Women’s bodies and nature have long been linked in art. In a brilliant two-gallery exhibition at Commonwealth and Council, Katie Grinnan suggests it’s high time we start thinking of nature in terms of women’s minds.
Each work in Nathaniel Mary Quinn's bracing show at M+B is keyed to a single song, but the imagery comes about through a process of sampling. Quinn borrows, adapts, deconstructs and reconstructs to build these portraits on paper and canvas. Collages in spirit and sensibility, they involve no glue....
When women's naked breasts appear in Julie Curtiss’ curious, terrific paintings at Various Small Fires, they do so rather unexpectedly. They are unnaturally conical — fetishized, certainly, but also strangely weaponized. Where fingernails appear in the works, they extend like long flames, purple...
South African artist Cameron Platter has one of those careers that could exist only in the globalized, digitized art world of our times: diffuse in sensibility, divergent in practice, predicated on the image saturation of the everyday. He draws, sculpts (in wood, clay and bronze), makes videos...
The UCLA Hammer Museum’s much-anticipated biennial survey of new art produced in the city has just opened its fourth iteration. “Made in L.A. 2018” is the best one yet. Part of the reason comes from simple, dramatic contrast. Since the show’s last outing in 2016, American society has been plunged...
For art museums, is there a director’s gene? A distinctive bit of DNA material that distinguishes between a successful museum director and a successful curator? If so, the Museum of Contemporary Art needs to start DNA testing of potential candidates to fill the directorship being vacated by Philippe...
"Cut! Paper Play in Contemporary Photography," a delightful teaser of a show at the Getty Museum, divides neatly into two complementary halves. Three of the six artists in the show photograph collages or constructions they've made out of paper. Their works present as straight pictures, even if...
I would not have enjoyed living in Teotihuacan, given all the human and animal sacrifice believed necessary to keeping the cosmic wheels of nature and civilization oiled and turning in that ancient Mesoamerican metropolis, just outside modern Mexico City. More than a dozen years ago, few archaeologists...
When we first meet Topsy in the pages of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," the enslaved young girl grins, "goblin-like," and repeatedly professes her wickedness. She embodies blackness to her young mistress Eva's whiteness; she plays devil to Eva's saint, base earth to Eva's ethereal spirit. She comes into...
Google the term "daily practice," and you'll get an assortment of mindfulness tips and prompts encouraging a regular, self-actualizing regime. What the search is not likely to deliver are parameters like those adopted by the 15 artists in "Every (ongoing) Day" at Arena 1 Gallery: Place a piece...
Helen Molesworth, the chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art whose exhibitions have included the critically acclaimed 2017 Kerry James Marshall retrospective that was also a rare popular hit, has been fired, according to sources close to the museum. MOCA Director Philippe Vergne took the...
Sleek sculptural objects with misty, mercurial surfaces and at least partial inspiration from aerospace technology have not lost their appeal in more than half a century. In Los Angeles, first there was Craig Kauffman, then Helen Pashgian and now Gisela Colon. For her second solo exhibition at...
Video killed the radio star, but, save for a few exceptions, photography killed presidential portrait painters. As painting genres go, presidential portraiture was, if only for a few decades, the only way our head of state’s visage could be recorded and interpreted for posterity. Now, U.S. presidents...
Every morning when we wake up, we put the world together anew, Robert Irwin marveled in an interview with me more than a decade ago. The painter-turned-pioneering artist of light and space had been probing how perception defines reality since the 1970s, but there he was, nearing age 80, and clearly...
At a time when the Supreme Court is willing to debate whether a gay wedding cake is free speech, it’s easy to hear about 29Rooms and not know what it is. Housed in a gigantic tent in a parking lot in downtown Los Angeles, the conglomeration of 29 installations is a conflicted mishmash of art, marketing...
At 9 on a Friday night, I knocked on a door in a nondescript Los Angeles apartment building. The only distinguishing feature was a small label with red text that read “Lauren.” Soon came a whirring sound and the click of the door unlocking. My night with Lauren had begun. Lauren is the creation...
The 14 clay vessels in Adam Silverman’s exhibition at Cherry and Martin in Culver City look great from far away. They look even better up close. From a distance, their silhouettes stand out: rough and tumble contours that bespeak the bumps and bruises accumulated on rides through life. Hell-and-back...
Eduardo Sarabia’s installation “Drifting on a Dream” is a collection of old and new work that explores dreams and fantasies, particularly as they play out in global commerce. The ambitious exhibition is the Mistake Room’s contribution to Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, the Getty-led initiative looking...
Walk into “Video Art in Latin America” at LAXART and you’ll wonder: Why does it smell like rotten bananas in here? The gallery’s contribution to the constellation of exhibitions known as Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA is a sprawling survey of video from the 1970s to the present. Deftly curated by...