The sculptural riddles of Vincent Fecteau: What, exactly, do you see?
At Matthew Marks Gallery, Vincent Fecteau's sculptures and collages challenge logic in beautiful ways.
ARTS REVIEWS
ART REVIEWS
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Review: The serious artist's cat painting and other idiosyncratic standouts from Jess
In a sense, all artists are eccentrics: people who do their own thing in ways that may seem strange to others. Jess (1923-2004) is an eccentric among eccentrics. He was born Burgess Franklin Collins in Long Beach, got drafted into the military and worked on the production of plutonium used in the...
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When the cover of a book becomes postcard art: Captivating messages in surprising packages
"Through-Line: Drawing and Weaving by 19 Artists" at the Steve Turner gallery brims with small gems and large wonders. Not everything in the show reinforces the profound connections between line, language, image and weave, but the sampling is rich and varied — materially, conceptually and geographically....
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A to-do list for MOCA's new director, Klaus Biesenbach
Now that the Museum of Contemporary Art has named Klaus Biesenbach the sixth director in its 39-year history, expect three immediate responses: Celebrity hipsters will be thrilled, the art world will do a collective eye-roll and everyone else will just have to cross their fingers and hope for the...
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Review: Random junk takes on weirdly personal meaning in this UC Riverside Arts show
In the 1950s, a lot of artists began using the discarded castoffs of thriving commercial culture to make sculptures. Assemblage art was born. The flood of mass-produced material goods that fueled their diverse assemblages continues. But, it has long since been joined by something more evanescent,...
THEATER REVIEWS
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Love screwball comedies? Theatre 40 has a bada-bing 'Screwball Comedy' for you
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Review: Revolution in 'Haiti' stirs the New World
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The week ahead in SoCal theater, Aug. 19-26: 'The Glass Menagerie,' 'Ain't Too Proud' and more
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Review: 'Midsummer Night's Dream' with a lesbian twist at New Swan Shakespeare in Irvine
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The week ahead in SoCal theater, Aug. 12-19: 'End of the Rainbow' and more
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Review: In 'Under Milk Wood,' the lost and the lonely live in the poetry of Dylan Thomas
MORE ARTS REVIEWS
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A photographer's remarkable, bittersweet diary of his daughter's life, MRI and all
Leon Borensztein's photographic chronicle of his daughter, Sharon, begins at the beginning, with her birth in 1984. We see the dark, sticky hair on her crowning head. We see her fresh little form carefully cupped in adult hands, dipped in the silvery waters of a sink bath. Before long, we also...
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Review: As planes take flight at LAX, two photographers find a darker reality below in 'Grounded'
In 1975, John Divola photographed abandoned houses along the northern edge of the runways at Los Angeles International Airport. Casualties of a formally defined Noise Abatement Zone, the houses were deserted in the wake of a larger, ecologically minded social movement toward curbing the effects...
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Review: Ethan Cook's paintings are not paintings. Or are they?
Can a painting be made without paint? Ethan Cook's beautiful, ticklish show at the Los Angeles gallery Anat Ebgi would suggest that the answer is yes. Cook’s works read, at least from a distance, in that familiar way: as arrangements of color on a flat surface, within a frame. But step closer and...
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Review: In 'Head Back and High: Senga Nengudi' at Art + Practice, two standout works
If you missed “Senga Nengudi: Improvisational Gestures,” a survey of the artist’s performance-based work at the USC Fisher Museum of Art last spring, catch up (somewhat) with “Head Back and High,” a smaller show of performance objects made between 1976 and 2017. The exhibition, organized by the...
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Review: Do you see stars? The sun? An eye? The unexpected discoveries in Robert Gunderman's worlds
After dropping out of art school, Robert Gunderman joined the military and served as a small-arms specialist on a rapid response expeditionary team before being honorably discharged in 1987. Then he teamed up with artist Randy Sommer to found and run a couple of art galleries: Food House in Santa...
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Review: Mary Heilmann lets loose sexy, shameless color at Hauser & Wirth
To see a single painting by Mary Heilmann is a treat. To see a roomful feels as if you’ve gone to heaven. That happens twice over in “Mary Heilmann: Memory Remix.” The extravaganza at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in downtown Los Angeles zeros in on the painter’s brilliance: her capacity to make an...
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Review: With 'Year of the Dog,' artist Joakim Ojanen crafts imaginary creatures full of real drama
The characters in “Year of the Dog,” Joakim Ojanen’s second solo show in the United States, are more diverse than those that appeared in the Swedish artists’ solo debut two years ago, also at Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica. Made of clay, bronze, paint and charcoal, Ojanen’s menagerie of...
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Review: 'Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography' at the Getty Museum reveals the limits of the art form
As art, fashion photography is thinner than a supermodel. Call it anorexia aesthetica. Fashion photographs can certainly be attractive. That’s their job – to attract consumers, as either advertising or editorial advice. The attraction can be performed in a variety of ways, employing sumptuousness,...
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Review: At the Korean DMZ, reunification through one artist's strange lens
In “Paradise Limited,” Young Joo Lee offers an unusual vision of the DMZ. The room-spanning, three-channel video projection at Ochi Projects highlights how the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea has become an inadvertent nature preserve, a human-free harbor for rare wildlife species....
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Review: Police, violence and an artist who paints to provoke
A raw rage runs through Forrest Kirk’s paintings of police officers at Chimento Contemporary’s new space in West Adams. The provocative images are indictments of police violence, attributing it to racism and an obsession with power. The techniques Kirk uses are sometimes ham-fisted, but the same...
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Review: Photographer Todd Gray traces African roots
The strongest work in Todd Gray’s latest exhibition at Meliksetian Briggs is one of the least complex. Like all the other works in the show, it’s a combination of layered, framed photographs — the artist’s signature technique. But it radiates clear exuberance around a core of calm. The larger of...
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Review: 'This Brush for Hire: Norm Laich and Many Other Artists' at ICA LA
Norm Laich has produced more astonishingly diverse, profoundly significant art during the last 30 years than just about any other American artist. The catch: He’s made just about all of it for other artists. At least two of those works, one by John Baldessari and the other by Mike Kelley, are incomparable...
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This Candy Store wasn't a candy store: Remembering a California gallery that made art stars
The Candy Store never did sell candy. Unable to get permits from the health department in Folsom, Calif., to manufacture her family nougat recipe, Adeliza McHugh pivoted, and instead made art history. She opened the Candy Store Gallery in 1962 and ran it for 30 years, showcasing a rising generation...
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In Shinique Smith's 'Refuge,' bits of past make for a compelling present
Call it activist assemblage. Shinique Smith has set up a "Donation Center" in one corner of her stirring show at the California African American Museum. Bins of travel-size toiletries, pillows, tarps, socks and toys load the shelves. "Be an American," declaims the plastic cover on a plush red,...
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The disturbing meets the sweet in Alex Anderson's new sculptures at Gavlak
Alex Anderson has tremendous material wisdom in his hands and a penchant for barbed beauty. The ceramic sculptures in his intriguing show "Wonderland" at the L.A. gallery Gavlak slip in and out of familiar categories, settling uneasily in memory and enduring as strong, ambivalent impressions. Textures...
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Kirsten Tradowsky: In turning photos into paintings, she blurs faces, races and the walls between us
Painter Kirsten Tradowsky and gallerist Paul Kopeikin both collect what’s called vernacular photography, trawling flea markets and the like for other people’s images. Tradowsky’s current exhibition, “Time Echo,” is a collaboration: Kopeikin shared photographs from his collection, and Tradowsky...
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Black and gay: Jonathan Lyndon Chase's paintings play with cultural conventions
There’s a lot going on in Jonathan Lyndon Chase’s chaotic paintings of gay black men, often in sexual congress. They capture the inchoate feelings of intertwining oneself with another body, but they also reflect a raw engagement with fragmented facets of gender, racial and sexual identity. The...
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Out of the shadows and into the light: 'Chiaroscuro Woodcut' is a sleeper hit at LACMA
Ugo da Carpi might not have had any formal training as an artist, but after about 1516 he had a profound impact on the course of Italian art for the next century. How? Ugo got a patent, or whatever the rough equivalent was in Renaissance Venice. The story is told in “The Chiaroscuro Woodcut in...
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Like song sampling as painting: Nathaniel Mary Quinn's puzzle-like portraits of personhood
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....
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Naked body parts, hair as sculpture: The strange, sinister, seductive art of Julie Curtiss
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...
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Marvelous or maddening? In Cameron Platter's show, it depends on which way you face
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...
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'Made in L.A. 2018': Why the Hammer biennial is the right show for disturbing times
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...
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MOCA has lacked an effective director for nearly 20 years. It's time for change
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...
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Cut, folded, pasted: Photography takes a twist and turn in the Getty's 'Paper Play'
"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...
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Teotihuacan: An ancient Mexican city's remarkable art comes to life at LACMA
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...