Los Angeles Art Shows- “Lumen: The Art & Science of Light” at The Getty Museum

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Books, California Art Shows, Conceptual Art, Glasswork, Illustration, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture
Dec 062024
 

As part of their programming for PST: Art & Science Collide, Getty Museum is showing Lumen: The Art & Science of Light. The exhibition includes a collection of European medieval artwork, along with several contemporary works, that focus in some way on the science and concept of light.

From the museum about the show-

Through the manipulation of materials such as gold, crystal, and glass, medieval artists created dazzling light-filled environments, evoking, in the earthly world, the layered realms of the divine. To be human is to crave light. We rise and sleep according to the rhythms of the sun, and have long associated light with divinity. Focusing on the arts of western Europe, this exhibition explores the ways in which the science of light was studied by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim philosophers, theologians, and artists during the “long Middle Ages” (800-1600 CE), when science and religion were firmly intertwined. Natural philosophy (the study of the physical universe) served as the connective thread for diverse cultures across Europe and the Mediterranean, uniting scholars who inherited, translated, and improved on a common foundation of ancient Greek scholarship.

This story is equal parts science, poetics, and craft. By bringing together a variety of media that materialize light and objects that communicate how medieval people understood the lights of the heavens and of the eye, this exhibition demonstrates how science informed the artistry of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. To convey the continuing sense of wonder inspired by starry skies or moving light on precious materials, the exhibition includes several contemporary works of art placed in dialogue with historic objects.

Below are a few selections-

“On the Construction of the World”, in “Book of Divine Works (Liber divinorum operum)” (text in Latin), Rupertsberg, Rhineland, Germany, about 1210-40 CE by Hildegard of Bingen (German, 1098-1179 CE), Tempera, gold, and ink on parchment

About this work from the museum-

The nun and philosopher Hildegard of Bingen is known for her deeply religious visionary experiences in which she communed with the fiery “living light” (lux vivens) of God. Yet her evocative spiritual imagery reflects the language of science and cosmology. Shown at lower left, Hildegard, an illuminator as well as author, recorded her dazzling vision of the human at the center of nested elemental spheres. The figure is ringed by heavenly bodies, the clouds, and the winds, all encircled by the figure of flaming Caritas, or Divine Love. As a way to understand humankind’s relationship to the Godhead, Hildegard’s imagery emphasizes the correspondence between the body and the cosmos; just as the four humors affected health, the four winds controlled the earth, and the vivifying power of divine light nourished both.

“The Glorification of the Virgin”, attributed to Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Haarlem, northern Netherlands, about 1490-95 CE, Oil on panel

The painting above by Geertgen tot Sint Jans has so many fascinating details and was part of a section titled Divine Darkness.

The wall text from that section-

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all associate God with light. In the Creation story told in Genesis, when light was created, so too was darkness. As medieval optical theorists understood that sight was contingent upon light and that bodily vision was not possible in darkness, theologians of the time equated the unknowable, invisible aspects of God with darkness. According to a medieval “negative theology,” God exists beyond human perception and poses a challenge to vision itself. The fifteenth-century Christian theologian Nicholas of Cusa wrote that “God is found when all things are left behind; and this darkness is light in the Lord.” Such contradictory associations between God and both light and darkness were fundamental to the verbal and visual expressions used to elucidate the nature of the divine.

And about the painting-

Golden light surrounds the glorified Virgin Mary and Christ child at the center of this intimate and absorbingly detailed devotional painting as a luminous host of angels fills the heavens with eternal music. Their brightness contrasts with the dark perimeter that envelops this apocalyptic vision to suggest the ineffable darkness in which God dwells.

Constellations from a Hebrew Translation of Ptolemy’s “Almagest”, In an astronomical anthology (text in Hebrew), Catalonia, about 1361 CE, Tempura, gold, and ink on parchment and Astrolabe (with Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic Script), Iberia (Spain) or Italy, 1300s CE

From the museum about these two items-

In the Muslim and Christian courts of Europe, and particularly in Iberia, highly educated, multilingual Jews held important positions as physicians and astrologers. Jewish practitioners of these related fields contributed original works on astronomy, mathematics, and philosophy, drawing from and improving on Greco-Arabic sciences. At left, the Hebrew translation of Ptolemy’s Almagest (a work that was little known in Europe before 1200) updated the ancient text with the addition of astronomical tables that guided religious observance. Only a small number of European astrolabes with Hebrew inscriptions survive. This exquisite example lists the names of twenty-four stars in a combination of Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic. The centermost circle marks the ecliptic, or the sun’s path, and is labeled with the zodiacal signs in Hebrew.

“Untitled (Mugarnas)”, 2012, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Mirrors, reverse-glass painting, and plaster on wood

One of the most impressive contemporary pieces in the show was the sculpture pictured above, by Monir Sharoudy Farmanfarmaian, which captured and reflected light so beautifully.

About the work from the museum-

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian was deeply inspired by a visit to the Shah Cheragh shrine in Shiraz, Iran. The vaulted domes and walls of that site are covered in dazzling, intricate mirror mosaics that fracture and dematerialize space while reflecting light and amplifying movement and activity in the shrine below. Farmanfarmaian began exploring these mosaic techniques, eventually collaborating with master artisans to produce sculptural and wall-mounted works that incorporate mirror mosaic and reverse-glass painting. Untitled (Mugarnas) adopts the sacred and decorative forms that are common in Islamic architecture, and expresses the perfection of creation.

This exhibition closes 12/8/24.

 

California Art Shows- Matisse Prints at Hammer Museum and Palm Springs Art Museum

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Collage, Los Angeles Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Palm Springs, Printmaking
Nov 232024
 

Both Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and Palm Springs Art Museum are showing prints from Henri Matisse’s Jazz. It’s interesting to see the same work but in two different contexts based on the curation.

At Hammer Museum they are part of the group exhibition Sum of the Parts: Serial Imagery in Printmaking, 1500 to Now, on view until 11/24/24.

From the museum-

Printmaking’s capacity for serial imagery was recognized during the Renaissance in Europe and has continued to be explored by artists across centuries and geographies to creative, oftentimes experimental ends. Print publishers had a hand in issuing series, which could be conceived complete from the start, expanded from shorter sets, or even formed from existing bodies of related works. Diverse organizing principles have shaped the serial format, including pictorial narratives, iconographic groupings, formal innovations, thematic variations, and sequences measuring time and marking place, as well as structural, modular, and conceptual progressions. Importantly, the creative act itself is an open-ended serial pursuit, with each gesture, idea, and decision interacting with or informing the next.

While we can appreciate an individual print extracted from a series as a work in its own right, our visual perceptions, intellectual interpretations, and emotional responses shift when we view multiple images collectively: the whole becomes greater-or other-than the sum of its parts. New meanings surface as commonalities, patterns, or differences emerge. Selected from the collection of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, this exhibition presents prints conceived as sets or series and further considers artists’ informal serial procedures and approaches to printmaking across five centuries.

At Palm Springs Art Museum they are part of Art Foundations, which places different works together in from their collection into groups organized in different themes. Matisse is paired with Ellsworth Kelly in a section devoted to “artmaking through the angle of a given concept, with each wall dedicated to a single concept: pure color, automatic painting, text as a motif, or ready-made.”

From the museum about the exhibition-

Art Foundations explores how various art forms have been produced throughout the last two centuries. It presents a succession of artwork groupings across multiple media and disciplines, bringing together works not usually shown in the same space. Meant to be visited clockwise, each gallery provides a different angle on what we consider art, with each grouping questioning how art is made, why, where, and by whom.

This presentation shifts the lens through which we look at art, allowing us to explore gallery after gallery, the conception and the material of artmaking, and the spaces where it is created. Art Foundations brings together academically trained and untrained artists as well as visual arts, architecture, design, and glass, displaying the breadth and interconnectedness of the museum’s collection.

For more on Matisse’s Jazz, The Metropolitan Museum of Art provides detailed information on its website.

 

Los Angeles Art Shows- “Abstracted Light: Experimental Photography” at The Getty

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Video and Film
Nov 202024
 

“Untitled”, 1930s-40s, Osamu Shiihara, photogram

The Getty has gathered several innovative photo works made from the 1920s to the 1950s for Abstracted Light: Experimental Photography, part of their PST ART: Art & Science Collide series. The exhibition also includes several experimental films and a room dedicated to Thomas Wilfred’s  “Lumia Instruments” that produce colorful moving abstract forms.

From the museum-

Light abstraction emerged after the First World War as a preoccupation of photographers and filmmakers in international centers of art production. Many artists began seeing light as something that could be manipulated, then photographed and filmed, like any other physical material. This exhibition offers a selection of works, dating from the 1920s onward, that reveals these artists’ fascination with the formal qualities of light as well as their innovative methods of projecting, reflecting, and refracting its rays to liberate their media from traditional modes of representation. They emphasized the novelty of their varied approaches by inventing new terms-including “Rayograph” (Man Ray), “Light Drawing” (Barbara Morgan), “Luminogramm” (Otto Steinert), “Photogenics” (Lotte Jacobi), and “Lumia” (Thomas Wilfred) -to characterize their work. “More and more artists of our generation have begun to contemplate light with the eyes of a sculptor gazing upon a block of marble,” noted Wilfred, “seeing in light a new and basic medium of expression with unlimited possibilities.”

Below are a few selections.

Edward W. Quigley, “Untitled (Light Abstraction)” 1931-39, and “Vortex”, 1933, Gelatin silver prints

Nathan Lerner, “Car Light Study #7”, 1939, and Hy Hersh, “Untitled (Abstraction)”, About 1950, Chromogenic print

Man Ray, “Untitled (Sequins)”, 1930 and “Untitled (Corkscrew and Lampshade)”, 1927

Francis Bruguiére, “Untitled (Design in Abstract Forms of Light)”, About 1927

This exhibition closes 11/24/24.

Los Angeles Art Shows- Sculpting with Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography at The Getty

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Photographers / Photography
Nov 202024
 

Deana Lawson, “Black Gold (“Earth turns to gold, in the hands of the wise,” Rumi)”, 2021, Inkjet print with embedded transmission hologram in beveled-mirror frame

Detail from the image above- this hologram is of Ron Finley, an LA based food activist and farmer

Matthew Schreiber, “Bowie 1-8”, 2016-23, a series inspired by David Bowie’s death in 2016.

As part of their programming for PST ART: Art & Science Collide, The Getty is showing Sculpting with Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography. The exhibition explains the process and presents the unique ways several contemporary artists experimented with it in their work.

From the museum-

Holograms produce the magical illusion of three-dimensional objects floating in space. They were made possible by the invention of laser technology in the 1960s, and since then, many artists have experimented with the art form. This exhibition presents holograms by John Baldessari, Louise Bourgeois, Ed Ruscha, and other artists who were invited by the C Project to explore the creative potential of the medium in the 1990s. Deana Lawson turned to holography to expand her photographic practice around 2020. The master technician in both instances was artist Matthew Schreiber, whose work is also featured.

Ed Ruscha, “The End”, 1998 reissued 2016

Louise Bourgeois, “Untitled”, 1998, reissued 2014

This exhibition is on view until 11/24/24.

Los Angeles Art Shows- Art Share L.A.- “Plateaus: Art That Resonates”

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Glasswork, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Music, Mixed Media, Music, Painting / Painters, Performances, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture
Nov 152024
 

Sculptures by Emily Sudd

Sculptures by Kyung Boon Oh

Photography by Kate Turning

Pictured above are some selections from Plateaus: Art That Resonates, a multisensory group exhibition at Art Share L.A. exploring the dualities of life that artists bring into their work.

From the gallery-

Art Share L.A. is pleased to present Plateaus: Art that Resonates a multidisciplinary and multisensory immersive art exhibition that explores dualities: art and craft, death and life, grief and love, and activity and stillness. These contrasts exist with an interdependent bond, reminding us that bonds are intrinsic and often intertwined partners. In multiple materials, processes, and scales, monument-like creations are revealed through thoughtful burnishing of passion.  The exhibition curated by Stacie B. London features seven visual artists: Amanda Maciel Antunes, Kyong Boon Oh, Hadley Holiday, Soojung Park, Emily Sudd, Kate Turning, and Cheyann Washington, along with additional contributions of ikebana by members of Sogestu Los Angeles, music by Rocco DeLuca, perfume by Lesli Wood (La Curie Eau de Parfume), and seating by Hunter Knight. Through a shared refinement of intentional experimentation with their mediums – acrylic panels, clay, glass, ink, photography, scent, sound, stone, thread, tree stumps, and wire– these artistic achievements reveal work that is brave, meditative, resilient, and vulnerable.

Our five senses inform our experiences and knowledge and assist us in ordering the world. In Plateaus: Art that Resonates the traditional forms of visual art of painting, photography, and sculpture are broadened to include aural art — via music and sound — and olfactory art. These multisensory and immersive pieces enhance the experience of viewing visual art and introduce additional dualities: sight with smell, smell with hearing, and hearing with sight. The expanded human experiences in an art gallery switch the expected experiences and invite the possibility of a familiar experience in a new way, or a breakthrough!

Breakthroughs often occur after long periods of what often seems like stagnation, or a plateau. It’s instinctual to want growth to be a continual upward trend, but instead it’s usually a series of long, flat periods (plateaus) of work with few visible results. Seemingly out of nowhere the plateau makes space for a breakthrough of creativity or growth—an intermittent moment when everything comes together. Instead of focusing on the result, it’s good to get comfortable in the plateau.

The artists and artisans of Plateaus: Art that Resonates use a broad range of approaches and techniques towards creative creations that are examples of how to grapple dualities, navigate the plateaus of life, and share breakthroughs that transmute our awareness of mortality into loving engagements with life and it’s contradictions and opposing perspectives that inspire and infuse life with meaning, immediacy, awareness, and appreciation.

Below are two of the ikebana created by members of Sogetsu Los Angeles.

This exhibition closes this Saturday (11/16) with a closing reception from 6-9pm.

Los Angeles Art Shows- Lisa Williamson at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Sculptors / Sculpture
Nov 142024
 

“OoOoOo”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, maple, aluminum, and lacquer

“New Wave”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, basswood, aluminum, and lacquer

“Ray”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, basswood (left) and “Wavy Earth”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, maple, aluminum, and lacquer

“Chimera”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, basswood, aluminum, and lacquer (left) and “Fields”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, maple, aluminum, and lacquer (right)

“A Bird and a Bud”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, basswood

“Trace”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, maple, aluminum, and lacquer

“Pool”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, basswood, aluminum and lacquer

Shapes create a visual language in Lisa Williamson’s exhibition Hover Land Lover at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles. The hand painted colors accent forms that feel both familiar and strange at once.

From the press release-

With an interest in forming a language through concise material abstraction, Lisa Williamson creates works that are visually precise, physically resonant, and often attune to the spaces in which they are exhibited. For Hover Land Lover, the artist presents a series of painted wall reliefs and sculptures that convey language as a series of formal compressions — of landscape, of architecture, and of figuration. At once systematic and intuitive, Williamson tunes and calibrates material space, in that of her individual works and in their relationship to one another within the gallery.

Central to the exhibition is a series of machine-carved basswood relief sculptures that are mounted to aluminum and painted by hand in layers of semi-transparent shimmering metallics, contrasted by surfaces of densely saturated color. Shifting in scale from vast horizontal expanses to modest head or page size abstractions, each work punctuates space and impresses an energetic chromatic charge. Wrapping around the galleries, the artist relates the installation of these works to the structure of a sentence or to that of an imagined morse code. Installed with “room to breathe”, Williamson carefully considers the sculptures’ relationship to the walls and connection to the surrounding architecture, rhythmically creating a conversation between each form and the space they occupy.

In the metallic silver-blue relief, New Wave, the sculpture echoes a long and narrow wave, a line drawing, a curtain, or a vibration. In juxtaposition is the compact relief, Fields, a concentrated bolt of color in which three horizontal bars of vivid green float before a gold infused bronze-metallic ground. Inventing subtle color associations and complex painted surfaces through her incorporation of glass and metallic particles, Williamson’s sculptures catch light and perceptually shift as one moves around each work. Groover is a direct nod to this act of tuning as a pattern of black dials reminiscent of stereo knobs protrude from a glimmering cream block. Hovering in the galleries, Williamson’s reliefs each convey a particular optical frequency — autonomous forms that hold space — at once expressive in their physicality while also maintaining a certain level of interiority, opacity, or resistance.

In a series of vertical sculptures, the artist draws from leveling or navigational tools such as plumb bobs, fishing bobbers, and pins. Human in scale, each upright form personifies balance and the demarcation of space. Situated in conversation with Williamson’s reliefs, these works disrupt the horizontality of the exhibition and instead “drop in”. Ray is a tall and tapered pin that is bifurcated by warm and cool tones, with alternating sections of opacity and luminosity. Drawing from a ray or beam of light, this work exemplifies the active nature of Williamson’s painted forms as glass particles reveal a non-static and light-responsive surface. In the diptych, A Bird and a Bud, Williamson inverts two identical forms and reorients her approach to color within each. Standing together, these animated sculptures conflate nature and figure, as an after-image of color casts against the wall to activate the surrounding space. Regarding precision as an expressive gesture and calibration as a mode of production, Williamson imbues her forms with character and locates a distinct formal resonance, softening the line between painting and sculpture, language and object.

This exhibition closes 11/16/24.

Los Angeles Art Shows- “Against Dystopia” at Diane Rosenstein

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Digital Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture
Oct 312024
 

Adrienne Elise Tarver

Cara Despain

Cara Despain

Ashanti Chaplin

Ray Anthony Barrett

Ray Anthony Barrett

Olivia “LIT LIV” Morgan

One room of the gallery with Margaret Griffith sculpture (center)

Jane Chang Mi

Andrae Green (paintings) and Phoebe Collings-James (sculpture)

Andrae Green

Margaret Griffith

Margaret Griffith (detail)

Against Dystopia, the group exhibition at Diane Rosenstein curated by niko w. okuro, presents a variety of interesting work that speaks to the times we are living in.

The exhibition includes ten international artists representing twelve cities across the United Kingdom, Jamaica, and all five regions of the United States-  Ray Anthony Barrett, Ashanti Chaplin, Phoebe Collings-James, Cara Despain, Andrae Green, Margaret Griffith, Jane Chang Mi, Olivia “LIT LIV” Morgan, Esteban Ramón Pérez, and Adrienne Elise Tarver.

From the gallery-

Presented on the eve of the 2024 presidential election, Against Dystopia is ‘a far-reaching exhibition, both in terms of the diverse backgrounds and approaches of its featured artists, and the social, cultural, and geographic ecosystems those artists represent and critique,’ writes okoro, who is based in New Haven, CT. The exhibition ‘features artworks that inhabit a spectrum of anti-dystopian thought, from mobilizing conceptualism to overcome historic traumas and the precarity of the present, to envisioning future utopias against seemingly insurmountable odds.’

Against Dystopia transforms fear and anxiety surrounding the uncertainty of our shared future into a tangible site of hope—one where collective memory reminds us of our agency to enact change today, and rich cultural traditions empower us to imagine alternative futures. Of significance is the inclusion of artists who identify as multi hyphenates, playing numerous social roles within their communities, such as advocate, change agent, chef, documentarian, educator, father, filmmaker, mother, musician, oceanographer, researcher, and too many more to name.

Artworks are grouped into three thematic sections, each of which explores creative strategies of resistance and works against dystopia at all costs: field research, symbolic interactionism, and speculative fiction.

Ray Anthony Barrett (Missouri), Ashanti Chaplin (Oklahoma), Cara Despain (Utah/Florida), and Jane Chang Mi (Hawai‘i/California) use field research to map histories of frontierism, settler colonialism, and land politics onto ecological and socioeconomic systems today. With a focus on listening to the land and sea to both unearth and atone for difficult truths, these artists name and dismantle dystopian practices on the path to reconciliation. Embracing an appreciation for both hyperlocal traditions and the tenets of global citizenship, each underscores our shared duty to ensuring ecocultural sustainability and Earth’s habitability for future generations.

While Margaret Griffith (California), Olivia Morgan (New York), and Adrienne Elise Tarver (New York) work through markedly different mediums and styles, they share a fearlessness in addressing ongoing tensions and questions surfaced amidst the political firestorm of 2020. Embracing tenets of symbolic interactionism, or the theory that individuals shape and are shaped by society through daily interactions and the co-creation of meaning from symbols, these artists remind us of the power of human connection to bridge difference. Each steers towards social cohesion by processing collective grief and the enduring impacts of the 2020 presidential election, the proliferation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement respectively. Whereas Morgan and Griffith subvert symbols that often polarize rather than unite us within physical space—such as fences, face masks, and smartphones—Tarver reaches into the past to pull forth reimagined symbols that speak to our spiritual interdependence.

Phoebe Colling-James (United Kingdom), Andrae Green (Massachusetts/Jamaica) and Esteban Ramón Pérez (California) boldly envision alternative realities by using speculative fiction and symbolic allegory to sew threads of connection across time and space. Each resists linearity and subverts narrative tropes to instead materialize the fluid spiritual dimensions of lived experience. Through their layered ceramics, paintings, and sculptures, these artists mine the depths of their respective Jamaican/British, Jamaican/American, and Chicanx heritages to comment more broadly on social conditions today, prompting us to dream beyond what’s readily visible or knowable.

Against Dystopia opens concurrently with The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: Art x Science x LA, which similarly explores, “opportunities for civic dialogue around some of the most urgent problems of our time by exploring past and present connections between art and science.” By convening an international group of visionary artists to help initiate these dialogues, Against Dystopia prompts viewers to pursue deeper understanding of shared challenges and solutions, on both the micro and macro levels.’

This exhibition closes 11/2/24.

 

 

Los Angeles Art Shows- Brian Rochefort at Sean Kelly

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Ceramic Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Sculptors / Sculpture
Oct 302024
 

Brian Rochefort’s ceramic sculptures for Staring at the Moon at Sean Kelly gallery are an incredible mix of textures and colors. Based on his travels to several natural environments around the world, the work combines the familiar with the unusual to form fascinating results.

From the gallery-

Brian Rochefort’s mixed-media sculptures incorporate a variety of different textures, surfaces and colors to create rich, otherworldly forms. Referencing his travels to some of the most remote parts of the planet, such as the Amazon Rainforest, the Galápagos Islands, and the Ngorongoro Crater, in Tanzania, he internalizes and translates his experiences in these secluded, ancient landscapes into potent sculptural forms.

Rochefort’s sculptures are built up in a unique process of layering, wherein the initial form undergoes multiple firings. Between each firing, he airbrushes the works and applies glazes, many of which he has developed himself through extensive experimentation. This process pushes the technical limits of ceramics in pursuit of evocative, otherworldly new forms. As he states, “Some of the most successful pieces that I’ve done in the past have been works that I’ve built up too fast… but somehow I’ve managed to save the form, and it turns into a different monster.” He works intuitively to build a composition, not unlike an abstract painter, and cites artists such as Albert Oehlen, Joan Mitchell, Franz West, and even photographer Aaron Siskind as influences for their daring deployment of color and texture. His virtuosic control of his medium is tempered by the element of chance inherent to the process of firing the sculpture. In this way, the completed works are the result of a dynamic interplay between his highly developed technique, the distinctive character of each sculpture, and ultimately chance.

Rochefort is equally inspired by his travels to remote and untouched ecosystems, such as barrier reefs and rainforests. A vital form of inspiration for him, the rare and vibrant natural forms found in such locations are apparent in the works. His intent, however, is not to directly represent the landscapes that he visits, a task he describes as “nearly impossible to do.” The sculptures take on the formal qualities of the landscapes through an almost volcanic layering of form upon form, color upon color, and texture upon texture, ultimately blooming into vivid, texturally sumptuous works. His larger freestanding works, which he refers to as Craters, evoke the fundamental quality of his sculptures: a powerful moment of contact with something deeply elemental and otherworldly.

The gallery also posted the video below where he discusses the work.

This exhibition closes 11/2/24.

Los Angeles Art Shows- Shirazeh Houshiary at Lisson

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Los Angeles Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Oct 292024
 

“Earth Lament”, 2023, Pigment and pencil on Aquacryl on canvas and aluminium

“Earth Lament”, 2023,Pigment and pencil on Aquacryl on canvas and aluminium (detail)

“So Far So Near”, 2024, Pigment and pencil on Aquacryl on canvas and aluminium

“So Far So Near”, 2024, Pigment and pencil on Aquacryl on canvas and aluminium (detail)

“Cicada”, 2023, Pigment and pencil on Aquacryl on canvas and aluminium

Currently at Lisson Gallery is Shirazeh Houshiary: The Sound of One Hand, an exhibition of the artist’s new and recent work. For the paintings she combined distinct color formations with intricate patterns drawn on the surface using pencil. The details are astounding when seen up close.

From the press release-

For her first solo show in Los Angeles for over a decade, the British artist Shirazeh Houshiary presents new and recent works, exploring the origins of life and the mysteries of the cosmos, from a microscopic cellular level, to the stratospheric phenomenon of the aurora borealis. The show’s title relates to a Zen Buddhist teaching that instructs the student to listen to the sound of one hand clapping, in order to open their mind to such a possibility and transcend the constraints of the physical body. Despite not being a Zen practitioner, Houshiary realised that her work revolves around the insistent sound made by one of her hands, making tiny, looping, scratched marks in pencil onto large aluminum surfaces, building up worlds through the silence of her inscribed words.

Houshiary’s abstract paintings emerge from an initial pour of liquid color that floods the surface in irregular pools, before she then covers these areas with her own calligraphic gestures in graphite, which are in fact tiny repetitions of the Arabic phrases: “I am” and “I am not”, which she also likens to the natural act of inhaling and exhaling. For one of the two largest works in the show, entitled Enchanter (2024), Houshiary applies red pigment and pencil to a black ground in five ring shapes, recalling structures of carbon particles linked in a chain. Matching this in scale but cooler in tone, is the painting Earth Lament (2023), with two silhouetted blue figures that somehow materialized from the sedimented pigment, one appearing to soar and the other seemingly being dragged down. This accidental figuration also occurs in the work Cicada (2023), which could just as easily be a depiction of the wings of this insect as it could be a representation of its rhythmic song. At the other end of the scale are the galactic indigo swirls of So Far So Near (2024) and the bands of ethereal light crisscrossing the work titled Aurora (2023), recalling those seen occasionally streaking across a night sky.

Occupying the floor is a sculptural installation in nine parts, made from an open latticework of aluminum bricks in blue and green hues, each with the same footprint, but all at different heights, growing at increments of one layer at a time (the shortest has five layers, the highest thirteen). Entitled Maelstrom (2022), these curved forms, both hard and supple at the same time, recall not only the molecular structures of the red painting Enchanter, or “that primeval storm within the spiral of creation where something grows,” as the artist puts it, but also the shape of the ouroboros snake eating its own tail.

A second sculpture, seemingly another form defying logic and gravity, bursts from the wall. Its two sinuous, entangled lines are the artist’s approximation of the movement of a solitary wave – lending it the name Soliton (2024) – which is a type of swelling or surging motion that is not dependent on previous pulses, or followed by other waves. From such unfathomable objects, to minute molecules and gigantic expanses of space, Houshiary’s artworks represent a journey through everything from the chaos and messiness of the Big Bang to the silent contemplation of the resulting energies that surround every one of us.

This exhibition closes 11/2/24.

Los Angeles Art Shows- Austin Lee at Jeffrey Deitch

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Digital Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film
Oct 232024
 

Austin Lee’s uses a combination of technology and traditional artistic techniques to create work in a variety of mediums for Psychomachia, his latest exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch. The saturated colors in his paintings (and the blue of the center sculpture) make them eye catching, while his subject matter creates, at times, a feeling of unease.

From the gallery-

Austin Lee knows how to render human emotion. Through a unique process that has defined his career, Lee explores human psychology and emotions by integrating software technologies with traditional methods of artmaking to produce vibrant paintings, sculptures and video works. Psychomachia marks Lee’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in eight years and third exhibition with Jeffrey Deitch.

Lee’s work explores the hyperreality of social media and the internet, and, in this exhibition, he continues to explore the complexity of human connection that can be refracted through our digital age. He uses 3-D and virtual reality software to make drawings that are then painted on canvases with airbrush or fabricated in materials like resin and bronze. Lee turns inward and examines his own raw emotions through saturated hues and uncanny images.

The exhibition also draws inspiration from a transformative visit Lee made to the Giotto Chapel in Padua, Italy, where he was inspired by painted scenes from the 14th-century poem Psychomachia by Prudentius. The poem, which depicts the allegorical battle between virtues and vices for control over the human soul, served as an important source for several paintings in the exhibition. Some paintings show imagery that is directly pulled from the Chapel’s walls, while other paintings are quiet references to familiar symbols, like animals and families. Lion with Blue Eyes (2024), for example, conjures feelings of valiance and strength, whereas In Bed (2024) invites visitors to participate in a more unsettling sensation–– the feeling of being vulnerable or being under surveillance.

Central to the exhibition space is Blue Fountain (2022-2024), Lee’s fountain sculpture that was previously exhibited in his solo museum exhibition at the Lotte Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea in September 2023.

The mezzanine features a series of new video works that continue to explore surveilled environments and the disquieting feelings in the paintings. The animated figures ogle at the viewer from the same viewpoint as reflected in In Bed. It is common for Lee to build upon previous works, placing them in a rich, multidimensional visual world through rendering them in different media.

This exhibition is on view until 10/26/24.

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