While a student at Hollywood High, Shirley Morand was prevented from accepting a scholarship to the San Francisco School of Fine Arts by her father, who felt she didn’t need further education. Sometime later, she would receive a tap on the shoulder while in line for Cocteau’s 1930 film, The Blood of a Poet, at the Coronet Theatre in Los Angeles.
Read MoreThe title of the film conveys the dual meaning of the word—as both an accounting and a reverberant or explosive signal, echo or announcement of an event—and the film carries its full freight. The actual fragments of live radio broadcast transmissions that comprise the soundtrack are an accompaniment as much as reportage in the conventional sense.
Read MoreKohn Gallery opened Soft Joy, Heidi Hahn’s second solo presentation with the gallery. Known for her lushly evocative compositions of melancholic figures, Hahn wholly prioritizes the female experience.
Read MoreThrough deft use of texture, the Brooklyn painter renders her own experiences—privacy, vulnerability, and liberation among them—in meditative portraits of women asserting bodily autonomy and existing on their own terms.
Read MoreOver the course of her 15-year career, Ilana Savdie has carved out a niche of her own in the contemporary art world with her vibrant, surrealist elaborations on the human form. Her paintings—reminiscent of both the hopeful abstractions of Helen Frankenthaler and the visceral, warped bodies of Francis Bacon—explore the tensions between control and defiance, identity and ambiguity.
Read MoreIlana Savdie is back and presents her solo exhibition, in the Los Angeles Kohn Gallery: Entrañadas. The artist explores the few and many things that constellate one’s sense of self.
Read MoreIlana Savdie: Entrañadas at Kohn Gallery. With hot-colored, electrifying paintings, Savdie’s large-scale works actualize tension as a state of being. Humanoid forms are suspended beyond normative order to narrate the displacement of power through invasion, control, and defiance.
Read MoreOn view at Kohn Gallery in Hollywood is a posthumous exhibition of paintings by the influential LA abstractionist Ed Moses, who passed away in 2018 at the age of 91. Working prolifically until just two weeks before his death, Moses was a notable member of the “Cool School” artists and made work that was constantly experimental, pushing the boundaries of what paint and abstraction can do.
Read MoreThe Kohn Gallery presents paintings by Ed Moses (1926-2018) from the last decades of his life. One of the most distinguished artists during the post-war Los Angeles art scene, Moses continued to challenge himself artistically through six decades of his career. His abstract paintings were constantly evolving,
Read MoreFeaturing works by: Martha Alf, who has a gift for giving life, beauty, and often personality to mundane objects with her use of light, colour and space, Sharon Ellis, whose works demonstrate an evocative approach to landscape painting, by touching upon the sublimity of the wild with rich hues, dramatic light sources and marked proportions.
Read More“I am always thinking through social and political structures that can both disenfranchise or empower people, and seeing works by these artists help to remind me how we are all embedded in global networks of power, privilege, and oppression.”
Read MoreArt is a force of nature and Kate Barbee is the example. Her work is powerful and strong but at the same time, she is capable of transmitting delicacy and tenderness. Therefore, it could be said that Kate is a strange creature, a restless woman who is not afraid to navigate the secret recesses of her interior. With her new work body of work that was first exhibited at Kohn Gallery, “Feral Flora,” inspired by the poet Amanda Ackerman, Kate opens up to us the doors of her secret garden, as untamed and powerful as her creative spirit.
Read MoreWhat does it mean to live in a utopia of our own design? How can opposing ideas or bodies occupy the same space, where binary qualities are bound together to create a translation of form that is whole and yet wholly singular?
Read MoreToday, 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 MoreLA-based artist Kate Barbee rolls out a solo show at Kohn Gallery that uses blazing colors to synthesize body and object.
Read MoreIlana Savdie begins her works by drawing. Disjointed limbs and razor sharp nails, burrowed in seas of black ink, inform the nine new paintings that comprise Swimming in Contaminated Waters, the artist’s first solo exhibition at Deli Gallery. Savdie scans and manipulates these drawings digitally, dividing and aggregating body parts among thrilling palettes to map new geographies altogether. When transferred to canvas, these scenes electrify.
Read MoreAlready known for planting her cut-out shapes onto a dense matte black ground, which she has characterized as ‘non-space,’ for this show, Kent challenges viewers straight off with a plunge into a black field already seemingly torn away to reveal both apparent voids alongside ‘cut-out’ figures in white that echo the more prominently placed pigmented shapes, and—further confusing her ‘non-space’—shallow, quasi-illusionistic depths in which undulant and organic segmented forms in gauzy charcoal-grays seemed to emerge from behind the deep-black torn-out surround like protozoa or plant stalks, only to sink again behind interior black shards and stalactites.
Read MoreKate Barbee has piqued the interest of the art world with her dynamic depictions of fragmented female bodies in vivid domestic tableaux. Few artists can meld as many painting styles and art historical references as fluidly as Barbee does because few artists have the assuredness to paint as courageously.
Read MoreNew York-based Israeli artist Nir Hod has obviously been bitten by the serpent. A quick search for this term yields only medical treatments and quotes from the Christian bible, no mentions of any colloquial phrases, which is strange because in his 1992 book Liber Kaos, Peter Carroll writes that “The awakening of the octarine power is sometimes known as ‘being bitten by the serpent.’”
Read MoreFor her first solo show at Kohn Gallery, Chicago-based artist Caroline Kent hung eight of her oversize acrylic paintings around the venue’s main and commensurately scaled space. The thin unstretched canvases, anchored to the wall by their top edges, suggested an affinity with banners or tapestries, pliant and portable heralds even though their compositions were long since fixed.
Read More
