Juan Capistrán‘s I Am Hoping to See the Day for Hammer Museum’s exhibition Made in L.A. 2014.
Sep 072014
Sep 072014
Today (9/7) is the last day to see Hammer Museum’s Made In L.A. 2014, their second biennial exhibition consisting of Los Angeles based artists.
Jul 262014
If you are in Culver City make sure to check out Joshua Abarbanel’s show at Hinge Parallel– See Life. The biologically influenced shapes created out of layers of laser cut wood are incredible.
Jul 262014
Tonight (7/26/14) is the closing party for Mike Kelley’s exhibition at MOCA. It is free from 6-10pm. There will be DJs, food trucks and a cash bar.
Jun 282014
There’s a lot going on at Mark Ryden’s show at the Kohn Gallery– The Gay 90s:West. The paintings are incredibly detailed as are the frames. In one room there is a diorama-like sculpture that for a penny becomes an active parade through an intricately created town. There are also listening booths for a record created for the show in which several pop artists, including Katy Perry, Tyler the Creator and Nick Cave recorded versions of Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two).
From the press release:
In the inaugural exhibition Mark Ryden, underscores his aesthetic forays into cultural kitsch through his exploration of the lost but not forgotten “Gay 90s”. Employing the visual trappings of the formally idealized 1890s in America—women dressed in satin skirts with large bows, large wheeled bicycles, Main St. USA, vaudevillian stages—Ryden recreates scenes from this marginalized slice of pop culture. This important new body of work—which includes paintings, works on paper, installations, and sculpture—negotiates the aesthetic value of clichéd nostalgia through the lens of polished neoclassic painting, and will include Ryden’s largest and most ambitious work to date, The Parlor (Allegory of Magic, Quintessence and Divine Mystery): a 96 x 120 inch painting with a wooden frame hand-carved in bas-relief.
It’s hard to tell what it all means, but it is certainly worth checking out for the spectacle. This show closes 6/28/14.
Jun 282014
For Gabriel Kuri’s current sculpture show at Regen Projects, he has taken ordinary objects and combined them in interesting and often humorous ways.
From the press release:
Regen Projects is pleased to announce its first exhibition with Gabriel Kuri. Bringing together the artist’s recent explorations into the form, function, and materiality of everyday utilitarian objects, the show will feature a series of new sculptures composed of consumer materials and found elements that touch upon the relationship of value and exchange in contemporary global society.
He is also a part of Made in L.A. 2014 at the Hammer Museum. His show at Regen Projects closes 6/28/14.
Jun 082014
Today (6/8/14) is the last day to see Jacob Hashimoto’s stunning Gas Giant at MOCA Pacific Design Center. Thousands of paper sculptures in color and black and white (on the first floor) combine to create the feeling of walking into another world.
From the artist’s website about the work-
In its third and final edition at MOCA Pacific Design Center, Gas Giant begins its voyage subverting the grid of the white cube on the first floor by tangling the black and white elements of the installation while directing the viewer to the second floor, where an open, atmospheric, and colorful emphasis on the verticality of the space is the climax of the piece. Influenced by ample sources that range from sacred architecture, post-war abstract painting, the Light and Space movement from the 1960s in Southern California, and the 1990s generation of Los Angeles painters, Hashimoto expands painting and collage strategies in an ongoing exploration of abstraction and landscape through color, repetition, association, and even simple marks and gestures that when combined together, result in the infinite layers of complexity that characterize his work. Becoming a mirror of human experience, Gas Giant is a metaphor of possibility and temporality—the viewer encounters the beauty of an encompassing landscape, through vastness and detail in equal manner, but also with the idea of loss, since the work also reflects on the intensity of human labor in its creation, and considers the temporality of the viewing experience, and of the piece itself. This exhibition marks Hashimoto’s first solo museum exhibition in California.
May 242014
Maren Hassinger’s current show Almost Weightless at Reginald Ingraham Gallery uses everyday materials like newspapers and plastic bags to create larger sculptures which are concerned with the human condition.
The pink bags of Love (seen above) were inflated with “human breath” and contain “love notes”, tiny papers printed with the word love, within. In Wrenching News, (also pictured above), the harsh stories from newspapers are twisted into a knotted sculpture. Hassinger’s use of these materials with their alternating heaviness and light, grayness and color, enable the viewer to feel the weight of the emotions the sculptures are conveying.
May 032014
Daniel Arsham- Kick the Tires and Light the Fires
For his current show at OHWOW gallery, Daniel Arsham molds familiar American cultural objects out of rocks and minerals, such as obsidian, quartz, volcanic ash, or glacial rock dust to create work that feels like its been unearthed from a time capsule.
This show closes 5/3/14.
Apr 122014
Yoshitomo Nara’s solo exhibiton at Blum & Poe (closing 4/12) is filled with new works by the artist on a large scale including a room of bronze sculptures and some of his large paintings in others (an example of both pictured above). On the second floor of the gallery is a retrospective look at the artist’s drawings throughout his thirty year career. Whimsical and at times melancholy, the wide eyed figures fascinate.
Also in Culver City and closing 4/12/14-
Angles Gallery in collaboration with Hinge Modern presents THE ARTIST’S HANDS CONTINUUM by Rena Small. Small has been photographing her friend’s hands since 1984, and each black and white photograph represents the person in a unique way. Several of the hands included belong to familiar names.
The group show at Maloney Fine Art includes work by Joel Otterson, and some unique ceramic creations which look like bizarre vinyl toys by Maberry + Walker.