Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

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…]

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…]

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…]