physically embodies the sitter. Rather, Saville is interested in using paint to, as it were, flay the flesh she depicts, deconstructing her subject matter while simultaneously layering it with art historical references. [Read more…]

Passing Through Time, Memory, Decay: A Journey That Wasn’t

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at the Broad Museum (through February 2019)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Time. It can be both friend and foe. It eludes us, slips through our fingers and yet also seemingly extends ad infinitum. The fourth dimension in all of its frustratingly enigmatic glory serves as spellbinding subject matter for the Broad Museum’s current group showcase, A Journey That Wasn’t. Rather than focus on a particular artist, movement, or epoch, co-curators Ed Schad and Sarah Loyer instead chose to delve into this abstract, multifaceted concept. Comprised of 55 rarely seen works, all from the Broad’s vast collection, this sweeping exhibition acts as a philosophical treatise on the passage of time, memory, and decay. [Read more…]

Getting Lost On The High Ground Of Greater Than L.A.

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at Desert Center, Los Angeles (through 21 July 2018)
Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot 

There’s something about Los Angeles that makes people constantly wrestle with what it means and never tire of describing how life is lived here. No other place, not even Paris or New York, has sponsored such a compendium of self-reflexive art and literature, almost all somehow both obsessive and ambivalent at the same time. L.A. is the kind of place where people who’ve never been here have more passion and frequently more insight about its nature than natives, which is to say, Hollywood especially, is such an aspirational, archetypal place, that there’s almost more cultural currency in projection and fantasy than in a direct yet diffuse experience of it. [Read more…]

Manifesta 12 Promises The World, And Delivers

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by Arabella Hutter von Arx

“I have pushed for the transformation of Manifesta . . . into a more inclusive, pragmatic and sustainable format that turns signals into substance.” – Hedwig Fijen, founding director of Manifesta

1. Opening Rites To Our Common Humanity

Buzz words fly around at the press conference launching Manifesta 12 in the breathtaking Renaissance Church of Santa Caterina: incubator, civic cooperation, testing ground, sustainability, interconnection, flowing networks. The 12th edition of the biennial took as guiding vision the “Planetary Garden,” a term coined by French gardening philosopher Gilles Clément. They add that Manifesta, the nomadic biennial, was created in the early 90s as a response to the erection of new partitions and borders in Europe after they had been felled in the previous decade. Manifesta 12 wants to shift perspectives, in order to imagine and promote caring for the world through collaboration, the second tier of its title, “Cultivating Coexistence.” This “cultivating,” a gardening of sorts, is to replace the existing paradigm of one species’ domination at all cost. The concept of cultivation is to be applied to the city of Palermo itself, with the ambition of bringing lasting change and empowering its citizens of all origins and classes. [Read more…]

Judy Chicago’s Birth Project: Born Again

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at the Pasadena Museum of California Art
through October 7 (upon which time the museum will permanently close)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

“If men had babies, there would be thousands of images of the crowning.” – Judy Chicago, 1982

Since 2002, East Union Street’s illustrious Pasadena Museum of California Art has reliably showcased some of the city’s most vibrant, eclectic, and socially-conscious exhibitions, including 2018’s The Feminine Sublime and Testament of the Spirit: Paintings by Eduardo Carrillo. As a modern and contemporary art hub renowned for presenting Southern California’s finest art and artists, this progressive artspace has undoubtedly elevated Los Angeles’s cultural discourse over the course of its 16-year run. With the recent news that the PMCA board has decided to close this beloved museum following the conclusion of its current exhibition, Judy Chicago’s Birth Project: Born Again, in October due to fundraising issues, witnessing this exquisite collection of Chicago’s rarely-seen feminist tapestries from the early 1980s in this transcendent, sublime location is now all the more important. [Read more…]

Made In L.A. Is A Tapestry Of Diversity, And A Golden One

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at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Like an intricately woven tapestry, Made in L.A. 2018 stitches together a diverse sampling of some of the most dynamic and noteworthy artists working in Los Angeles today. Presently on display at the UCLA Hammer Museum, this sweeping biennial exhibition boasts 32 textile, performance, painting, video, sculpture, assemblage, photography, and installation artists hailing from a total of 13 states and seven countries. Together they weave a grand and gripping narrative highlighting critical socio-political issues, including representation and marginalization. [Read more…]

Archive Fever: Repetition And History In The Works Of Kudzanai Chiurai

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by Khanya Mashabela

Kudzanai Chiurai’s practice visualises history and its tendency for repetition. The cyclical nature of history is as much a subject as Colonial and Post-Colonial southern Africa and its governance. He shows us history outside of the limitations of linearity and its related belief of progression or digression. This representation is particularly potent within the African context, largely because its position as ‘inferior’ within the binaries of First World and Third world — and White and Black — relies upon the belief that Africa and Africans are connected to the ancient past, while the West has been portrayed as having a monopoly on modernity and postmodernity. [Read more…]

Hung Viet Nguyen’s Artistic and Spiritual Alchemy

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by Genie Davis

Artist Hung Viet Nguyen is a magician and an alchemist. His paintings evoke the beauty of nature, its wonder and its spiritual quality. He takes the real and reconfigures it, shapes it into a mysterious, reverent space. With images that are both landscapes and stunning mosaic-like patterns, the Vietnamese-born, Los Angeles-based artist transports viewers into paintings that resemble an enchanted realm. [Read more…]

Tomas Saraceno’s Literally Uplifting Solar Rhythms

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at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

As much a visionary as he is an artist, Tomas Saraceno, a visionary artist, clearly follows in the footsteps of such innovators as Buckminster Fuller, Paolo Soleri, and others whose aesthetic brilliance parallels their deep desire to sustain humanity on this planet. The influence of his friend, the great Olafur Eliasson, for whom he briefly worked as a studio assistant, is obvious. But Saraceno goes beyond flexing the muscles of his considerable technical flair to invent designs that are or can be implemented as part of his Aerocene project, started in 2015, the stated goal of which “proposes a new epoch, one of atmospherical [sic] and ecological consciousness, where we together earn how to float and live in the air, and to achieve an ethical collaboration with the environment.” [Read more…]