Yuh-Shioh Wong
Yuh-Shioh Wong
Alex Chaves
Today (10/10/15) is the last day to see Yuh-Shioh Wong and Alex Chaves’s excellent painting exhibitions at Night Gallery downtown.
Oct 102015
Oct 102015
Dan Levenson
Dan Levenson
Yunhee Min
Currently at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects gallery in Culver City are two very different artists. Yunhee Min’s large acrylic paintings use bright colors that give the gestural motion in them a striking vibrancy.
In the second half of the gallery are Dan Levenson’s monocromatic works which envision “a fictional and immersive narrative about a community of Swiss artists at the now-defunct State Art Academy, Zrich (SKZ)”, complete with an imagined studio and storage spaces filled with work.
This show closes 10/10/15.
Sep 262015
Noah Purifoy’s current retrospective at LACMA offers a comprehensive look at the influential assemblage artist.
A little background on the artist from LACMA’s website–
Noah Purifoy (1917-2004) lived and worked most of his life in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, California. A founding director of the Watts Towers Art Center, his earliest body of sculpture, constructed out of charred debris from the 1965 Watts Rebellion, was the basis for 66 Signs of Neon, a landmark group exhibition about the riots that traveled to nine venues between 1966 and 1969. In line with the postwar period’s general fascination with the street and its objects, Purifoy’s 66 Signs of Neon constituted a Duchampian approach to the fire-molded alleys of Watts, a strategy that profoundly impacted artists such as David Hammons, John Outterbridge and Senga Nengudi.
In the late 1980’s, after eleven years of public policy work for the California Arts Council, where Purifoy initiated programs such as Artists in Social Institutions, bringing art into the state prison system, Purifoy moved his practice to the Mojave desert. He lived there for the last fifteen years of his life, creating ten acres of large-scale sculpture constructed entirely from junked materials.
For more information on Purifoy and his Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum (where some of the pieces in the exhibition are from), KCET has an interesting article.
Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada closes Sunday 9/27/15.
Sep 202015
Mark Bradford- Dead Hummingbird, 2015 (image via Hammer Museum)
Today (9/20/15) is the last day to see the majority of artist Mark Bradford’s exhibition Scorched Earth at the Hammer Museum.
From the museum’s site:
Comprising a suite of new paintings (on view through September 20), a multimedia installation (on view through September 27), and a major painting on the Lobby Wall (on view through November 15), this new body of work by the Los Angeles–based artist Mark Bradford refers to formative moments in his life and ruminations on the body in crisis. As an artist who has long been interested in strategies of mapping and the psychogeography of the city he calls home, Bradford uses his characteristic painting style to excavate the terrain— emotional, political and actual—that he inhabits. Examining the moment and afterlife of the 1992 uprisings in Los Angeles, which he experienced from his studio in Leimert Park, Bradford has translated the outrage and lasting wounds of the riots into these new paintings. Scorched Earth is Bradford’s first solo museum exhibition in Los Angeles.
For more on Mark Bradford, his life and work, this LA Times article is an excellent portrait of the artist.
Get out of the heat and check it out- it’s free!
Jun 202015
The drawings in Hugo Crosthwaite’s exhibition at Luis de Jesus Los Angeles for Tijuana Radiant Shine have an interesting mix of comic elements combined with melancholic ones, while those that make up Shattered Mural are more somber as they focus on the toll of the horrible violence in Mexico.
From the press release:
Taking inspiration from Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, “The Hymn”, Tijuana Radiant Shine is composed of a puzzle-like installation of fourteen mixed media drawings on panel. The works are visual poems that depict the hopeful possibilities for a better future and the dichotomy of the reality that exists in this border city’s daily life.
Shattered Mural is a floor installation of forty-three sculptural wall fragments that reference the recent abduction and murder of the 43 college students in the Mexican State of Guerrero. This tragic event has become a national, and perhaps international, symbol for victims of institutional corruption and repressive regimes around the world. Unlike the Tijuana Radiant Shine panels, the sculpture fragments of Shattered Mural were created by deconstructing a mural into forty-three shards that when put back together would contribute to the whole.
Also make sure to look at the backs of the mural pieces which have different colors and patterns. This show closes 6/20/15.
May 302015
Alexandra Wiesenfeld‘s current exhibition at Klowden Mann when i when if when lie when life (Xavier Villaurrutia) is filled with lush paintings which (according to the press release) are a “meditation on landscape, desire, human presence/absence, and the nostalgia and longing embodied by natural landscape at a moment in which human history faces a growing recognition of its own eventual erasure.”
This show closes 5/30.
May 302015
Today (5/30) is the last day to see Ed Templeton’s exhibition Synthetic Suburbia at Roberts & Tilton in Culver City. His new paintings and drawings present a unique perspective on the Huntington Beach community.
Apr 192015
Today (4/19) is the last day to see both Robert Williams’ exhibition Slang Aesthetics! and 20 Years Under the Influence of Juxtapoz, a group exhibition by guest curators Andrew Hosner of Thinkspace Gallery and Gary Pressman of Copro Gallery at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG), in Barnsdall Park.
Robert Williams has had a long career, from working on famous 60′s comic book Zap Comix to later helping to create Juxtapoz Magazine in 1994 to provide exposure for underground artists. His paintings are highly skilled and detailed and each one has a story explaining the meanings behind the work.
The Juxtapoz exhibition has a diverse range of artists including Mark Ryden, Margaret Keane, Triston Eaton, Brett Armory, Andrew Schoulz and too many others to list here. Also drawing crowds are two of Kazuhiro Tsuji’s eerily lifelike sculptures of Dali (pictured above) and Andy Warhol.
Apr 182015
Alex Chaves
Currently at Roberts & Tilton, the exhibition And There Is An End is a wonderfully eclectic mix of painting and sculpture.
From the press release-
A search for poetic truths entails a search for art that not only has a dialogue with contemporary issues, but talks back to us. This exhibition brings together disparate voices to convene in a context spanning multiple generations and varied identities. With a range of works that acknowledges the individual via paintings and sculptural works with an unabashed display of the personal, the hand and the intuitive, implementing autonomous figuration and tactile expressions of materials that question the act of production and active image making.
This show closes 4/18/15.
Apr 112015
There is something pleasingly disorienting about Mernet Larsen’s paintings, currently at Various Small Fires (VSF) Gallery until 4/18. The once familiar objects take on new shapes and forms through her unique perspective.
This is the first show in Los Angeles for the artist who, though painting since the 1960′s, primarily showed in her home state of Florida, where she also taught painting at the University of South Florida.