Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

The Universe As Canvas For Inscrutable Wonder

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Vija Celmins
at Matthew Marks Gallery, West Hollywood
Reviewed by Christopher Michno

In a world increasingly short of attention, Vija Celmins has for more than four decades been depicting a narrowly delimited set of subjects with a degree of emotional distance that has offered expansive space for reflective thought. In her current exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery in West Hollywood, Celmins returns again to these same subjects—the surface of the ocean and views of the night sky, littered, as it were, with stars. Accompanying the paintings, mezzotints and drypoints of these familiar motifs are examples of Celmins’ formal dexterity applied to trompe l’oeil objects, paired with real world counterparts: two rocks, one, a painted bronze, the other, geologic artifact; and two sets of blackboards, each set comprised of a fabrication and its found partner. These six objects engage themes that run beneath the immediate surface of her constructions: the natural world, and human systems of knowledge that reflect our constant probing of that world. [Read more…]

The Cross-Bordered DeLIMITations Bridges An Era’s Divide

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at Museo De La Artes, Guadalajara, Mexico
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“Delimitation means the act or process of fixing limits or boundaries of territorial constituencies in a country or province having a legislative body”

A timely and compelling installation at Museo De La Artes, Guadalajara, Mexico, entitled DeLIMITations by Mexican artist Marcus Ramirez ERRE and American artist David Taylor, examines and documents through stills, a documentary film, large-scale graphics, a solid-steel obelisk and historical research presented as wall text, the original border between the United States and Mexico as determined by the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1821. Their historical, political and cultural piece sets about to establish a border that was never physically marked by placing 47 steel obelisks along the 2400 mile border that never was. The treaty was rescinded 27 years later, after the Mexican-American War of 1846-8, when Mexico ceded 55% of its land to the United States in a land grab disguised as a war. Ulysses S. Grant was then a young lieutenant who fought in the war, and later admitted (and is quoted here in the exhibition) “I do not think there was ever a more wicked war…I thought so at the time…only I had not the moral courage to resign.” [Read more…]

Lauren Halsey: we still here, there

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at MOCA Grand Avenue (Through September 3, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Appearing simultaneously prehistoric and futuristic, the labyrinthine cave formations presented in MOCA Grand Avenue’s fantastical current installation, Lauren Halsey: we still here, there are bathed in ethereal suffusions of cerulean, emerald, magenta, and violet light. This site-specific showing presents maximalism at its most celebratory and poignant with several diverse sources of inspiration, including Chinese-Buddhist caves, the neighborhoods of South Los Angeles and Watts, the sculptural architecture of André Bloc, and the music of Parliament-Funkadelic. Punctuated with a plethora of tropical potted plants, reflection pools, and found objects, this exhibition exists as a wondrous, whimsical realm, a vision of a just and inclusive society. [Read more…]

Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin

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at MOCA Grand Avenue (Through September 3, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Borrowing from its vast and momentous photography collection, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is currently exploring themes of intimacy, non-traditional relationships, and marginalized people through Real Worlds: Brassaï, Arbus, Goldin. This gripping group exhibition centers around images from Brassaï’s provocative 1976 photobook, The Secret Paris of the 30’s, Arbus’s posthumous treatise, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (1972), and Nan Goldin’s famed autobiographical slideshow, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). These honest and intimate depictions of young lovers, prostitutes, and gathered friends form a timeless bond between viewer and subject and reveal the perennial desire to be loved and accepted. [Read more…]

The Chosen One: A Conversation With Celebrated Photographer Gusmano Cesaretti

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by Pancho Lipschitz

Gusmano Cesaretti pulls a book off the shelf in his South Pasadena studio and hands it to me. The book is on Chaz Bojorquez, the Godfather of East L.A. graffiti. He opens the front cover and shows me where Chaz has written in beautiful stylish script, “To El más chingón. You started my career. Thank you. Chaz.” The story of how an Italian kid obsessed with American culture ended up documenting the birth of East L.A. graffiti culture is just one chapter in the crazy fairy-tale that is Cesaretti’s life. [Read more…]

Judy Chicago’s PowerPlay: A Prediction

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at Salon 94, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

Consistently miles ahead of the curve, the uber-feminist Judy Chicago has been so prescient that it has, at various key moments, worked against her. It sometimes seemed—and certainly must have felt—that despite presaging much of our current predicament, she was, unfortunately, pissing into the wind for entirely different reasons than the super-hero-sized malevolent male in her series, PowerPlay: A Prediction, shown at Salon 94. This evil-looking, nearly headless giant boasts a six-pack and a relatively small member, which he sprays like a brainless hose, heedlessly poisoning the hills and valleys of our planet. The painting, done in 1984, is called, appropriately enough, Pissing on Nature. [Read more…]

Emmeric Konrad: Walking On Thin Ice Just To See My Reflection

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at Tieken Gallery, Los Angeles (through March 31, 2018)
Reviewed by Shana Nys Dambrot

Emmeric Konrad paints angels with dirty faces, serafim porn stars, saints with reality-hangovers, and refugees from justice in rags of former couture. Chainsmokers at church, day-drinkers at Disneyland. His fraught and tectonic compositions are like stream of consciousness literature or automatic drawing, a madman writing complex pictographic equations. One imagines him painting in a trance, a frantic archeological dig for visions that spring forth; however almost nothing you see is random. Any given 12 square inch passages of a single panel contains multitudes enough to make a fine painting on its own, already as dense with detail as a neutron star is packed with atoms and also infinite invisible unfathomable emptiness.  [Read more…]

Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre?

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an exhibition at the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam, (through March 25, 2018)
Reviewed by Lisa Appignanesi

Life? or Theatre?
by Charlotte Salomon
Overlook Duckworth, 815 pp., $150.00

Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre?: A Selection of 450 Gouaches
Taschen, 599 pp., $35.00

Excerpted from Painting on the Precipice, in  the 22 February issue of  NYRB 

A woman walks down the red stairs of a tall roofless building. Her dress is almost black. Her hair is pulled back, her arms crossed against the cold, her face melancholy. She walks past denuded trees up a darkened street, curves into another, and another. The wind seems to be propelling her, tugging at her, so that at one point her hair tumbles free, her dress whirls. Lamplight turns pavement and road a stormy sea blue. As she comes closer her path is outlined in blood red, until red takes her over to transform her into a drowning figure in a blackened lake. [Read more…]

Geometry Born Of Dance: Nathan Hayden’s Strong Magic

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at CB1 Gallery, Los Angeles (Through April 7, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

What mystical visions and artistic insights can dancing an hour per day provide? For Nathan Hayden, a West Virginia-born, Santa Barbara-based psychedelic multimedia artist, this transcendental practice inspires the mind-bending imagery behind his abstracted landscapes, biomorphic ceramic sculptures, and hallucinatory wall murals. [Read more…]

Louise Bourgeois: The Red Sky

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at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (Through May 20, 2018) 
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

“My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.” ㅡLouise Bourgeois, 1998

Produced in the last three years of her life, the effervescent bubble and flower doodles, rudimentary abstract patterns, and scrawled, Cy Twombly-like swirls currently lining the walls of Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, in Louise Bourgeois: Red Sky may seem like this renowned French-American painter, sculptor, and printmaker’s innocent, joy-filled ruminations on childhood, however, a closer look reveals a world of anguish and anxiety. [Read more…]

Judith Bernstein’s Money Shot

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at Paul Kasmin Gallery, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

Judith Bernstein’s work has always been brazenly in-your-face. In the early-to-mid 1970s the self-styled “proto-feminist” was best-known for her huge charcoal drawings of hairy, phallic screws, one of which was censored from a museum show in Philadelphia in 1974, despite a petition signed by Louise Bourgeois and John Coplans. A co-founder of the alternative gallery, A.I.R., which showed only female artists, she more or less disappeared from the art world until 2012, when the New Museum featured “Hard,” a show of her large-scale work, including a 66-foot long mural painted directly onto its lobby windows, followed by two shows at Mary Boone in 2015 and 2016. [Read more…]

Geta Brătescu: The Leaps of Aesop     

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at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (through 20 May 2018)
Reviewed by Lorraine Heitzman

Of the three artists currently showing at Hauser & Wirth it is fair to assume that Geta Brătescu, the 92 year-old Romanian Conceptualist, is the least familiar to American audiences. Though her work has neither the heady bombast of Mark Bradford’s paintings nor the sinewy lyricism of Louise Bourgeois’ work, Brătescu brings her curiosity and playfulness to an encyclopedic body of work that spans seven decades. Her drawings, films, performances, animations, collages, and sculptures defy a single descriptor as they are based on her wide-ranging visual and literary interests and vary according to the medium but what Brătescu seeks to address in all of her work is the idea of transformation and multiplicity, especially in relationship to the role of the artist. While the exhibit will undoubtedly invite comparisons to Louise Bourgeois’ work because they were both active at the same time and because each gained recognition in a male dominated field, they have very different sensibilities. Where Bourgeois is so poetically expressive about her interior life through paintings, text and sculptures, Brătescu chooses conceptual and experimental genres to create imaginative narratives, her literary references and studio almost always present. Hauser & Wirth provides an opportunity to contrast both artists while introducing a new voice, albeit one that has flourished outside of our orbit for some time. [Read more…]

Modernizing Modern Abstract: Mark Bradford’s New Works

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at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (Through May 20, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

How do you modernize modern abstract painting? If you are beloved Los Angeles-based painter and collage artist Mark Bradford, you build thick, impasto-inspired canvas surfaces with ten to fifteen layers of paper in the form of attention-grabbing advertisements, photographs, newsprint, magazines, posters, and comic book panels. Shellacked with glue and lacquer, you dry them in the sun, bleach them, and sand them down, partially exposing the forgotten strata below. With Bradford’s wildly inventive, semi-geological paintings, the viewer acts as an archaeologist from some distant future excavating the remains of our modern society. Also acting as socio-political city maps and diagrams of the human body, this MacArthur Fellow’s masterful large-scale fusions of Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, and Street art allow the audience to consider issues of LGBTQ rights, the AIDS epidemic, and systemic racism through the lens of both the micro and the macro. [Read more…]

Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth

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at the Broad, Los Angeles (through March 13, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

My work is largely concerned with relations between seeing and knowing, seeing and saying, seeing and believing. Preconceptions which are sort of “knowing” may be placed in doubt or may be affirmed by seeing. 一 Jasper Johns, 1965

In a sudden moment of creative clarity and focus, Jasper Johns awoke from a dream in 1954 with a vision of the American flag dancing around in his head. The then-emerging New York-based multimedia artist knew immediately that he had to paint it. Not having the money for a new canvas, he simply used some old bedsheets instead. Little did Johns know at the time that he was creating an image that would elevate him to the upper echelons of artistic fame and forever alter the course of art history.

Now sixty-four years later, the Broad Museum, the mecca for all things modern art in Los Angeles, is looking back on this celebrated artist’s momentous collection of flag paintings in concert with his later number, target, and map works. Consisting of over 120 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints, including many that have never displayed in the city before, this extensive and historically significant collaboration between the Broad and London’s Royal Academy explores Johns’s oeuvre thematically rather than chronologically. This curatorial choice allows the viewer to see works of different eras on the same wall and make unexpected, eye-opening connections. [Read more…]

Rico Lebrun In Mexico

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at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los Angeles (through March 17, 2018)
Reviewed by Lorraine Heitzman

Discovering Rico Lebrun in Mexico at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts is a thrilling experience in the way that the best introductions are: eye-opening and ultimately rewarding. At the same time it is a little confounding too because the work is unfamiliar and it shouldn’t be. These are large paintings of tremendous, muscular force that are as passionate as they are perfectly constructed. That the work was made over sixty years ago and largely overlooked is bewildering. To paraphrase Jack Rutberg, “Only in L.A.” [Read more…]

Night Falls On Caroline Walker’s Sunset

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at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles (Through March 10, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

With its twinkling city lights in the distance, seductive glow of the illuminated swimming pool below, and sumptuous sheen of the satin nightgown worn by the seated woman in the foreground, the painting Tinseltown (2017) and all of the other works on display in Sunset — the debut exhibition from London-based figurative painter Caroline Walker’s at Anat Ebgi — delight the eye and highlight the lavish lifestyle of a chic, mature woman living in the Hollywood Hills. Through the twelve oil paintings and works on paper displayed here, she is depicted lounging in the pool, trying on clothes and brunching at the famed Beverly Hills Hotel. Although this David Hockney-esque realm of fantastical wealth and luxury is enviable, one cannot help but feel a twinge of sadness hanging in the air. Perhaps this melancholy stems from the fact that she is all alone. Ultimately, Sunset takes the viewer on a tour of the most glamourous haunts of Hollywood’s rich and famous while simultaneously revealing this woman’s most private thoughts and desires.  [Read more…]

Catherine Opie: The Modernist

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at Regen Projects Los Angeles (Through February 17, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Bursting onto the Los Angeles art scene in the early 1990s with her enthralling and empathetic portraits of the LGBTQIA community, internationally acclaimed Ohio-born photographer Catherine Opie is currently setting the city ablaze again with the release of The Modernist, her haunting and provocative debut film project at Hollywood’s Regen Projects.

In the middle of the gallery floor, guests will find a sleek and reflective box-like structure. Built by Los Angeles-based architect Michael Maltzan, a Los Angeles-based architect known for his work on Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Building, the Sixth Street Viaduct, and Regen Projects itself, this highly futuristic form houses the film projector and some seating while complimenting the film’s space age aesthetic. Lining the walls of the gallery, visitors will also find 33 photographs highlighting significant moments in the film. [Read more…]

Ecofeminism and The Elevation of Female Voices

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The Feminine Sublime
At Pasadena Museum of California Art (Through June 3, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Offering a feminist perspective on the divine, art historical tradition, as well as widespread issues currently plaguing our planet, including climate change, consumer waste, terrorism, and the downsides of technology, The Feminine Sublime, currently on view at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, highlights the socially and politically charged work of five prominent Los Angeles-based female painters Merion Estes, Yvette Gellis, Virginia Katz, Constance Mallinson, and Marie Thibeault. [Read more…]

On Immigration, Liminality, and Ellis Island: Debra Scacco’s The Narrows

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Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell

Debra Scacco’s The Narrows is a timely show at Klowden Mann that uses multimedia art to examine the changing immigrant experience and liminal spaces found, created, and realized on the journey to the United States.

Scacco researched this project in the Ellis Island archives, beginning with a residency there in 2012, as she began tying her own personal connections between her family’s Italian immigration story to the larger historical narrative. With her art, she questions the immigration process, the changing roles of race, whiteness, and ethnicity, and the ever-present liminality presented in traversing borders and nationalities. [Read more…]

The Poetry of Decay: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Newly Remastered Stalker

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by Alci Rengifo

The year has begun with the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists — those rational soothsayers of the global landscape — moving their infamous Doomsday Clock closer to midnight by thirty seconds. As it stands according to the clock, we are but two minutes away from cataclysm. If we are to approach it in messianic terms, we are living two minutes away from apocalypse. Desolation now haunts our daydreams and nightmares, even if the Doomsday Clock adjustment goes unnoticed by the wider populace still marching to the rhythm of a modern world. But the sense of upcoming cataclysm seeps into our pop consciousness, as personified by the sudden rise of dystopian television, young adult and adult fiction, and the return to political discourse of words associated with futuristic struggle (#resistance). [Read more…]