“Progeny,” Chiffon Thomas’s exhibition here, presents three installations in which peculiar juxtapositions of body parts and architectural forms become points of departure for considering how individual and collective identities evolve.
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“Progeny,” Chiffon Thomas’s exhibition here, presents three installations in which peculiar juxtapositions of body parts and architectural forms become points of departure for considering how individual and collective identities evolve.
Read MoreChiffon Thomas’s bronze, stained glass, and steel sculptures fuse the corporeal and the monumental, invoking forgotten legacies of labor, communal perseverance, and historical injustices.
Read MoreLike vivid flowers blooming out of damp soil and bright eyes emerging from dark wombs, German artist Rosa Loy has trekked deep through the trails of her own subconscious, lush with shaded verdure, and come to a restful pitstop within lichtung, a word she describes as “the place in the middle of a dark forest where the sun is shining.”
Read MoreMany of the near-identical subjects of William Brickel’s Was It Ever Fair. at Michael Kohn Gallery are looking down or away, as though they’ve just heard something that made them blush; their robust cheekbones are sometimes touched by a little red.
Read MoreWilliam Brickel’s elongated, sometimes contorted, often intense figures, possess an ambiguous beauty that are bluntly modern, nod to 16th-century mannerist styling, and offer a whiff of Paul Cadmus, Lucian Freud or even Egon Schiele. Mostly though they hold your eye with their strong and distinctive presence, crackling with feeling, pulling you in with their mysterious sets and clothes in colors fit for a Prada moodboard.
Read MoreFreud believed that human instinctive impulses come from subconscious desires, and that art and dreams are the products of transferred desires. In "Green Snake" (1993) directed by Tsui Hark, the use of color and scenery adds a avant-garde aesthetic to this erotic story: the lotus pond transformed by the white snake is often shrouded in mist; when the green snake appears in the pond, When he revealed his true form, all the lotus flowers in the pond flashed with faint will-o'-the-wisps.
Read MoreIn “Oscillating Womb,” Li Hei Di’s new solo show at Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, limbs, torsos, and fauna intermingle, fizzing and crackling in swirls of deep color and luminescent light. In a style that is neither figurative nor abstract, the Chinese, London-based artist captures the ephemerality of desire, encounter, and connection through painting.
Read MoreThere is a certain feeling of catharsis present in the works of Ilana Savdie. As I walked into her show, Radical Contractions, at the Whitney Museum of Art, and the ten-foot paintings towered colossally over me, it felt like my only option was to surrender to their fluorescent pools.
Read MoreRicardo Cabret is a Puerto Rico based interdisciplinary artist who uses painting and software to revel in the tensions between technology and the natural world.
Read MoreOn Friday, I checked out the newest exhibition at Kohn Gallery in Hollywood. “Un Nuevo Manglar” by Puerto Rican artist Ricardo Cabret reimagines his digital art into physical paintings
Read MoreThe Puerto Rican painter and computer engineer allows his two spheres of practice to inform one another, yielding intricately gridded canvases that both reveal and shed a soft light on the entanglements between man and machine.
Read MoreIn Alia Ahmad’s debut solo exhibition in the United States, “من الحلم .. . روضة (A meadow…from a dream),” on view at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles through January 14, 2023, a kaleidoscope of color invokes a sense of magnetism. Born in Saudi Arabia’s capital city, Riyadh—which is located on a desert plateau in the center of the country—Ahmad draws inspiration from her home’s diverse cityscape for her large-scale tableaus.
Read MoreThere is something sugary about Sharon Ellis’ new psychedelic paintings that are reminiscent of my favorite childhood board game, Candy Land, nostalgic of gingerbread plum trees, the peppermint stick forest, Queen Frostine and Princess Lolly. Ellis’ paintings also remind me of the last time I took mushrooms and indulged in looking up at the glittering night sky.
Read MoreOver the course of her 15-year career, Ilana Savdie has carved out a niche of her own in the contemporary art world with her vibrant, surrealist elaborations on the human form. Her paintings—reminiscent of both the hopeful abstractions of Helen Frankenthaler and the visceral, warped bodies of Francis Bacon—explore the tensions between control and defiance, identity and ambiguity.
Read MoreIlana Savdie: Entrañadas at Kohn Gallery. With hot-colored, electrifying paintings, Savdie’s large-scale works actualize tension as a state of being. Humanoid forms are suspended beyond normative order to narrate the displacement of power through invasion, control, and defiance.
Read MoreFeaturing works by: Martha Alf, who has a gift for giving life, beauty, and often personality to mundane objects with her use of light, colour and space, Sharon Ellis, whose works demonstrate an evocative approach to landscape painting, by touching upon the sublimity of the wild with rich hues, dramatic light sources and marked proportions.
Read MoreKate Barbee has piqued the interest of the art world with her dynamic depictions of fragmented female bodies in vivid domestic tableaux. Few artists can meld as many painting styles and art historical references as fluidly as Barbee does because few artists have the assuredness to paint as courageously.
Read MoreA new exhibition of paintings by Kate Barbee abandons the precious sanctity of the canvas. In rosy paintings, figures swirl and mingle, limbs jut out at impossible angles. Just as her figures are deconstructed in a pseudo-Cubist style, her paintings too are cut apart and then stitched back together.
Read MoreEven as a child, Caroline Kent was immersed in the language of abstraction. The Chicago-based artist — whose large-scale black canvases evoke cosmic unknowns — grew up alongside her identical twin sister, Christine Leventhal, with whom she shared special methods of communication. Their conversations can still be so elliptical and condensed that they perplex others.
Read MoreSophia Narrett’s are not your typical tapestries. First of all, they’re not tapestries; the textile artist does not weave, but embroider, layering thread upon stitch to create shapes and shades that coalesce into a dazzling narrative. Secondly, there’s the subject matter—highly erotic vignettes that would make artisans of the historic Parisian tapestry house Gobelins clutch their pearls.
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