Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Michael Ajerman’s Possessions And Marty Schnapf’s Loves and Lovers

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at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles (through August 17)
Reviewed by Genie Davis

Michael Ajerman and Marty Schnapf each offer their own elegant and sensual images in two strong solo shows at Diane Rosenstein Gallery. While Ajerman works with vivid colors in his figurative oil paintings, Schnapf’s current body of work is in nearly-life-size black and white. Both offer deeply intimate expressions that are filled with energy and pulsing with life. There is a physicality to both artists’ work that makes them ideally paired, although the outward appearance of each exhibition is visually diverse in palette and style. [Read more…]

The Formidable And Innovative Lee Krasner

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Lee Krasner: Living Colour, at the Barbican Centre, London (through 1 September)
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones

Sometimes a retrospective can abbreviate an artistic life into a series of airless high-peaks without taking notice of the lower-lying ground. Lee Krasner’s exceptional exhibition, Living Colour, at the Barbican Centre in London, achieves the exact opposite. The 100 or so works on display flesh out a life with all the territory – high and low – accounted for, so that every piece lends itself towards a greater whole. In doing so, the exhibition reveals why Krasner is rightly regarded as an artist of pioneering significance, whose development from cubist collage to expressionistic vigour accounts for an important story in 20th century American art. [Read more…]

The Incidental Orifice In Sarah Lucas’s Au Naturel

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At UCLA’s Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (through September 1)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

It’s been said that all great artists have only a few “real” subjects and those subjects nearly always reference love, sex or death. In fact, these pivotal subjects could arguably be the holy trinity when it comes to the imagination and the deeper impulses that drive the creative process. So, Picasso had his underage lovers, his bull testicles and his minotaur. Magritte his pipe, umbrellas and top hats and Cezanne his monumental, sacred mountain.  [Read more…]

Christina Quarles And The Aesthetics Of Ambiguity

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by Lita Barrie

Christina Quarles is at the forefront of a generation of millennial artists who are making ambiguity the aesthetic of our time. Few artists can incorporate as many painting styles as fluidly as Quarles does because few artists have the chops to paint and draw as well as she does. Even fewer have the philosophic rigor and intellectual muscle to upturn the cultural assumptions underlying the history of painting – and have such obvious pleasure doing it. [Read more…]

Ross Bleckner’s Burnt Offerings

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Pharmaceutria
at Petzel Gallery, NYC (through June 15)
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

Ross Bleckner’s luminous canvases of the 1980s and 90s, often rendered in grey and evoking distant galaxies, possess an otherworldly light, which is apt, since many of his paintings of that time memorialize those lost to the relentless onslaught of AIDS.

Bleckner, whose first show in five years is on exhibit at the Petzel Gallery through June 15, is still making elegiac, gauzy images of loss. But this time, the loss that plagues us is, sadly, self-inflicted: our current political and social divisiveness, and more portentously, the plight of our planet, that Garden of Eden we have managed to more or less destroy. [Read more…]

The Disorienting, Confounding And Enthralling New Work Of Guillermo Kuitca

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at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (through August 11)
Reviewed by Genie Davis

As if dreams of buildings, rooms, floor plans, and landscape had landed within his abstract works, Guillermo Kuitca’s often mysterious images take viewers into a world entirely different from our own. At LA’s Hauser & Wirth, Kuitca’s works collapse, repeat, and spatially shift the spaces they represent, weaving a visual language that is both surreal and yet recognizable, evoking both past and future and an impossible present. The exhibition offers viewers a robust variety of the Argentinian artist’s  work, including lustrous mixed media on paper images that represent performance spaces such as the Hollywood Bowl, Staples Center, and the Sydney Opera House, among others. [Read more…]

Deborah Roberts Explores The Fragility of Black Masculinity in Native Sons

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Native Sons: Many thousands gone
at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects (through June 8)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie

Deborah Roberts’ impassioned exhibition memorializes Black boys who lost their lives from the social injustices of false accusations for murders they did not commit. This solemn exhibition is predicated on African American literature and takes its title from James Baldwin’s non fiction essay, “Many Thousands Gone” (Notes of a Native Son, 1955). [Read more…]

Squeak Carnwath: How the Mind Works

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at Frederick R. Weisman Museum, Pepperdine University
Rewiewed by Nancy Kay Turner

The idiosyncratic, stream-of-consciousness, large-scale oil paintings by the Bay Area painter Squeak Carnwath are personal ruminations on everything from politics to urban anxieties and parental concerns (“PAReNTS BEWARE homework is BAD”) [sic], to name just a few of the issues that rise to the surface, unbidden like half heard conversations or bad dreams. Though the exhibition at The Frederick R. Weissman Museum on the splendid Pepperdine Campus is entitled How the Mind Works, it really could be called Notes To Self.  

[Read more…]

Into The Mythic With Rebecca Farr’s Animal Love Thyself

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at Klowden Mann (through June 15)
Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell

When I wrote about Rebecca Farr’s fourth solo exhibit in November of 2016, I said it was everything. I saw the show immediately following the 2016 presidential election and Farr’s show created a nurturing embrace and a place for soul-and nation-searching. In her fifth solo exhibit at Klowden Mann, Animal Love Thyself, Farr’s exhibition again feels like everything we need in an age that is amidst Trump’s presidency, amidst the wake of #MeToo and #TimesUp, and amidst a time that is more and more against the rights of people who are not hetero, cis, white men [Read more…]

A Conflation of Dueling Sentiments In Alexandra Grant’s Born to Love

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at Lowell Ryan Projects, Los Angeles (through July 6)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Artist Alexandra Grant refers to herself as a “radical collaborator,” a dualistic thinker, a synthesizer of textual images into visual form as for many years she has worked closely with both writers and scholars to create luminous paintings that both incorporate and re contextualize the words of others. In the case of her most recent body of work however, Grant has chosen to turn inward, mining a more personal landscape that encompasses the written texts from Sophocles’ Antigone. At the core of Sophocles’ play is the radical iteration, given the year in which it was written and the fact Greece was a patriarchal society, that a woman can have a voice, an identity, a deeply personal conviction, insisting, as Antigone does, on divine altruism and the healing power of love. Love is the driving force that fuels Grant’s work, so it only seems natural that she would gravitate to the prescient words spoken by Sophocles heroine — “I was born to love, not to hate.” [Read more…]

Our Future Revisited In Paula Rego’s Untitled: The Abortion Pastels

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by Ellen C. Caldwell

During a time in which eight U.S. states have passed bills to limit women’s rights to abortions, Paula Rego’s Untitled: The Abortion Pastels seems timely and relevant. Made between July 1998 and February 1999, this series of ten works features personal and quietly anguished portraits of women who have just undergone or are undergoing, at-home, illegal abortions. Rego, born in Portugal and living in Britain, was motivated to create this series about her home country after a referendum to liberalize existing abortion laws was proposed and defeated in Portugal during the summer of 1998. She saw this as a rallying cry for change and used her art as a response and motivator. [Read more…]

Beauty and the Beast Both Defines And Defies The Figurative

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at Launch Gallery, Los Angeles (through June 8)
Reviewed by Genie Davis

Beauty and the Beast is a compelling two-person show that both upends and celebrates formal figurative tradition. It is an exhibition of contrasts: the personal and the political, the interior and the external. The two artists, Jorg Dubin and Andrea Patrie, are disparate in style and subject, but their works speak to each other here, a kind of call and response between the most defined and the more evocative articulation of the physical body. [Read more…]

Running Toward Nothing: A Journey Through The Evocatively Feminine

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Reviewed by Genie Davis

Closing May 25th at Night Gallery, U.K.-based artist Laura Lancaster’s Running Toward Nothing is absolutely heading toward a highly fluid “something.” Perhaps it is the passage into a void we cannot control or fathom, perhaps it is the way through or into a dream, or just possibly, it is the outcome of memory and a passage through this life. [Read more…]

Bereavement Of The Felled: New Works By Trisha Donnelly

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at The Shed, NYC (through May 19)
Reviewed by John Haber

If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it still make a sound? At the very least, it can make art. For Trisha Donnelly, it must make a sound as well, for art is always listening, even as so many refuse to hear. Much of the planet may be dying, like her two fallen trees at The Shed, but art can speak to that as well. She has the very first show in the cultural center of Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, and it makes quite an impact. It puts to the test a gallery with, as yet, too few visitors, next to a shopping mall serving too little of New York. It looks beyond that very concentration of wealth to a fragile state of nature. It also risks drowning global warming and goodness knows what else in sounds of its own. [Read more…]

Artists As Keepers Of Radical Thought In The Weight of Matter

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at Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (through June 15)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

The Weight of Matter, on view at Roberts Projects in Culver City, takes as it central premise the idea that artists are the keepers of radical thought, of dreams and incongruities, of nightmares and deepening schisms, and that these ideas are worth each and every dissection, no matter how minute or painstaking. On the surface, the exhibition appears to expand on the theme of materiality – how artists utilize their materials in new and inventive ways, yet if we look more closely, all the works included here begin with materiality as a central subject, and then deliberately and systematically subvert the process by which the works are imagined. [Read more…]

Nari Ward: We The People

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at The New Museum, NYC (through May 26)
Reviewed by John Haber

When it comes to Nari Ward, it can take a long time to hear so many voices. They are everywhere in his retrospective at the New Museum, fleshing out the sonic landscape amid (and from) the multiple installations. A tanning bed, for instance, made from oil drums, calls out not the work’s title, Glory, but an insistent “Hey, come on over here.” Sons recite their Miranda rights, in a muffled audio, to their very own father, in full dress as a retired policeman. Mahalia Jackson sings “Amazing Grace” over empty baby carriages in the outline of a slave ship. Just three words from the Constitution supply the show’s title, “We the People,” with every one of those people aching to be heard. In each case, the voices call attention to the silence that they can never quite break. And Ward has one listening to that as well. [Read more…]

Radiant Poetic Shadows And The Timeless Framings Of Roy DeCarava

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Roy DeCarava: The Work of Art, at The Underground Museum, Los Angeles (through June 30)
Reviewed by Henry Cherry

Despite a couple of career retrospectives and a small handful of books, the late photographer Roy DeCarava is one of the most overlooked photographers of his era. His photos are among the few photographic equivalents to sound. Somehow, in spite of this majesty, his obscurity persists. But this spring, across Los Angeles, his work is being well served. DeCarava is represented by 21 photographs in the Broad Museum’s Soul of a Nation show, where the late photographer is one of many voices. While several of his disciples are part of the Annenberg Space for Photography’s Contact High show dedicated to the documentation of hip hop, it is the Underground Museum’s Roy DeCarava: The Work of Art, on view until June 30th 2019, where DeCarava gets the best chance to imprint his genius upon the next generation. [Read more…]

Andy Warhol – From A to B and Back Again

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at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (May 19 – September 2)
Reviewed by Jill Conner

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is set to open Andy Warhol – From A to B and Back Again, a stunning retrospective that presents the artist’s large-scale compositions, installations, portraits, sculptures and films. The title of this exhibition suggests something relational about Warhol, which sounds odd at first because he had been so well connected.  Since moving to New York City in 1949, he became the most sought-after commercial illustrator in advertising design, where images and their subsequent repetition in print bridged perfectly with popular culture. [Read more…]