Sophia Narrett’s are not your typical tapestries. First of all, they’re not tapestries; the textile artist does not weave, but embroider, layering thread upon stitch to create shapes and shades that coalesce into a dazzling narrative. Secondly, there’s the subject matter—highly erotic vignettes that would make artisans of the historic Parisian tapestry house Gobelins clutch their pearls.
Read MoreART: Caroline Kent: A Sudden Appearance of the Sun and Sophia Narrett: Soul Kiss at Kohn Gallery. Interested in a reevaluation of abstract painting, Kent’s practice is founded on notions of language and textual translation.
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 MoreOur identities are endlessly complicated — a strange mix of our own personal insecurities and ambitions, combined with the pressures of a society projecting its insecurities and ambitions onto us. Especially in a year with little distraction, we've been forced to sit with ourselves in months-long isolation, reflecting on who we are, what we've been and ways we can possibly adapt moving forward.
Read MoreAt Los Angeles’s Kohn Gallery, a group show titled Myselves comprises work by 25 different artists working in varying mediums. The show is emphatically diverse in this way, with work by painters like Loie Hollowell and Amoako Boafo on view with photography by Wolfgang Tillmans, alongside mixed media works by Chiffon Thomas and Jagdeep Raina. The show’s curator, Joshua Friedman, wanted to explore how different mediums can communicate ideas about racial, gender, and national identities, and how these come to be constructed.
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myselves is an opportunity to see and be seen by the artwork of emerging and mid-career artists as they probe into the architecture of identity. Featuring traditional painters, textile artists, mixed media artists, and photographers, Joshua Friedman has curated a broad foundation of unique makers to explore the shape-shifting theme of identity.
Read MoreAs far as anyone can know or prove, homebrewed existentialism is blossoming indoors—a philosophical trend as invisible as the poison in the air that prompted it. Like mold spores in a shower stall, a scentless gas leak, or this lingering unseeable virus, the pandemic has revealed ourselves to ourselves, whether we know it or not. The self likes it indoors. It’s why we have skulls.
Read Moremyselves, a group show of 27 artists and curated by Joshua Friedman, explores themes of selfhood and isolation during a time of worldwide seclusion. These emerging and established contemporary artists delve into their mediums as a form of expression, and in that, share their experience of what it means to be inspired by our current circumstances of
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 MoreOn view at Kohn Gallery is the first West Coast solo exhibition of paintings and sculptures by New York-based artist Nir Hod. Hod is known for creating works—from figuration to abstraction—that have a deeper, fundamental meaning. “By telling the truth through beauty you get away with many things,” says the artist.
Read MoreA group exhibition curated by Joshua Friedman, myselves brings together 27 artists who investigate ideas about the fluidity of identity by deconstructing the conventions of their mediums. Examining the interlaced spheres of race, gender, sexuality, and heritage across painting, collage, sculpture, and mixed media, this anticipated exhibition offers not only a look at new art-making modalities, but at a generation of rising stars whose works, “confront the myth of selfhood’s unchanging rigidity and turn instead to its fertile nebulousness.”
Read MoreContemporary painting is usually characterized by the specific stylistic orientation of an artist; however, it is not that rare that one’s artistic practice is a mix of different formal and conceptual persuasions. Take for instance the Israeli born, New York-based artist Nir Hod, who manages to express himself through both figuration and abstraction.
Read MoreSince founding his namesake Hollywood gallery in 1985, Michael Kohn has weathered his share of storms. "In 2008 [amid the financial crisis], buyers clammed up," recalls the veteran art seller. "And in 1991, during the first Iraq War, everything just stopped."
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 MoreA 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.
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.
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