When Michael Kohn opened his eponymous gallery in West Hollywood four decades ago, his choice of location seemed far from a plausible business plan at the time. With its breezier pace and dominance of the entertainment industry, the City of Angels did not resonate with the avant-garde grunge of the downtown New York scene where the dealer cut his teeth.
Read MoreShiwen Wang’s painting is a refusal of clarity. Each work oscillates between the total collapse of formal and perspectival hierarchy and the unrestrained instantiation of a singular idea, often toying with the margins of representation.
Read MoreShiwen Wang finds inspiration right before nightfall, in twilight, a liminal time she sees as a moment of convergence between human and non-human life.
Read MoreOn the festive occasion of The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time (PST) project: “Art and Science Collide,” ever-inspired artist Lita Albuquerque debuts her fourth presentation with Michael Kohn Gallery.
Read MoreA matriarch of the Land Art movement that is closely associated with the American Southwest, Lita Albuquerque has engaged with the surface of Earth from the South Pole to Saudi Arabia, Peru to Paris.
Read MoreLita Albuquerque’s fourth exhibition at the Michael Kohn Gallery utilizes white color pigments to honor the experience of light-reflecting materials in nature, like salt and snow.
Read More“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 MoreEnglish professors will tell you that Shakespeare is funny, but his jokes often elude my grasp: his complex verse can cloud the immediate comedy of his plays. A similar difficulty underscores Siji Krishnan’s solo exhibition at Michael Kohn Gallery, aptly titled ‘Liminal Spaces’.
Read MoreEvery day artist Rosa Loy rides her bicycle 10 kilometers through Leipzig from her home to the studio she has kept since 1994. “My mind clears of everything I’ve been thinking of at home,” she said during a recent conversation. “I go into the studio, have a tea, start to paint, and see what’s coming in. I wait for a tingling feeling like someone is watching me from behind. That’s where my ideas come from.”
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 MoreIn 1972, a year before Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro opened Womanhouse—a watershed feminist Gesamtkunstwerk that was installed inside a derelict Hollywood mansion—Martha Alf (1930–2019), a newly minted MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, had begun work on her so-called cylinder paintings, the subjects of which were toilet-paper rolls.
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 MoreThe cover of the “Groundswell” catalog shows a detail of Lita Albuquerque’s “Spine of the Earth” (1980), a since-vanished artwork in the Mojave whose central spiral — done in red powdered pigment — looks like colorized Smithson.
Read MoreA little over an hour by train from New York City, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum debuts Chiffon Thomas’ first solo museum exhibition.
Read MoreAs Chiffon Thomas prepares for his first solo museum show—“The Cavernous,” opening in September at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut—he is mining the legacy of the geodesic dome, plumbing it for contemporary resonances.
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