I’ve always remembered a story my father used to tell me, about how my mother was arrested in North Beach, San Francisco in the late 1950’s for walking barefoot in public. “Howl”, City Lights Books, and Lenny Bruce were often mentioned in the same conversations. Those were days when society and government heavily censored people - their writing, speech, music, public activity, and art - primarily out of fear, fear of anything different or non-conformist.
Read More“WHAT A SHOW! WHAT A SHOW!” The reaction of the unseen, breathless, and elated MC at the end of Bruce Conner’s moving-image installation Three Screen Ray, 2006, is likely to be the exclamation of many a visitor exiting “Bruce Conner: It’s All True,” the revelatory retrospective of some 250 works currently installed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (through …
Read MoreIt’s taken a long time for Bruce Conner (1933 – 2008), the polymath San Francisco artist who was a major force in the development of both found-object sculpture and experimental film in the United States, to be given a major retrospective.
Read MoreIn a time when the world is constantly depicted to us through images, what is real: the tangible world or the reflected world? Can we even make a distinction between the two? How does it affect our approach to what we encounter? Ori Gersht’s work addresses these issues through two photographic series, On Reflection and Floating World at the Kohn Gallery.
Read MoreWhen Bruce Conner died in 2008, it wasn’t the first time. In 1960, the artist staged his own death in his first solo show, titled “The Work of the Late Bruce Conner.” By 1970, he had also convinced “Who’s Who in American Art” directory that he was deceased.
Read MoreBruce Conner was one of the great outliers of American art, a polymathic nonconformist whose secret mantra might have been “Only resist.” In multiple media, over more than five decades, this restless denizen of the San Francisco cultural scene resisted categorization, art world expectations and almost any kind of authority.
Read MoreAs a child, the late artist Bruce Conner overheard his father exchanging pleasantries with a neighbor in their front yard. Their conversation was so stilted and trite that the young Conner thought they must have been speaking in code. At that moment, as his story goes, he reckoned that adults must be using language to hide something from children. “I learned to distrust words,” he told an interviewer in 1986. “I placed my bet on vision.”
Read MoreBruce Conner (1933–2008) was one of the foremost American artists of the postwar era. Emerging from the California art scene, in which he worked for half a century, Conner’s work touches on various themes of postwar American society, from a rising consumer culture to the dread of nuclear apocalypse.
Read MoreFrom 1957 to 1961, Wallace Berman lived in the Marin County township of Larkspur, California, where he took over an abandoned house on Madera Creek and turned it into Semina, a private gallery space where he would host one-day art exhibitions featuring his own work (and those of his contemporaries).
Read MoreBerman, “American Aleph,” at Kohn Gallery. This is the first comprehensive Los Angeles retrospective for the pioneering Southern California assemblage artist in roughly four decades. The artist, who was also the publisher of the influential arts and literary magazine Semina, had an international influence.
Read MoreWallace Berman was a seminal figure in the post-war Los Angeles art scene, having made his solo LA debut at the legendary Ferus Gallery in 1957. Despite his crucial role at the intersection of assemblage, collage, mysticism, and poetry, he has not had a proper retrospective almost since his death 40 years ago.
Read MoreLita Albuquerque’s career stretches back to the 1960s, when she developed her praxis as part of California’s Light and Space movement. She has always had a propensity toward remote, desolate environments; over the four decades she has been creating, she has installed works at epic locations, including the Antarctic, Death Valley and the Mojave desert, and at the Pyramids at Giza, often completed in collaboration with architects.
Read MoreSusan Sontag argues that "whatever goal is set for art, eventually proves restrictive, matched against the widest goals of consciousness." While Sontag famously defined art as a "form of consciousness," she also insists that "outgrown maps of consciousness are redrawn."
Read More“There was a point in my career in the fall of 1977 when I decided to give up painting as I had known it in order to go back to the history of painting, to its very beginning where the first artists were using the earth to draw upon its surface, as a need to understand it historically.”
Read MoreFor decades, the Los Angeles–based artist Lita Albuquerque has blurred distinctions between Land art and Light and Space on increasingly grander scales, whether it be building installations surrounding the pyramids in Egypt or placing sculptures across Antarctica to mirror the formation of the stars.
Read MoreThe Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announce a retrospective devoted to Bruce Conner, spanning his 50-year career. BRUCE CONNER: IT’S ALL TRUE is the artist’s first monographic museum exhibition in New York, the first large survey of his work in 16 years, and the first complete retrospective.
Read More"The fair is as busy if not busier than it's ever been," Los Angeles dealer Michael Kohn told artnet News via email. "There are more people, more admirers, a bigger market," he said. Among his sales, Kohn counted works by Lita Albuquerque, two works by Bruce Conner, one Wallace Berman and one Joe Goode, adding that these are "artists who are on their way to rediscovery" for their "historical California-based works."
Read MoreSimmons & Burke's newest works at Kohn throb with internal contradiction. Each of the eight huge prints dazzles and daunts. The artists, based in L.A., make their elaborate digital collages with surgical precision and sophistication, but the visual impact of what results has the blunt force of a hammer.
Read MoreFor centuries, elephants have played a prominent role in Indian society, culture and religion. These exotic mammals are entwined in the traditions of India—woven into the essence of everyday life. Alternately abused and revered, they have been drafted into war, harnessed to work in logging, decorated and paraded in Hindu festivals and worshipped for their connection to Ganesh, an important deity.
Read MoreAnd the widespread interest in abstract painting continues apace: The eccentrically intimate still lives of Giorgio Morandi are being shown with the incomparable white paintings of Robert Ryman in Object/Space at Kohn Gallery opening September 19.
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