The pleasures of trompe l’oeil effects are immediate. However the gee whiz marvel over the technical ability to optically deceive fades fast like the precipitous drop in earnings of a wide release film in its second weekend receipts. In a new exhibition at Ambach and Rice, Ron van der Ende races headlong towards this cliff [...]
Matthias Merkel Hess demonstrates an impressive power of aesthetic transformation with a contemplative and intelligent solo exhibition at Acme Gallery on Wilshire Boulevard. One of the foremost principles of art is an act of transformation. This can be as basic as observing the three-dimensional object and rendering it in two dimensions. Of course it can [...]
The Santa Monica Museum of Art throws a great party. Every year, around this time there’s a party that’s thrown called Incognito. Should the name conjure images of revelers with bars across their eyes or entire heads pixelated beyond recognition, you might be a little off in your expectations. Incognito is an annual fundraiser for [...]
The power of photography, in its infancy, was often associated with magic. To capture the likeness of animate or inanimate objects with chemicals is of course a sort of alchemy. But along with democratic availability of the technology came not only a ubiquity but also a disillusion of magic. Rinko Kawauchi is one of the [...]
I’ve always been a fan of drawings by sculptors. Perhaps more than any category of artist, sculptors have an innate understanding of line, volume and form on paper. Puryear, Shapiro, Balkenhol, Rodin and Kapoor have all been bilingual in sculpture and drawing. Richard Serra belongs to this group in a distinctive manner. Rather than translate [...]
Let’s face facts: art fairs are entertainment. They provide an opportunity for the mildly culturally curious to scan and peruse 40-80 galleries which trot out their chosen “best.” All under one roof. Art fairs are the malls of the visual culture world. They come in all shapes and sizes. Some are pretentious, expensive and self [...]
Heroic can come in many forms. More often than not it is content that signals the heroic. And yet, perhaps the most inventive form of the heroic in art slips under the radar in the guise of scale. This is certainly true of a medium that is often, if not always, associated with intimacy and [...]
Poetry is in short supply in the art world. It’s as if there’s a general mistrust of even the search for beauty, truth or elegance. Thank god there’s George Stoll to fill the void. With ten pieces installed in the sun-drenched gallery of Maloney Fine Art, Stoll reacquaints us with grace achieved through rigor and [...]
Every so often one stumbles upon something in the art world that acts like an aesthetic Wasabi. Stopping in at Gallery Brown off 3rd Street the other morning initiated such a moment of palette cleansing recently. Installed in the sunny windows of the gallery were plastic containers, in groupings of two and three, of varying [...]
Richard Prince has come west. Riding into Beverly Hills with a posse of cowboys shouldn’t be surprising. It is perhaps the most natural way the elder statesman of appropriation art should stake his claim in Los Angeles. We are, after all, not only the epicenter of American image broadcasting but also the NASDAQ of artificiality. [...]
