Art. Word. Thought.
at Fort Gansevoort, Los Angeles (through February 8)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
Opening an outpost in Los Angeles, the well-known New York-based gallery, Fort Gansevoort, chose artist, author, and play-write Christopher Myers’ Drapetomania as its inaugural exhibition in this city. Myers’ large-scale, mural-sized textile works and powerfully bleak sculptures create a stirring initial show. [Read more…]
at Nicodem Gallery, Los Angeles (through February 1)
Reviewed by Eve Wood
Imagine a faceless orgy, a concupiscence of bodies – colliding, embracing, penetrating, wherein the entirety of the surrounding picture plane is reduced to a senseless expanse of writhing and roiling flesh. In Philipp Kremer’s work, the notion of desire is determined by an exploration into genderless ideation. Sex is not strictly sex, nor is this beauteous lovemaking, but an electrified and energized landscape of human intersections – hand in hand, arm over arm, face into face, thigh across thigh, torsos twisting and contorting in a vaguely nihilistic expanse where no two people ever seem to truly connect. [Read more…]
at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (through January 5)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie
Lari Pittman’s momentous retrospective at Hammer Museum, is not only the most ambitious exhibition organized by the museum but arguably the most important exhibition anywhere in the country — or perhaps the world, today. This career-spanning exhibition of 80 densely layered monumental paintings and 50 vibrant works on paper ends the decade on a jubilant note because as the curator Connie Butler says, “the show is really about revelation.” [Read more…]
at The Broad, Los Angeles (through February 16)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner
“Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” —Edward Said
“To stay alive you must slay silence” –Simin Behbahani
Shirin Neshat’s dense and nearly overwhelming exhibition I Will Greet The Sun Again interrogates the very nature of reality, myth, perception and memory with her piercing portraits of women whose face, hands and feet are covered with intricate, decorative Farsi text; her haunting videos reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s mysterious starkness, and her later portraits, which compile faces of the exiled. Neshat’s compelling photographs (black and white) and mystical films (black and white as well as color) examine cultural norms surrounding the wearing of the veil, as seen through both the Western and Islamic gaze along with the cultural dislocation suffered by individuals in diaspora. [Read more…]
at Tanya Bonadkar Gallery, NYC and MoMa, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban
For several decades, Sarah Sze has artfully transformed detritus into art, whether it’s the corner of Central Park at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, where she submerged a mini-replica of the white brick apartment complex across the street, filling it with objects from socks to alarm clocks, (Corner Plot, 2006), or the clever 1997 transformation of a closet in the Tribeca loft of Michael and Susan Hort, major Manhattan art collectors. Consider her the poet of clutter. [Read more…]
at Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles (through January 5, 2020)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
I looked a coyote right in the face
On the road to Baljennie near my old hometown
He went running thru the whisker wheat
Chasing some prize down
And a hawk was playing with him
Coyote was jumping straight up and making passes
He had those same eyes just like yours
Under your dark glasses
……………………………………….– Joni Mitchell, “Coyote”
Joni Mitchell’s song, “Coyote,” about a lover she describes as a shape-shifting trickster, seems a fitting soundtrack to the Autry Museum of the American West’s Coyote Leaves the Res: The Art of Harry Fonseca. The beautiful exhibition is the inaugural presentation of Fonseca’s work taken from the museum’s acquisition of the artist’s vast estate. In it, viewers meet an evolving humanization of the artist’s character of Coyote, an elusive figure who could very well have slipped into Mitchell’s heart and music. [Read more…]
at Mash Gallery, Los Angeles (through December 21)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
The group exhibition MORPH is thematically about transformation, boundary pushing, and serves as an exhilarating tour de force by the artists as they explore edgy, surreal and transitory forms. But more striking perhaps than its theme is its color. Vibrant, dazzling, surprising and strange, mixed with heightened, dimensional textural elements or purely 2D ink and paint. It is that technicolor vividness that grabs the viewer first, almost daring the eye to enter thrillingly into its radiant, reality-bending dimension. [Read more…]
at California African American Museum, Los Angeles (through March 1, 2020)
Reviewed by Seren Sensei
Everything old is new again. This motto has held steady for years in the world of fashion, with it’s here-today-gone-tomorrow trends, and nowhere has it rung more true than in the waves of 1990’s urban culture that are currently enjoying a huge resurgence on runways. As numerous high fashion and luxury brands clamor into the billion dollar market for streetwear, Cross Colours: Black Fashion in the 20th Century, showing at the California African American Museum (CAAM), is a fresh and dynamic exhibit examining the history of the recently rebooted Cross Colours: a Black-owned brand that was one of the first to cater exclusively to a young, Black, and ‘urban,’ i.e. inner-city, customer who predominantly wore streetwear. A testament to its culture-shifting perspective, the retrospective opens with the story of how the line came to be, and then moves through its brand history and significance in time as viewers explore the gallery. [Read more…]
at National Portrait Gallery, London, through 5 January 2020
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones
In her new solo show at the National Portrait Gallery in London, New York artist Elizabeth Peyton offers a procession of glistening vignettes, portraits of famous and not-so-famous faces, whose cool freshness leaves the visitor with an excited, if slightly outmoded sense of pursuit. Many of her male subjects carry a melancholy, morning-after expression that signals an unabashed adoption of the female gaze. Peyton has painted Kurt Cobain and David Bowie, David Hockney and scenes from the Twilight films, as well as personal friends and lovers. Her eye tends towards the sheen of beauty, where cheekbones are elevated and noses are streamlined. [Read more…]
at LACMA (through November 11)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie
Mary Corse is finally having her moment in a breakout role as the luminary of “light painting.” Although Corse has received critical acclaim since the sixties she has been overshadowed by male SoCal Light and Space artists. Interestingly, it took New York women curators to revise the canon with a fresh spin on Corse’s singular importance as the first light painter because she does not depict light as a subject but paints with light as her source material. [Read more…]
at Launch Gallery, Los Angeles (through November 16)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
Magic is the word that first comes to mind when describing the two-artist exhibition currently at Launch Gallery. A Love Letter is an exhibition of landscapes — quintessentially Los Angeles landscapes — that serve as landmarks for both the city’s, and the artists’, zeitgeist. [Read more…]
at Roberts Projects (through November 16)
Reviewed by Eve Wood
How do artists convey silence within two-dimensional space? I would argue that it is difficult to create an authentic connection between the subject and the viewer, and it is even more difficult to create a space of quietude and self-reflection even as the artist is in the active process of divining another person’s inner life. Yet all great portraiture is as much about the artist as it is the subject. There are many great examples of artists who have successfully explored their own personal connections to their subjects and, by extension, their viewers. Alice Neel, for example, whose portraits of friends and family are extraordinary in that they encapsulate not only a specific character but the breadth and tempo of the artist’s relationship with that specific person. [Read more…]
at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles ( through November 2)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie
Enrique Martínez Celaya’s haunting exhibition at Kohn Gallery is conceived as visual poetry predicated upon Virgil’s phrase “the tears of things,” from Aeneid ( Book 1, line 462), about an encounter with a mural of the battle of Troy which made the Trojan hero weep as he remembered those he had loved and lost. This famous poetic passage about the power of painting continues to fascinate scholars because it is open to multiple subjective and objective interpretations. [Read more…]
at Luis De Jesus (through October 26)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie
Laura Krifka enjoys doing things she is not supposed to do. Having absorbed the tenets of neoclassical painting, she bypasses high-minded seriousness by adding a candy-coated veneer of hyper-artificiality adopted from 1950s MGM musicals to the domestic decor of private scenes she then undercuts with a deviant sexual subtext recalling David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. This irresistible mix of dexterity, decor, decorum and deviance makes viewing her paintings a guilty pleasure — rather like sneaking into a peep show or secretly spying on neighbor’s forbidden acts. We can view the conventions of art, cinema and domestic life through a bemused female gaze with no-holds-barred on taking delight in human foibles. [Read more…]
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
at The Neue Galerie, NYC (through January 13)
Reviewed by John Haber
No movement in early modern art was as cosmopolitan as German Expressionism — and the group that called itself Die Brücke. Who else took to the streets when Picasso was just finding his way from circus performers to still life? Who else first exhibited in a former butcher’s shop, where it also met? When, decades later, Adolf Hitler denounced the movement as “degenerate art,” his rhetoric feels familiar from religious conservatives even now blaming a perceived moral decline on urban liberals. And who in Die Brücke was as cosmopolitan as its oldest founding member, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner? [Read more…]
at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (through January 5, 2020)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner
…there’s no success like failure and failure’s no success at all
Bob Dylan
The painter’s first duty is to be free
Philip Guston
In 1970, New York City was the undisputed center of the art world and 57th street in midtown Manhattan was the epicenter of New York’s art world with its plethora of blue chip galleries. Art and theater critics reigned supreme – they could and would ruin careers with a gleeful flourish of their poison pens. When Philip Guston, acclaimed Abstract-Expressionist, showed his new large-scale paintings at Marlborough in October, 1970, he was roundly excoriated for his switch from abstract art to figuration. Not only was the work (horrors!) figurative, it was rudely cartoonish and crudely drawn. [Read more…]
at LACMA (through April 5, 2020)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
Betye Saar’s riveting, 40-object exhibition currently at LACMA offers a fascinating insight into the artist’s process. It’s strong focus on the power of redemptive faith and personal strength in the face of adversity is passionate and compelling – which can be frankly said of all Saar’s work. The exhibition also aches with possibility: Saar is a prolific artist, and as extensive as this exhibition is in terms of an insightful view of her sketchbooks, the longing remains to see more of her finished works, of which there are fewer than 20 exhibited here. [Read more…]
at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Reviewed by Seren Sensei
In a short video clip during Figures of Speech, Virgil Abloh’s show at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago, he mused on his upbringing and influences. Born the son of Ghanaian immigrants in a small town in Illinois, he discussed the wonders of growing up “in the middle of nowhere,” and the freedom it gave him to explore, and to create, without feeling beholden to any predominant ideology or method of production. [Read more…]
Alert the critics: The cutting edge of New York City’s art avantgarde can now be found at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store. Amid the blistering doldrums of summer, Apple has offered [AR]T Walk a guided tour of their new augmented reality exhibit. Co-curated with the New Museum, the tour is being offered in five other cities around the world: London, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, though the latter has been suspended indefinitely due to the political instability. [Read more…]