News..
Today, April 9, Chiffon Thomas debuts their solo show at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles. Using techniques ranging across hand embroidered mixed media painting, collage, drawing, and sculpture, Thomas examines issues of race, gender, and sexuality. Identifying as a non-binary queer person of color, Thomas’ works examine the difficulties faced by defining one’s identity in contemporary society.
Read MoreShe lies on the ground, turns her body towards the canvas that will eventually become a painting full of colour, and starts creating. Dallas-born painter Kate Barbee is carried away by feeling, and needs space to express emotions that can sometimes be difficult to manage. Her latest series focuses on self-portraiture - a necessity during lockdown. I
Read MoreAt Kohn Gallery in Hollywood, Caroline Kent’s abstract shapes dance above matte black backgrounds. In each painting, made at a large and consistent scale, geometric forms mingle and position across the canvas. Like the cut paper works of Matisse — Kent also begins her process with cut paper to sketch out her forms — Kent’s shapes have precise and clean edges, while smaller details, like a swarm of squiggles, float on the black ground to create subtle annotations, almost like punctuation.
Read MoreCreating colorful narratives about erotic encounters from needle and thread, Sophia Narrett makes fascinating embroidered artworks that are fueled by love and desire. Trained as a painter, the Brooklyn-based artist began working with yarn by chance while constructing a sculpture during her undergrad studies at Brown University. Further experimenting with thread to stitch some drawings, she brilliantly discovered a way to employ embroidery to simulate figurative paintings. By the time she received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2014, she was imaginatively making meaningful art with her new medium, which quickly caught the attention of critics, curators, and collectors.
Read MoreIn her vibrant embroidered works, Sophia Narrett paints with thread, deftly creating detailed figurative scenes tinged with fantasy, desire, and eroticism.
Her tapestries take center stage this month in “Soul Kiss,” the New York artist’s first solo show at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles. Her layered thread designs, almost Baroque in their complexity, present a fever dream of feminine sexuality, with women in ecstasy reveling in their freedom.
Read MoreSophia Narrett was a painter before she began “drawing with thread,” as she told Hyperallergic. Dense with figurative detail, her embroidered bas-reliefs weave together not only fabrics but also various daydream-like narrative threads.
Read MoreWhat does selfhood mean during times of extreme isolation? This is only one of the many thought-provoking questions that Myselves, opening on September 11th at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, might be able to answer. The group exhibition, curated by Joshua Friedman, features over twenty-five established and emerging contemporary artists who use their medium as a means to examine the various ways that our environment shapes our identity.
Read MoreHow does an artist shape and portray their identity? Curator Joshua Friedman explores the question in myselves, a group exhibition at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles until October 31. The group show features work from 25 contemporary artists, including Amoako Boafo, Heidi Hahn, Bruce Conner, Loie Hollowell, Jesse Mockrin, Xiuching Tsay, and Naotaka Hiro.
Read MoreWith galleries slowly reopening across the Americas, especially in cities where the curve has been flattened, we took a look at the solo shows on view and found a number of exhibitions dealing with concepts of art-making in fresh and exciting ways.
Read MoreArtist Nir Hod has had his share of opening parties and solo shows, but his latest debut at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles offers an unveiling like none other. Opening on July 16 and running through the end of August by appointment only, the show entitled, “The Life We Left Behind,” pushes Hod’s work with chrome to new depths.
Read MoreAs the world continues to watch numbers in hopes they come down or stay the same, two Chicago artists got to see their bank accounts go up in the amount of $10,000 thanks to winning the 2020 Chicago Artadia Awards. Sculptor/printmaker Eliza Myrie and abstract painter Caroline Kent received the unrestricted funds this week as part of the national nonprofit’s 11th award cycle. The national nonprofit gives money annually to visual artists (in any medium) living within Cook County for more than two years.
Read MoreI must admit, it has been difficult to make work about human connection and the many emotions that come with that, because I have been so isolated. Before all of this, it was easy to just fall into a strange hypnosis and paint my feverish memories or fantasies. The intimate connection that was once easily shared with others has turned inward. I have gone deeper into myself and have challenged my perspective to tap into the collective unconscious.
Read MoreCaroline Kent breaches borders, formally, conceptually, geographically. Interested in reevaluation of abstract painting, that sacred ivory tower of modernism, Kent’s practice is founded on notions of textual translation informed, in part, by time spent in Romania.
Read MoreDesert X, a land art exhibition, first launched in 2017 in the Coachella Valley. It appeared again in 2019. Then its director, Neville Wakefield, announced a new location for 2020: Al Ula, a magnificent desert-scape and UNESCO World Heritage site in Saudi Arabia.
Read MoreOpening this Saturday, November 9th, 2019, Guadalajara-based artist Octavio Abúndez brings his conceptual works to Los Angeles for his first-ever solo exhibition. Courtesy of the Kohn Gallery, Abúndez’ show Facts, Contradictions, An Explanation, and a Few Lies will continue to explore the artist’s affinity for language, text, and the varying transmissions of Pop Culture across a remarkable 256 paintings.
Read MoreLos Angeles’s Kohn Gallery has added the Guadalajara, Mexico–based conceptual artist Octavio Abúndez to its roster. Abúndez, who was born in Monterrey, Mexico, in 1981, is known for works in a variety of media that address questions of borders, systems, and history.
Read MoreWallace Berman had an almost shaman-like impact on people. Private to the point of paranoia, he avoided interviews or having his own photograph taken, though he repeatedly photographed his wife and son. In 1976, he was killed in a car crash with a drunk driver in Topanga on his 50th birthday.
Read MoreThere’s something different about Jarvis Boyland’s work. Walking the exhibition rooms of Los Angeles’ Kohn Gallery — where Boyland’s “On Hold:” exhibit is on view through Thursday, May 23 — I was arrested by his portraits of Black queer men. Though simple and straightforward, there’s a complexity in the color story, particularly in his subject’s skin tones. They were rich and nuanced and complex, both imagined and realistic, and unlike any paintings I’ve come into contact with.
Read MoreBoyland’s most outstanding pieces focus on intimate portraits of queer, black men in the comfort of domestic settings, free from the prejudices which follow them throughout their life. Although relaxed, by deconstructing their anxieties, the men are inherently defiant in their abode. On Saturday, April 6th, Kohn Gallery opened On Hold:, an exhibition, which, in conjunction with NY-based artist Heidi Hahn's stellar show, Burn Out in Shredded Heaven, continues on until May 23rd. Flaunt had the lovely opportunity to chat with Boyland on his experiences growing up in the South, the inspiration behind his work, and the power behind portraiture.
Read MoreGonzalo Lebrija is one of Mexico's most renowned contemporary artists. Across a connective thematic thread examining the porous borders between life and death, dreams and phenomena, mind and body, eye and spirit, Lebrija practices in a fluid continuum of materials including but not limited to painting, sculpture and video — examples of all of which will be on view at his exhibition opening this weekend at Kohn Gallery in Hollywood.
Read More
