Le Pain- Running of the Bulls
This song is from LA band Le Pain‘s upcoming album Dirge Technique, releasing on May 2nd.
They are celebrating the release with a show at Non Plus Ultra in Los Angeles on Saturday, 5/3/25, with Sea Lions and G.M.O.
Work by Roger Halligan
Work by Jan Chenoweth
While visiting Lake City, South Carolina for ArtFields one must see gallery is Chenoweth. Halligan Studios. The gallery showcases the work of artists Roger Halligan and Jan Chenoweth who relocated to the area from Chattanooga, Tennessee in 2019. In addition to being a gallery, it is also a working studio with an outdoor sculpture space.
During ArtFields and other events the gallery is open to the public, but they are also available by appointment.
Work by Roger Halligan
Work by Roger Halligan
Work by Jan Chenoweth
Mural by Donald Walker
ArtFields Community Mural by Jessica Diaz, Morgan Funkhouser, Olivia Cramer, Sam Ogden
Today’s flashback is to 2021 and a trip to Lake City, South Carolina to check out ArtFields. Started in 2013, the event is a wonderful example of how the arts can revitalize local economies.
So what is ArtFields? Every year for one week local businesses and galleries host works created by artists from the Southeastern United States for a competition with prizes totaling over $145,000. There are also two People’s Choice Awards which are determined by the attendees of the festival. The other awards are chosen by a panel of art professionals. Special events take place throughout the week and ArtFields Jr. offers a chance to see work by South Carolina students.
This year the event runs from April 25th to May 3rd, 2025. Even if you can’t make it, it’s worth taking a look here at this year’s artwork as well as from past years.
Below are a few selections from 2021-
Mural by Lance Turner
“From This Moment Forward” by Herman A. Keith Jr. inspired by Gee’s Bend Quilters
Partially finished mural by Broderick Flanigan honoring Lake City educators Elouise Cooper and Derrick Faison.
“7 Red Wolves” by Joann Galarza Vega
About the work from the above by Joann Galarza Vega–
“There may be as few as only 7 red wolves remaining in the wild. These animals, like so many others, are disappearing in the shadows of our periphery. Their very existence depends on us, as did their extinction. Let us see them, acknowledge them, acknowledge that biodiversity and the balance of life matters. They are painted bright red in order to stand out and bring attention, no longer hidden away.”
Pictured above is The House on Church Street which in 2021 was used for several art installations including the two below. The first is New Histories: The Gadsden Farm Project by Michael Austin Diaz and Holly Hanessian.
About the installation-
The installation below, All Too Brief, was created by Gainesville, Florida artist Cindy Steiler.
From the ArtFields website about the installation-
All Too Brief was inspired by the movement of time and the unconscious process where our present moment is being continuously converted to memory. The elements comprising All Too Brief include a series of scrolls of cyanotype photographs and repurposed textiles wound on antique industrial weaving bobbins. Each scroll has a WW2-era laundry pin embossed with a number that corresponds to the written narrative of the images and textiles it holds. This piece is my attempt to document and archive people, places, and fleeting moments I hold dear. This piece became even more meaningful to me this year. My studio assistant at the time this piece was created has since passed.
Finally- while in town it’s also worth checking out the Ronald E. McNair Life History Center and Memorial Park. The Lake City-born astronaut and physicist died tragically in the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion.
“I Like How the Left Side Modulates Up”, 1989, acrylic on canvas (from the “Hitchcock” series)
“Apollo, 617”, 1982, acrylic on canvas
Sundaram Tagore Gallery is currently showing the paintings of the late Robert Natkin for the exhibition A Better Place. The colorful abstract works are from the several series he produced during his lifetime.
Natkin used his artwork to explore different concepts and influences, many of which are listed in the press release below and in the information provided alongside several of the artworks.
“The Beloved (Field Mouse)”, 1969, acrylic on linen
Here, for example, is the information provided for the painting above, from his Field Mouse series-
Natkin explored motile, fragmentary shapes from 1967 onward in the “Field Mouse” series, a reference to a poem by Ezra Pound about the passage of time. These visualizations of fleeting life-experience, with which Natkin sought to form a new emotional vocabulary, often resemble microscopic views of teeming organisms. For him, they were complex emotional landscapes, reflecting a romantic turn when the Natkin family moved from New York to the quiet of rural Connecticut in 1970.
And the Days Are Not Full Enough
And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass
–Ezra Pound
More from the gallery’s press release-
Robert Natkin is internationally recognized as an unsurpassed colorist and for the beauty of his large-scale abstract canvases. He was represented by blue-chip New York gallerists Elinor Poindexter in the 1960s and André Emmerich in the 1970s. Today, his work is in the collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
Born to a poor and unhappy Russian-Jewish family in Chicago during the Great Depression, Natkin would transcend his traumatic upbringing, often finding refuge in the color and splendor of the movies, charting an industrious course through public art education and briefly co-founding a gallery, to become one of the foremost American abstract colorist painters of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. His paintings are life-affirming, sensual celebrations of visual delight, of glorious Hollywood Technicolor, of fascinating surface effects, enticing layers, and sunny outlooks.
Natkin’s painterly journey can be seen through its distinct and loosely phased series as he accumulated years of psychotherapy and read and looked voraciously. They reveal his drive for redemption not just through introspection, but by consistently forging new stylistic syntheses.
FEATURED SERIES
The vigorous, gestural brushwork of Natkin’s early abstractions reflects the seismic impact of the Abstract Expressionists, including Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, whose work he encountered in an article about Abstract Expressionism in Life magazine in 1949. Natkin also found inspiration in French artists Matisse and Bonnard, among others in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago where he studied from 1948–1952.
In 1957, Natkin married the painter Judith Dolnick and together they founded the Wells Street Gallery in downtown Chicago, exhibiting cooperatively with a group of young contemporaries who similarly explored free-form abstraction, including the sculptor John Chamberlain, Ann Mattingly, Gerald van de Wiele and friend Ernest Dieringer. Wells Street Gallery made its cultural mark but was commercially unsuccessful, closing two years later, whereupon Natkin and Dolnick moved to New York.
In New York, Natkin’s vigorously abstract paintings took on more rectilinear qualities, decisively so with his Apollo series, characterized by loose vertical bands of color. The series began in the early 1960s under the inspiration of Rilke’s poem Archaic Torso of Apollo, based on a sculptural fragment in the Louvre, with its final imperative: “You have to change your life.” Named after the Greek god of the sun, the arts and healing, the Apollos established for Natkin the purpose of his art as a means of transformation for self and society.
The Apollo series was long-lived, spanning the 1960s and revived in the mid-1970s. The later instances incorporated Natkin’s distinctive technique of applying acrylic paint with a sponge covered in cloths of various textures, which he discovered in 1971. At his Dolnick’s suggestion, Natkin made a painting on a dishcloth because she had seen him make little paintings on handkerchiefs to give to friends, and then came up with the idea of effectively printing from it. The technique increased his productivity and transformed his aesthetic.
The pointillistic, gauzy effect of this technique came into its own in the more muted, diaphanous visions of the Bath series, so named for the English city where Natkin was to have an exhibition. The subtle, atmospheric nature of the Bath paintings are akin to his earlier Intimate Lighting series, which ran through much of the 1970s, and were described by British art critic Peter Fuller as possessing hints of portraiture in their central focus and inspired by Cubism in the clearly applied blocks of sponge-and-cloth-painting.
Natkin’s Straight Edge and Step paintings emerged from a period in the mid-1960s when he was preparing to teach a course on color at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and read Josef Albers’ theories on its interaction. They also channel the modernist architecture of his native Chicago, his love of jazz singers Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, and the dynamic grid-pattern streets of New York.
He explored motile, fragmentary shapes from 1967 onward in the Field Mouse series, a reference to a poem by Ezra Pound about the passage of time. These visualizations of fleeting life-experience, by which Natkin sought to form a new emotional vocabulary, often resembled microscopic views of teeming organisms and organelles. For him, they were also complex emotional landscapes, reflecting a more romantic turn when the Natkin family moved from New York to the quiet of rural Connecticut in 1970.
In 1977, Natkin produced the Bern series, named for the Swiss capital where the Klee Foundation is located and where Natkin spent many hours among Paul Klee’s works. In this series, he uses more sharply delineated shapes against expansive fields of intense color. Perhaps the boldest colors and shapes appear in the 1980s in the Hitchcock series, an homage to the great director and the movie-theater origins of his artistic journey. Hitchcock’s interest in psychoanalytic themes where dark secrets often drive the narrative, and his charging of the carefully crafted scenery and props with menacing symbolism appealed to Natkin.
Robert Natkin died in 2010 after several years of declining health. Over the course of his career, he demonstrated a remarkable capability of spanning beauty and ugliness in his art, though he dedicated his prime to the struggle of the former over the latter, to the Apollonian ascendancy of light over darkness.
In Somewhere Over the Rainbow, a 1982 documentary by award-winning filmmaker Mike Dibb, Natkin says, “In one sense, I want to be superhuman, but in another sense, I feel I’m barely an animal. And it’s a practice that I think if I don’t always maintain, juggle both these kinds of reality, I could then very easily be done in by the very kind of reparation that I use to make myself and that I hope will help the rest of the world to become a better place. I want to become a better place! Not a person: I want to become a better place, because as a person, I’m going to be gone in—I don’t know—ten minutes or ten years, but I want to become a better place.”
This exhibition closes 4/26/25.
“Untitled”, 2024, camera obscura Ilfochrome photograph (far left) and “Untitled Head” and “Head 2”, 2024, multi-layered pigment print and hand-applied gesso on canvas
“Black and White Poppies”, 2022, gelatin silver contact print mounted to board and mounted to aluminum (left) and “Untitled”, 2024, multi-layered pigment-print and hand applied gesso on canvas (right)
Richard Learoyd‘s exhibition A Loathing of Clocks and Mirrors, on view at Pace, features his recent dreamlike photographs from 2018-2025. Many of the works were made using a custom-built camera obscura, while others were created using multiple impression printing layered with gesso on canvas.
More from the gallery-
Deeply inspired by Dutch Golden Age painting, Learoyd’s latest works take viewers on a journey through intimate moments and intricate details, examining the relationship between subject, light, and space. The photographs on display explore a range of subjects, from hauntingly evocative portraits to still-life compositions that breathe life into the simplest of objects.
Learoyd’s unique photographic processes require an immense degree of technical precision, resulting in incredibly detailed, luminous prints with a tactile richness rarely seen in contemporary photography. Reflecting on the delicate interplay between light, shadow, and form, Learoyd’s work is imbued with a surreal, auratic presence that speaks to his enduring interest in the notion of collective photographic memory—the idea that a picture can be felt and understood on a subconscious level. The artist is renowned for his masterful use of light and his ability to capture the profound depth and stillness of the human experience.
“Light and space have always been central to my work,” Learoyd explains. “I want to capture more than just an image; I want to convey a sense of time, intimacy, and presence—things that transcend the immediate and evoke a more timeless feeling.”
Highlights in the exhibition, carefully curated by Learoyd, include a photograph of clasped hands, an ode to Alfred Stieglitz’s images of Georgia O’Keeffe’s hands from the first half of the 20th century. Also on view will be the artist’s most recent body of work, a series of photographs created using a new and transformative process of multiple impression printing layered with hand coated gesso on canvas. These multi-dimensional works showcase the artist’s exploration of depth, texture, time, and the relationship between photography and materiality.
This exhibition closes 4/26/25.
“Matsushima Triptych”, 2025, Monofilament, cotton, linen, kid mohair
“River Triptych”, 2023, Monofilament, cotton, linen, kid mohair
The two triptychs above are from Hiroko Takeda‘s solo exhibition, The Ten Thousand Threads at Hunter Dunbar Projects. These works evoking environmental patterns are presented along with others more focused on geometric forms.
From the gallery about the artist and her work-
Hiroko Takeda (b. 1966, Nagoya, Japan) is a Brooklyn-based artist who expresses her world in thread. She has taken her rigorous training in the Mingei Undo-the Japanese Arts and Crafts Movement-which honors and emphasizes the characteristics, capacities, treatments and beauty of materials-to boundary-crossing distances and depths in nearly 40 years of global practice. Mingei was developed in the mid-1920s in Japan by philosopher and aesthete Yanagi Soetsu (1889-1961), along with a group of craftsmen, including the potters Hamada Shoji (1894-1978) and Kawai Kanjiro (1890-1966).
The Ten Thousand Threads takes its title from the Taoist concept of “the ten thousand things.” Often attributed to the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, it refers to the notion that in spite of the variety visible in the world, all things are fundamentally one. Applying this to Takeda’s practice, the multitudinous variations in weft and weave, color, pattern, and structure in her work can be seen as having an underlying connection; the works reside within the “the rule-bound world of weaving” and simultaneously emphasize an “invitation to the accidental, disorderly, or unexpected.” Takeda’s works in The Ten Thousand Threads strive to transcend boundaries between light and dark, raw and refined, geometry and fluidity, painting and sculpture.
The exhibition features works from 2016 to 2025, consisting of varying approaches to structure, pattern, and color. The Blueprint and Still Life series utilize the ‘Giant Waffle’ technique to evoke Minimalist rectilinear patterns. The deeply structured grids created by the warp and weft of Takeda’s weaving push the compositions dramatically into three-dimensional space.
Works using transparent thread, on the other hand, imply subtle and dreamlike landscapes. In her recent Matsushima triptych (2025), for example, Takeda uses staggered horizontal passages of fine and coarse textures to suggest the seascapes and islands of tsunami-weathered northeastern Japan. Whether underscoring geometric form or expressive vistas, Takeda’s work illuminates the fundamental tensions between tradition and innovation as well as complexity and reductionism.
As Takeda points out, “the world I see, like the world of warp and weft, has rules and constraints that are supposed to be good for us, but disorder happens naturally, and the other side of tension is fluidity. I manipulate and orchestrate the elements and welcome accidental moments of material behavior.” Whether underscoring geometric form or expressive vistas, Takeda’s work illuminates the fundamental tensions between tradition and innovation as well as complexity and reductionism.
This exhibition is on view until 4/26/25.
Izzy Outerspace- Beautiful Blur
This dreamy song from LA-based artist Izzy Outerspace was released in November of 2024.
She will be performing at Permanent Record Roadhouse in Los Angeles on Thursday, 4/24/25 with Taleen Kali and Waverly Drive.
Aaron Gilbert‘s paintings for World Without End, currently on view at Gladstone Gallery combine aspects of dense urban environments with a sensitive look at the people who make their lives there.
From the gallery-
Known for his paintings that probe the distance between individuals and their communities, the private and the public, and the real and the conjured, Gilbert imagines the personal narratives that quietly unfold in the corners of our shared societal structures. Guided by myth, an uncanny sense of timelessness, and the artist’s deep interest in storytelling, these emotionally tender tableaux examine how individuals maintain their humanity in a historical moment punctuated by crisis, the looming peril of systemic collapse, and the increasingly totalizing velocity of consumer-driven desires.
While Gilbert’s subjects are often locked in moments of intimate exchange—we might see a couple in a bathroom together, a parent holding their child, an elderly man gazing wearily from a hospital bed—these interactions are nearly always mediated by the literal and symbolic confinement that typifies contemporary urban life. Referencing the containers that define city spaces (including storefronts, apartments, and even our own bodies), Gilbert investigates the complex emotional theater that plays out within all interiorities.
Typically inspired by moments from his own personal life, brief glimpses of interactions he’s observed between strangers, or an amalgamation of both, Gilbert’s work is particularly focused on endowing his subjects with the agency to circumvent the power structures that dictate their lives. Often including windows, plastic sheeting, glass, and other transparent barricades, Gilbert’s paintings probe the invisible mechanisms that quarantine us from one another. Exploring the limitations of even the most familiar of relationships, the artist imagines his subjects subverting the nearly inexorable systems of social taxonomy that have been instituted to organize and control our mutual understanding of desire, love, and community.
Gilbert’s paintings are often illuminated by the familiar glow of neon logos, halogen bulbs, or the hot orange tinge of summer sunsets oxymoronically improved by pollution. With his use of light and details that indicate a world touched by magical realism, the artist quietly suggests that his figures’ personal interactions extend beyond their relationship to goods, social frameworks, and the world as we know it. Amplifying the strange portals that join surrealism to reality, Gilbert allows us to glimpse a world hidden beneath the prosaic veneer of our organizing principles.
The artist has cited sources including devotional retablos, George Tooker, and Diego Rivera as influences, and his own work suggests a philosophical conflation of all three. Addressing both the dehumanizing qualities of contemporary life as well as the significance of the individual, Gilbert often looks at the myths generated by consumerism as an entry point to addressing cultural crisis. Interrogating the illusion of a choice-based identity offered under the mantle of capitalism, the artist frequently incorporates corporate logos in his work, including the Adidas and AT&T symbols that appear throughout this exhibition. Looming large in his dreamscapes, these familiar emblems seem to function as 21st century replacements for the mystical hieroglyphics of another time, their vacuum of meaning highlighting contemporary culture’s attachment to totems stripped of all spiritual significance. Juxtaposing intimate narratives with the dystopic depersonalization generated by commodity fetishism, Gilbert’s fictions search for the moments of magical connection that occur both on our city blocks, and behind other people’s walls.
This exhibition closes 4/19/25.
Currently on view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is the Thomas Scheibitz exhibition Argos Eyes. The show includes paintings, sculptures, and in the upstairs gallery, a table of tools and objects related to the work.
From the press release-
Internationally renowned for his mastery of painting, Scheibitz subverts traditional notions of the medium with radical juxtapositions of color and a unique formal language that lands ambiguously between abstraction and representation. Drawing from classical painting and architecture, the contemporary urban landscape, and popular culture, Scheibitz deconstructs and recombines signs, images, shapes, and architectural fragments in ways that challenge expected contexts and interpretations.
Scheibitz’s practice has been at the center of contemporary artmaking since the late 1990s with early solo exhibitions at the ICA London, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, as well as breakthrough presentations at the German pavilion of the 51st Venice Biennial, MUDAM Luxembourg, Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, and more recent major shows at Kunstmuseum Bonn, MMK Frankfurt, and Pablo Picasso x Thomas Scheibitz at the Museum Berggruen, Berlin.
In an age of infinite images and visual information, Argos, the multi-eyed, all-seeing guardian giant of Greek mythology, serves as a kind of avatar for Scheibitz. Like the panopticon-esque figure, the artist’s painting and sculpture absorb and dissolve visual material, encoding and decoding, mapping, measuring, penetrating and exploring a pictorial inventory. For Scheibitz, Argos Eyes are the observers of events and circumstances; that which we see directly, or indirectly via our ubiquitous technological devices, lenses, and screens. For the artist, a picture has always been a summary of different sources of observations and experiences which remain in the mind’s eye like “double exposures”. The eye, or by proxy the lens, is the entrance to the conscious or unconscious processing of what we see or do not see. A fundamental question for the artist remains the philosophical question: do we only see what we already know?
In the main ground floor gallery, Scheibitz presents a dynamic range of painterly compositions and a sculpture. Bringing together selections from his vast lexicon of images, Scheibitz builds up these compositions meticulously yet intuitively, using maquettes, drawings, collage, photography, and sketches. Recognizable forms such as eyes, cubes, droplets, and pyramids are translated into multilayered and complex pictorial structures that urge the viewer to consider multiple perspectives.
In the upstairs galleries, more intimately scaled paintings encircle the room, in addition to an Atlas-like master table filled with models, stencils, and other tools representative of the repeated motifs found in the artist’s studio. This conceptual landscape illustrates the core nature of the work, offering interrelated exercises in form, color, and material.
This exhibition closes 4/18/25.
The images above are of two sections of Laura Owens’s immersive multi-media exhibition on view in two of Matthew Marks locations. It’s a lot to take in with so many details in the layered paintings and throughout the various rooms.
Walking through a door to the brightly colored green of the second room gives the feeling of entering a magical secret world, an impression that continues throughout the galleries. Adding to this is a humorous video tucked away in a tiny space behind another door, and small panels that open from the walls revealing additional paintings. In the other gallery location are more rooms, including one with boxes containing various items and handmade books. It’s an overwhelming but wonderful show best seen in person.
From the gallery-
Laura Owens began exhibiting her work in the mid-1990s and quickly became known for her innovative approach to painting. Her work synthesizes traditional methods with unconventional ones, including printmaking and digital manipulation, to create destabilizing illusions of depth, extending her paintings beyond the confines of the canvas into three-dimensional space. Her paintings are often self-referential and draw extensively from art history, decorative arts, and craft traditions, as well as mass media and personal anecdotes.
The exhibition demonstrates Owens’s both meticulous and experimental approach to artmaking. Each element is hand-made in the artist’s studio through labor-intensive processes pioneered by Owens. A single panel may have over one hundred fifty layers of hand-printed silkscreen, on top of which Owens then paints further. The exhibition also includes kinetic elements, moving pieces within the artworks that continually point to their spatial and temporal contexts. “Though Owens is a master of composition, and the dynamism of her works has much to do with her sophisticated resolution of the problems that occur within the picture plane, it is at the edges, relations to external aspects such as architecture, interior space, landscape, time, geography, subject matter, style, and discipline, that their restlessness is found,” Kirsty Bell has written. “There is always more room to be surprised.”
This exhibition closes 4/19/25.