Los Angeles Art Shows- Kenny Scharf at Honor Fraser

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Apr 042015
 

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Kenny Scharf’s current show at Honor Fraser is a fun mix of collage, painting, and video, with many of the works making their debut.

From the press release:

Though Scharf is best known for his exuberant iconography, his work also contains underlying themes that reflect his ongoing commitment to social and environmental concerns. For Scharf, the embrace of fun is an act of defiance, his considered use of unconventional materials, bright color palette, and playful shapes a protest against restrictive cultural conditions. In his latest body of work, the Born Again paintings, Scharf encapsulates this notion of transforming the mundane by inserting his familiar characters and motifs into found amateur paintings. Akin to his earlier customizations of mass-produced objects like phones, washers, and televisions, here it is the discarded artwork that is repurposed.

His famous characters also make an appearance all around Davis Bros Tires on Washington and La Cienega nearby.

Los Angeles Art Shows- “Variations: Conversations in and Around Abstract Painting” at LACMA

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Fiber Arts, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Mar 222015
 

Today (3/23) is the last day to see Variations: Conversations in and Around Abstract Painting at LACMA.

From the press release:

In an attention-compromised age when images are instant and prevalent, abstract painting serves as a contradiction, acting as a conduit for the mark of the original, individual artist. While most of the work in the exhibition has been recently created and acquired, additional paintings culled from LACMA’s collection illustrate how artists have reanimated techniques and forms using other sources that are appropriated from popular culture, photography, and collage, essentially creating a new variation of abstract painting.

It’s also a good day to visit LACMA because they are having a full day of  activities and performances to celebrate Nowruz, the Iranian New Year and the first day of spring.

Los Angeles Art Shows- Ei Arakawa and Karl Holmqvist at Overduin & Co. and Anish Kapoor at Regen Projects

 Art, Artists, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
Mar 062015
 

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Tomorrow (3/7)  is the last day to see the Ei Arakawa and Karl Holmqvist exhibition Y.O.Y.O.G.A.L.A.N.D. at Overduin & Co.

From the press release:

The exhibition features sculpture, drawing, poetry, and video in an installation addressing a range of subjects from global energy production-nuclear power and the potential of geothermal energy-to utopian ideals and the relationship between art and social issues.

Also closing 3/7 is London based artist Anish Kapoor’s sculpture show at Regen Projects.

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From the press release:

A series of monumental works feature organic, terrestrial forms made from resin and earth. In contrast to their raw, earthly matter, a series of highly polished stainless steel sculptures reflect and refract an illusion of the world onto their mirrored surfaces and confound the viewers’ relationship to the space around them. Similarly, several monochromatic voids appear to float on the gallery walls, their concave interiors play with the viewers’ perception of surface and depth and create the illusion of infinite space reflected in their void like interiors. A trio of amorphous wall sculptures entitled Keriah (I, II, III) refer to the Jewish mourning practice of clothes tearing. Visceral and raw, their shapes hang on the wall as if in a perpetual state of decay.

Los Angeles Art Shows- Pierre Huyghe at LACMA

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film
Feb 222015
 

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Today (2/22) is the last day to see Pierre Huyghe at LACMA. There is so much to see within the show and it is, at times, overwhelming. You enter the exhibition with your name announced by a live announcer and then proceed through the maze like space to find aquariums with live sea creatures in them; video work, including a film with a monkey walking around wearing the mask of a girl; sculptures including the one pictured above with a head of live bees (Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt)); and Human, a live dog who is around the gallery at various times.  It’s Huyghe’s first retrospective in his twenty-five year career and well worth a trip into his unique visual world.

Los Angeles Art Shows- “LOUIS VUITTON SERIES 2- Past Present and Future” Exhibition in Hollywood

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Fashion, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Events, Video and Film
Feb 222015
 

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Today (2/22) is the last day of exhibition LOUIS VUITTON SERIES 2 – Past, Present and Future in Hollywood.

From their website:

The Series 2 exhibit is a modern and unexpected interpretation of a fashion show that contextualizes the Spring 2015 Women’s Ready-to-Wear collection, conceived by Women’s Artistic Director, Nicolas Ghesquière. The exhibit allows visitors to explore the creative process behind the collection through a “series” of distinctive rooms that thematically share his influences and inspirations as well as the excitement of the fashion show experience.

It is an interesting exhibit and does immerse you in the fashion show world. There is even a video section where you learn about the process of creating the items themselves.  And free stickers at the end!

Los Angeles Art Shows- Gillian Wearing at Regen Projects

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film
Jan 242015
 

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Today is the last day to see British artist Gillian Wearing’s exhibition everyone at Regen Projects.  The two new video works are especially affecting.

Fear and Loathing, the artist’s first work produced in the US, presents a split screen with two people wearing masks, one on each side, alternating monologues about either a fear or a loathing from their personal lives.  In the second, We are Here, residents of the West Midlands of England, tell stories of their lives as if they have returned from the dead. This piece was inspired by the American poet Edgar Lee Masters’ 1915 book Spoon River Anthology.

The artist also includes portraits of herself within the exhibition, including a portrait of herself in a mask of her younger self, a large necklace with a pendant that is a mask of her face, and a series of sculptures of her hand with different fortune teller readings written on them.

There’s a certain sadness to the exhibition as Wearing examines lives caught in circumstances that are often beyond their control. This ties in to the idea of the fortune teller, who is sought out for the feeling that life is predestined.  Yet the various fortune tellers here tell different stories for the same hand. Perhaps these are like the different stories we are presenting to the world throughout our lives, at times with our true faces masked.

 

Los Angeles Art Shows- Nicolas Grenier at Luis de Jesus Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Dec 132014
 

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From a distance the paintings in Nicolas Grenier’s  One Day Mismatched Anthems Will Be Shouted in Tune, his exhibition at Luis de Jesus gallery, look like patterns and gradients. On closer inspection though, words materialize to comment on the societal structures currently controlling us.

In the first image above, Middle Ground II, anger in the darker colors moves to the “whatever” placed in gray. The center text reads “toward a bipartisan middle ground”. In the second, One Day Mismatched Anthems Will Be Shouted in Tune, the top text line fading in the pinkish gray reads “mass of folks that are left out and slowly sink to the bottom”, and further lines describe increasing ways that “folks” deal with their lot in life until the bright yellow center which reads “few folks that actually make things what they are”.

From the press release-

For Grenier, color functions as a kind of ecosystem to house the social, political, and cultural systems that serve as points of departure within the work. Gradation is used as a scalable, mutable device for organizing the paintings into large, concentric forms, as well as the interface through which we experience smaller letterforms and vectors. Thus, color plays a double agent: working to both solidify meaning (produce readability) and obscure signs as they become recognizable.

Grenier will be speaking at the gallery Saturday, December 13th at 3pm. This show closes December 20th.

(top image via Luis de Jesus gallery)

Los Angeles Art Shows- “Transmogrification of the Ordinary” at Angles Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
Nov 082014
 

This has been a great year for sculpture shows in Los Angeles, and this selection of work from artists based in this city is one of the best.

From the press release:

This group exhibition will address representations of the domestic object in fine art, including issues of still life, consumerism, gender, and identity. Exploring destabilization and the transformative shifts in cultural and aesthetic value that elevate the ordinary to art, the exhibition examines how everyday objects can be lifted from the mundane.

Today (11/8) is the last day to see this impressive show at Angles Gallery.

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