A new site-specific artwork by Lita Albuquerque, “Red Earth,” greets visitors at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens as garden areas reopen after a closure of more than three months as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally scheduled to go on view in March, the temporary installation centers around a boulder capped with bright red pigment placed among towering bamboo in a grove of the Japanese Garden.
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 MoreBuddhist teacher and author Stephen Batchelor and artist Lita Albuquerque discuss their views on life, death, and the concept of impermanence with KCRW host Jonathan Bastian. This interview has been abbreviated and edited for clarity.
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 MoreHow else to describe these past few weeks other than surreal? Seemingly overnight, the entire fabric of daily life has been turned upside down. And yet—between trying to order groceries online and refreshing the New York Times homepage—it’s important that we keep ourselves optimistic, energized, and entertained (and, perhaps, a little distracted).
Read Moreohn Gallery didn’t aspire to plan a booth celebrating female and non-binary artists; the directors just selected work they were passionate about and ended up with a thoughtful, attractive presentation featuring no male artists at all.
Read MoreAs a nine year old elementary school student, meeting his dad’s colleague Marcel Duchamp was an eye opener for author Tosh Berman. “When I told the teacher,” Berman explains, “she asked ‘what did you do over the weekend?’ and I said I went to this art show at a big museum in Pasadena, and I met this French man, and she knew what I was talking about. I don’t think she was an art fan, but I think she read about it in a newspaper and stuff.”
Read MoreKohn Gallery in Los Angeles has added Chicago-based painter Caroline Kent to its roster. The gallery will present Kent’s first solo exhibition in L.A. in September. Works by the artist, who is known for her explorations of language and abstraction that unfold on black canvases, can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. She has previously exhibited at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, the FLAG Art Foundation in New York, and elsewhere.
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 MoreSeated atop a big anamorphous rock in AlUla, an ancient oasis in the Medina region of Saudi Arabia, is an electric blue sculpture of a woman seated in the meditative yogic position called “lotus.” Her legs are crossed while her hands extend out with her palms open on either knee. Her eyes are closed as she connects with the silence and nature that surrounds her.
Read MoreCurated by Raneem Farsi, Aya Alireza, and Desert X artistic director Neville Wakefield, the exhibition brands itself as the first of its kind in Saudi Arabia. Danish collective Superflex, Egyptian artist Wael Shawky, and five creators from Saudi Arabia are among those who have been tapped to create the 14 site-specific works from January 31 to March 7.
Read MoreDuring a fifth-grade field trip in 1966, Sharon Ellis' class shuffled into the San Diego Museum of Art and listened dutifully as a docent told the children why they should like a painting depicting a young girl. Sharon wasn't so sure. She decided she didn't like the painting. Or the girl in the painting.
Read MoreKohn Gallery in Los Angeles has added the New York-based artist Sophia Narrett to its roster. Known for her elaborate embroidered canvases that explore gender and notions of intimacy and identity, Narrett will have her first solo exhibition in L.A. with the gallery in September 2020.
Read MoreThe human race is better equipped to talk a lot of nonsense than to save itself from extinction. Octavio Abúndez’s exhibition at Kohn Gallery made the point with a resounding crash of cant. The main room was hung with some of the Conceptualist’s hard-edge “stripe” paintings, outfitted with the umbrella title “We Could Be So Much Better,” 2015–, and composed of stacked bands of color.
Read MoreSix painters contribute significant large-scale works to a dynamic group show comprising a range of aesthetics, styles and narrative strategies, all centered around representations of the male figure, especially men of color. In Disembodiment, curator Mariane Ibrahim is committed to an updated canon which recognizes that a universe of stories and styles exists, created by black artists, depicting people, that are nevertheless not engaged — or, not only — in a dialog on identity. Instead, or additionally, these artists are advancing a broad, diverse and robust conversation with the very notion of portraiture across art history and fine art technique.
Read MoreIn Facts, contradictions, puzzles, an explanation and a few lies, Guadalajara-based, mixed media artist Octavio Abúndez presents large brightly colored canvases covered with snippets of text culled from disparate sources. The centerpiece, Hi(stories): A Utopian History of Humanity (2019), a grid of 256 small canvases, is both an homage to Gerhard Richter‘s Color Charts and On Kawara’s Date Paintings while also a jumping off point for something completely different.
Read MoreThe newest addition to this blue-chip cohort is Tony Berlant’s sculptural triptych The Marriage of New York and Athens, a work with a one-of-a-kind provenance. Berlant, a Los Angeles–based sculptor, made the pieces between 1966 and 1968 to serve as an element of his studio’s interior design, and for a few years, they did just that. But when he became busier and needed more space, he removed them and loaned them to a then-upstart architect who had become a close personal friend. That architect: Frank Gehry.
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 MoreToward the end of his residency at the University of Chicago’s Arts + Public Life program, I travel to visit the studio of visual artist, Jarvis Boyland. “Hey Kootie K,” we greet each other with an embrace, as I enter the room and unload. Located across the street from the Garfield Green Line station in Chicago’s Southside, the studio is filled with the warmth of a long-awaited summer. Sheer splats of fuschia paint on the walls are leftover from a body of work that debuted earlier this spring in “On Hold,” his first solo-exhibition at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles
Read MoreThe Los Angeles-based enterprise Kohn Gallery has added to its roster the estate of Ed Moses, an L.A. painter who died last year. The gallery will include works by Moses in a group presentation in its booth at Art Basel Miami Beach in December
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