At one point in the bright, mantric hour-long performance ritual which christened Lita Albuquerque’s current sculptural installation hEARTH at the Sunnylands Center & Gardens in Rancho Mirage, a throaty clarion chant rang out across the great lawn, staccato: Got to, got to, got to, got to listen to the silence. Why did you come here? Why do you listen? What does it say to you? In many ways, these are the foundational questions and the essential directive of the entire Desert X affair.
Read MoreReality and fantasy don’t collide in Mark Ryden’s art so much as they are equal halves of a more natural and dreamlike world.
Read MoreEverything had to be reinvented for the 2017 Whitney Biennial — the first to take place in the new riverside home of the Whitney Museum. But then, this leading showcase of contemporary American art feels refreshed in other ways, too.
Read MoreAfter 33 years at LA Louver, seminal pop artist Tony Berlant has moved across Los Angeles to Kohn Gallery, in a change that reinforces the gallery’s strategy of supporting artists who helped shape the Californian and West Coast aesthetic.
Read MoreBruce Conner (1933, McPherson, Kansas - 2008, San Francisco) is one of the most pre-eminent American artists from the second half of the twentieth century. This exhibition, the first to present his work in Spain, brings together more than 250 works which span his fifty-year career.
Read MoreMark Ryden will have a major restrospective of his work exhibited in Málaga, Spain at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga.
Read MoreI’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.”
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