Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

An Interview with Artist Eve Wood

By

Eve Wood: Hanging in There to Hang On
at Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles (opening reception: Saturday, September 10, 7-10pm)

by Julie Adler

I met Eve Wood at Holly Matter, an art gallery on Heliotrope in East Hollywood, 22 years ago now. I recall she got up and read some of her poems. Incisive, cutting, direct, I thought, “wow, what a master,” and also “ouch,” but in a good way. We became friends there, and a few years later she brought out some drawings at a meal we were having, of people, animals with wide eyes, craggy lines. Sparse, comical and awkward, eyes staring back at you or away. Up until that point I had no idea Eve was also a visual artist. I had come from a performance art background but was also starting to get more engaged in 2 dimensions. She was eager to do a trade. It seemed we shared a similar concern for the human condition. And because we humans are funny in our grotesqueness, our derangement, our folly, we didn’t think it unusual to portray that. We also felt the comradery of being outsiders, even though we both grew up here in LA and went to art school here.

So, when Eve asked me to interview her for this publication, I did not hesitate. It’s been wonderful to burrow in with her on the ways and means of her process. She’s really not an outsider (nor am I.) She is as inside as it gets. [Read more…]

Nicole Eisenman and the Moderns: Head, Kisses, Battles

By

at Fondation Vincent Van Gogh Arles, France (through 23 October 2022)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Art is never made in a vacuum, as all visual iterations must derive from something: a momentary glimpse of refracted light, a train pulling out of the station, a woman lying languorously on a bed. Whatever it is we are witness to, at least in the context of art, it has been done before. The trick is to create a compelling conversation between the ‘now’ and the ‘then,’ to find threads of association, of understanding and celebration.

Nicole Eisenman has always been a renegade maker of things that are at once luminous and sardonic. She is an artist who asks the questions we are too afraid to ponder, and then she answers them for us – with wit, grace and infinite wisdom. Her answers may not always be what we want to hear, but rest assured they are true. Nicole Eisenman and the Moderns. Heads, Kisses, Battles establishes what the catalogue essay describes as an unprecedented dialogue between the artist’s own oeuvre and that of twenty-seven modern artists, including (and perhaps most importantly) Vincent Van Gogh. This, to be sure, is not an easy task, and it is one that could easily have slipped into sentimentality were it not for the fact that there is not one sentimental bone in Eisenman’s body. [Read more…]

Presence as Abstraction, as Beguiling Obfuscation, in the Works of Leon Kossoff

By

Leon Kossoff: A Life in Painting, at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NYC (with concurrent exhibitions at LA Louver in Los Angeles, through 9 April 2022, and Annely Juda Fine Art in London)
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

The first painting greeting us in the Mitchell-Innes & Nash exhibition is, aptly, a self portrait. Smaller than the other pieces in the show, monochromatic, it packs the power of dynamite. The man represented closeup looks aghast, terrified even. His eyes stare down with dismay at something off canvas, an abyss? Hell? Malleable, the face is agitated by a chaos of brushstrokes. The boundaries between the head and its surroundings are unclear, as if everything was made of the same substance: mud. Mud, here, is nicely symbolic not only for its biblical intimation — Man being dipped, thrown, trampled in and yanked from the “miry mud” — but the muddiness of mind is also equally appropriate. While his portraits often halted at an opacity in the sitter, Kossoff had a pretty good idea of what he was about: uncertain about everything. He could, he tells us, hold onto nothing solid, either on the outside or the inside. “The important thing is to somehow keep going. This is ‘the straw to which we cling.” This credo, shared in a rare interview, could serve as caption for all of his mature paintings. [Read more…]

Albert Pinkham Ryder: White Whale of American Art

By

by Christopher Benfey

A Wild Note of Longing: Albert Pinkham Ryder and a Century of American Art
at New Bedford Whaling Museum, MA
NYR

“American history is haunted by nightbirds in the nineteenth century,” Lewis Mumford wrote in The Brown Decades, his landmark 1931 study of Gilded Age culture. Chief among these nocturnal artists, for Mumford, was the painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, who was given to long, solitary nighttime walks in Lower Manhattan. Born in 1847, Ryder was a virtuoso of turbulent moonlit skies, ships lost at sea, and nightmare images—drawn from Poe, another nightbird, among other sources—that stick like burrs in the memory. In The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse), inspired by a waiter who killed himself after making a bad wager, a skeletal figure armed with a scythe rides a pale horse, while a menacing snake monitors his progress. “One might call Ryder the Blake or the Melville or the Emily Dickinson of American painting,” Mumford mused, “and thus define, after a fashion, one or another phase of his art; but the fact is that Ryder was Ryder. Like every great artist, he belonged to that rare class of which there is only one example.” [Read more…]

An Interview with Erin Currier: Artist, Writer & Activist

By

by Lisette García and Barrett Martin

excerpted from Ponderosas: Conversations with Extraordinary, Ordinary Women 
by Lisette García, Ph. D
available November 20th
Sunyata Books

“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And then you have to do it all the time.”
–Angela Davis

Barrett: I first met Erin Currier and her late partner, Anthony Hassett, in 1996 when I was visiting mutual friends in Taos, New Mexico. A group of us went on a hike together, in the magnificent Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the high desert of northern New Mexico. We all had much in common—a great love for music, art, and an obscure martial art that we were studying with the same master in Taos. Even though we were all relatively young, we seemed to understand each other in a much deeper way than most new friends. [Read more…]

John Bradford: By Land And By Sea

By

at Anna Zorina Gallery, NYC (through 25 April — view this exhibition online at annazorinagallery.com)
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

“For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”
— Herman Melville, from Moby Dick

The latest John Bradford exhibit at Zorina Gallery shows works in a style, history painting, that’s been out of favor with the art establishment for many decades. All the paintings’ subjects come from the 19th century or before, and relate to momentous events relating to the USA and the Americas: arrival of the Mayflower, of Columbus, Washington’s revolution, Lincoln’s wars. Bradford’s technique, thick impasto, has also fallen out of favor and is found more often in street market art: think Paris-view at sunset.  What is a blueblood painter, if ever there was one — he is a descendant of William Bradford, the English Puritan separatist who escaped persecution from King James I on the Mayflower and became the longstanding Governor of the Plymouth Colony, known thereafter as the Pilgrim Fathers — doing producing low art? [Read more…]

How to Hate the City: A Storyboard Of Canvases

By

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…]

Van Gogh and Britain

By

at Tate Britain, London (through 11 August)
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones

Judging from the crowds and the advanced ticket sales, the magnetism of Vincent Van Gogh shows no sign of diminishing. It’s hardly a surprise. We come to empathise with the optimism of a man whose dreams of an art colony in the south would come to nothing. We respond to him because he kept on painting, his canvases getting brighter and brighter as his days got darker. [Read more…]

Lari Pittman’s Portraits Of Textiles & Portraits Of Humans

By

at Regen Projects, Los Angeles (Through October 27, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Legendary Los Angeles-based graphic painter Lari Pittman’s kaleidoscopic bust portraits and textile-inspired abstracts currently on display at Hollywood’s Regen Projects plunge into the fabric of the subconscious mind. Marking the artist’s eighth solo exhibition at the gallery, these surreal, psychedelic images beg the viewer to consider the connection between the portrait and the still-life, the personal and the universal. [Read more…]

David Hockney: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life

By

at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Through July 29, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

What is the value of community? For David Hockney, one of Britain’s most prominent living painters, the circle of friends, fellow artists, and employees joyfully and intimately rendered in his current Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) exhibition, 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life reveal the invigorating and inspirational power of camaraderie. While portraiture has historically been a tool for the elite to showcase their wealth and status, this egalitarian collection portrays individuals from all walks of life, including the artist’s dentist and housekeeper. Also, as none of these portraits are commissions, Hockney here is instead driven by the desire to honor and celebrate the people in his life. Much like a mosaic or network of unique yet interconnected cells, these exuberant, vibrantly-hued acrylic paintings all combine to form a harmonious and cohesive body of work. [Read more…]

An Ode to Femininity and Freedom

By

Judith Linhares: The Way She Goes to Town
at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (Through February 24, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

What does a world without men look like? Celebrated Pasadena-born, New York-based figurative painter Judith Linhares’s current exhibition at Hollywood’s prestigious Various Small Fires aids the viewer in imagining this feminist utopia through a wide array of sumptuous female nudes lounging in lush landscapes, communing with nature, and performing a range of daily tasks. Perhaps a vision of a mythical, Amazonian-inspired tribe of women or an era after men, The Way She Goes to Town reveals social order and harmony without gender roles. Here, women seem to be entirely comfortable in their bodies, in nature, in leisure, as well as in their duties. Although the subjects depicted here are nude, they are not sexualized; rather, they are joyful and peaceful in their natural state. [Read more…]

The Mesmerizing, Enrapturing Aesthetic Of Loving Vincent

By

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

Cinema in our time is almost completely dominated by aesthetic. This has curiously been the case with both Hollywood mastodons and lower budget fare. The look of a film now supersedes its narrative, as evident in much of this year’s offerings ranging from Blade Runner 2049 to Wonderstruck. But Loving Vincent, an elegant and enrapturing film experience, proves that when approaching the life of a great artist, aesthetic is key — the trick is how to fuse the gesture with an engaging narrative. The film is an exploration of the cryptic life of Vincent van Gogh, his dark aura and wondrous talent, brought to life through his own visions. Here is a film worth seeking out in whichever local arthouse lucky enough to be showing it. I am grateful I accepted an invitation to see it from a dear friend who had just returned from those burning lands in the Middle East, who confessed Van Gogh was her muse and so was drawn to this film like a moth to flame. [Read more…]

The Meta-Outsider Work of Carol Rama

By

Antibodies
at New Museum, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

The art of Carol Rama occupies a strange and singular space; Rama, a self-confirmed outsider, is poised on a chosen cusp. Not a true outsider artist herself (her intense, self-conscious stoking of her own particular obsessive-compulsive neuroses precludes that) she provides a unique meta-vision — even a celebration — of the outsider mindset. She is a self-proclaimed insider of an outsider world, which she obsessively observes, reveling in recording its scatological and erotic impulses.

Henry Darger and Martin Ramirez were equally obsessed: it is fair to say that they all, including Rama, suffered from some degree of obsessive-compulsive disorder, just as does the uber-successful artist Yayoi Kusama. Louise Bourgeois once famously called her art “a form of therapy.” Or, as Rama put it, “We all have our own tropical disease within us, for which we seek a remedy. My remedy is painting.” [Read more…]