"The thing about artists," quips Tony Berlant, "is that they say the work speaks for itself, then they can't stop talking about it!" Well, thank goodness for that, because during our tour of his new exhibition, it turned out Berlant had quite a lot to say about his newest work.
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A lifetime-spanning survey of works by Jess (1923-2004) is bound to be a bit meta — because the work that Jess produced across his long career was itself always already a survey of his own life and times. From his earliest paintings in the 1950s to his latter-day collage-based compositions made well into the 1990s, with drawing, sculpture, and video collaborations along the way, Jess was at every moment consciously assembling an archive of his own obsessions.
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Most of us might respond to the idea of a nuclear attack by diving under a nearby table. But ever since the first mushroom cloud entered our consciousness, many artists have taken a far more considered approach to the notion of human-triggered annihilation.
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What are the contours of gender? Is there a range of conditions that determine gender along a curve or spectrum we can visualize or somehow represent, measure or analyze? Is there a focal point we can identify that will turn it in one direction or another?
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Engender, a group exhibition curated by Joshua Friedman at Michael Kohn Gallery, represents an amalgam of familiar visual tropes, albeit shattered ones. Ideas about identity, sexuality and personal choice are brought to the fore in this stunning line up that includes the likes of Nicole Eisenman, Hernan Bas, Jansson Stegner and many others.
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“Engender” opened this week at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles. The group show is curated by Joshua Friedman, and investigates the way gender is explored in painting by 17 contemporary artists. The medium has traditionally approached male and female as a binary. Today, that’s being challenged by artists like Hernan Bas, Natalie Frank, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Nicole Eisenman, and more. Whitewallspoke with Friedman about the exhibition, on view through January 13, 2018.
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“Engender,” at Kohn Gallery. A new group show looks at the ways in which 17 contemporary artists are approaching the topic of gender through painting, picking apart the idea of the binary in ways that are figurative, expressive and abstract. This includes works by figures such as Hernan Bas, Tschabalala Self, Mequitta Ahuja and Nathaniel Mary Quinn.
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There is a knowing wink in an exhibition titled “sophisticated shit.” Used by Spanish speakers when one has forgotten a particular word, the slang term chingadera inflects the practices on display here with jocularity, framing the work in a discourse of the not yet known.
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"Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album” is currently on view at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles. The exhibition, on view through September 1, includes 400 photographs taken by the artist in the ‘60s, originally shown at the Fort Worth Art Center Museum in 1970.
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Before he ruined Sandra Bullock’s commute by strapping a bomb to a city bus; before he maniacally inhaled gas from a plastic mask, morphing into one of David Lynch’s most sadistic, unhinged villains; and before he donned a hippie headband, straddled a custom chopper and rode easy with Peter Fonda across the American West, Dennis Hopper too
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I’ve often wondered why writing about art must be so complex, so ponderous, so filled with grandiose vocabulary and overly-intellectual concepts. Not so with Michael Kohn Gallery’s catalog, “Joe Goode: Paintings, 1960-2016.”
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Artist Lita Albuquerque once told an interviewer her approach to art “begins with nature and who we are in relationship to it. I am continually asking questions about who we are in relationship to the environment around us and to the planet itself.”
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A Viennese pastry shop, dancing sweets, a little boy who overindulges and a revolution by the lower pastry orders. An almost unknown Richard Strauss score. Décor and costumes by the pop-surrealist artist Mark Ryden. And a great title: “‘Whipped Cream’! It’s really wonderful,” Alexei Ratmansky said of his full-length work for American Ballet Theater after a long day of rehearsal last week.
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This piece brings us closer to the work of the American artist Bruce Conner, currently considered one of the most important artists of the American underground scene of the second half of the 20th century. The exhibition, which can be seen in the Reina Sofía Museum from February 21 to May 22, brings together about 250 works made in different media: film and video, painting, assemblage, drawing, engraving, collage,
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So much art wants to move you. Lita Albuquerque’s art, on the other hand, wants to ground you, align you to the cosmos, and connect you to a world bigger and deeper than the one you know.
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"BRUCE CONNER: IT'S ALL TRUE" (Museum of Modern Art, New York) MOMA delivered for Conner with this staggering retrospective that underscored the reciprocity between his moving-image and static work by giving seven films optimun projection within the 250-piece exhibition.
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Realist. Surrealist. Hippie. Punk. Bruce Conner (1933-2008) was all of these and more. A Bay Area pioneer in experimental film, collage, photography, conceptual works, and paintings, Conner challenged the limitations of medium, genre, and style, constantly breaking new ground.
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Although John Altoon died in 1969, when he 43, his paintings and drawings look as fresh as the day they were made. They may, in fact, be even fresher.
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Ori Gersht uses a digital camera, off-the-shelf software and a high-end printer to make photographs that make you wonder what you are looking at. It’s a slippery enterprise. When it works, the uncertainty is sublime.
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American art had been drawing from Sunday newspaper funnies in various ways long before Roy Lichtenstein’s painted comic books panels Popped onto the gallery scene. In 1950s New York, Robert Rauschenberg affixed Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley, and Terry and the Pirates onto his paintings and assemblages, recontextualizing them with coded signals about his closeted desires.
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