Max Colby
Above & Below at Shoshana Wayne (Culver City through August 28).
There are twelve artists in this exhibition who use fabric, weaving and beads to fashion their work.
Yveline Tropea’s beading and hand embroidery is the most engaging. She is West African living and working in both France and Burkina Faso.
Yveline Tropea
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Mark Bradford
In Focus: LA Artists at Hauser & Wirth (DTLA through August 22).
Hauser & Wirth presents 12 Los Angeles artists who the gallery represents. The gallery spins this exhibition as representing why LA is an important incubator for contemporary art. Actually it is simply a cross-section of their holdings and does little to discuss/present what LA art is or why it is important.
The 2020 Mark Bradford painting departs from his customary approach. He has collaged cloth and paper on top of the primary painting. This heavy impasto obscures the starting point. In earlier paintings Bradford removed layers of accretion over the primary painted surface to disclose the painting’s structure and meaning. In this painting the initial composition becomes hidden and any “meaning” is lost. Clarity has been obsessively muddied.
Over time I have an increased appreciation for the “visual coding” that are the paintings by Charles Gaines. The giant painting presented here is Gaines at his best.
Charles Gaines
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Lygia Pape at Hauser & Wirth (DTLA through August 1).
The Brazilian artist, Lygia Pape (1927-2004), has a large exhibition of her feather-based works that display her connection to Brazil’s indigenous people. It is the room-sized installation of fine silver thread with ambiguous lighting that makes this show memorable.
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Naotaka Hiro at The Box (DTLA through July 24).
It has been a long lockdown during the “Age of Covid”. We have all suffered from isolation and evolved new ways of coping. The Japan-born Hiro lives and works in LA. He suffered having the infection and turned to his art making to find solace. In making these “self-portrait” paintings he physically engaged with the wooden panels – lying beneath them or engaging them from above (at times being the master and at others being the servant to his creative process).
Quoting the artist on his process: For the wood painting series, I tried to physically separate the two-step procedure. Again, I crawled underneath the wood panel and laid flat with a face-up position. With the physical limitation, I have to keep my body quite close to the surface. I drew, often with both hands, reflecting my body parts, positions, and movement. I flipped the board over, stood, and sat on it to analyze, edit, and paint colors in. I repeated until the distinctions and binary systems got blurry and abstract, merging the two personal worlds.
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Carlson Hatton at Luis de Jesus (DTLA through August 14).
My bias in art appreciation leans toward figuration/realism. I like abstraction particularly when it informs the emotional nature of realism.
Carlson Hatton is a terrific painter. The “armature” for his painting is the figure/realism which he then emotionally deconstructs by abstraction. Hatton’s talent portends ever better painting to be seen in LA.
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Kristy Luck at Philip Martin (Culver City through August 14).
Kristy Luck reflects on her family and Navajo heritage in these oil-on-linen paintings. Given her heritage I find a great deal of shared artistic resonance with Hilma af Klint and Georgia O’Keefe.
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William Brickel at Kohn Gallery (Hollywood closing).
I respond to the European, formal art education that training in London’s academies imbues. Brickel uses himself as the model to paint about emotional vulnerability. His Modernist spirituality is visually very engaging.
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Camilo Restrepo at Steve Turner (Hollywood through July 31).
This in the seventh Restrepo (Medellin, Colombia (MFA from CalArts 2013)) exhibition launched by Steve Turner since 2013. Restrepo’s work is always energetic and engaging with each exhibition demonstrating a different approach to art making.
503 drawings – portraits of criminals that appeared in Colombian newspapers during 2020 – constitute this exhibition. Each drawing is complusively researched. The exhibition portrays the “narcos, paramilitary, and guerilla group members, hitmen, blackmailers, gang members, corrupt politicians, and isolated petty criminals” that form the country’s violent history.
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Karolina Jablonska at Steve Turner (Hollywood through July 31).
There is a quality of sturm und drang to this Krakow, Poland based artist.
Tending to life’s activities, she is the lead character in her paintings. But the burden of COVID and the repression of the current human condition in Poland weigh heavily.
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Lari Pittman
Selections: Gallery Artists at Regen Projects (Hollywood closing).
Regen Projects has been representing artists since 1989 (32 years). This exhibition offers a broad overview of the gallery’s representation of 30 artists. My faves in the “stable” are Lari Pittman and Abraham Cruzvillegas.
Abraham Cruzvillegas
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Isabel Yellin
Psychosomatic at VSF (Hollywood closing).
This is a humorous exhibition curated by Isabel Yellin. Most of the 15 artist’s works interpret somatic realities. Additionally the overlay of psyche gives full flower to the exhibition’s title.
Alison Saar
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Tony Matteli
Rewilding at Nino Mier (Hollywood through July 31).
This is an exhibition about current landscape art. It is a wide ranging exhibition with over 30 artists. Tony Matteli produces exacting replicas of plants (mostly we might call them weeds) in painted bronze. They are placed about the gallery at the seams between walls and floor (like weeds invading).
Robert Terry’s paintings are so heavily layered with paint that their nature becomes abstract.
Robert Terry
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Eleanor Swordy at Moskowitz Bayse (La Brea through August 1).
I wouldn’t think of making my LA art rounds without going to Moskowitz Bayse - people who love art and work to develop and support artists.
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Vivian Maier (Self Portrait)
Vivian Maier at KP Projects (La Brea through July 31).
Vivian Maier (1926-2009) obsessively took photographs of the architecture and people of the cities she lived in. For 40 years she worked as a nanny and never had her work seen or published. Much of her stored photographs were never printed from the negatives. Her popularity and critical attention as a street photographer came to be after her death with the discovery of her oeuvre by a couple Chicago collectors.
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Kiki Kogelnik at Kayne Griffin (lower La Brea through August 28).
The life story of Austrian-born Kiki Kogelnik (1935-1997) is as colorful as her paintings. The works in this exhibition are from the early 1960s. During this time she was in a relationship with the Californian, Sam Francis. She introduced the color pink into her paintings of that time and wrote in an unsent letter to Francis “You really made the whole world pink for me…”
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John Baldessari at Spruth Magers (mid Wilshire through Sept. 11).
He may be a recognized conceptual master, but Baldessari (who died in 2020 at the age of 88) has rarely commanded my attention. This exhibition’s series of works, all from 2019, are in my estimation Baldessari at his best. These works contain all the cardinal aspects of Baldessari. It is a very engaging exhibition.
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Frank Gehry at Gagosian (Beverly Hills through August 7).
Wow.! Coming around the entrance wall, entering the first gallery, one is overwhelmed by Frank Gehry’s huge fish fashioned with sheet plastic scales over a hidden armature. Gehry has been making fish for his entire career. These fish are breath-taking.
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Nancy Rubins at Gagosian (Beverly Hills through August 7).
We San Diegans know Nancy Rubin’s work – the nautical boats wired together and launching off into space from the roof of the Museum of Art in La Jolla. Her exhibition here is perfectly paired with Gehry. Rubins has taken cast metal representations of animals, sliced them up and then re-amalgamated them by wiring them into freely-floating sculpture. The work has a masculine control of mass – sensitively re-animating re-manufactured forms.
Get out, look at art; have fun.
Doug Simay July 2021