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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
As senior curator of modern art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Stephanie Barron catalyzed the Nasher Sculpture Center’s current exhibition, Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective. Originating at LACMA and moving next to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the show was organized by Barron and Price himself up until his death [...]
Communal openings do bring out the crowds. On an evening when frost warnings were posted, LA’s art world denizens came out in serious numbers to attend dozens of galleries in the La Cienega/Washington vortex. It must be said from the onset, openings are probably the worst possible time to actually view art. This malady was [...]
The concept of an exhibition being perfect for a summertime setting might too easily be misinterpreted as a slight. It is not. The paintings and drawings by Matthias Düwel currently on display at Martha Otero Gallery capture the high key color and sartorial swing that does indeed seem suited for the ratatattat of August. If [...]
Photography’s greatest Achilles heel may be that it’s too damn illustrative. How then to wrestle the poetry back into a medium which explains so much and leaves so little for interpretation? I was reminded of this re-occuring struggle when I saw, again, the emotive and evocational prints of James Fee at Craig Krull Gallery. Fee, [...]
The thing about group shows, especially in the long dog days of summer, is that they can drive you to distraction. While the art world in general has become a 365 days a year affair, many galleries still work on a “cultural season” of September through May. Summer group shows might not be the best [...]
Pick of the Week for July 25th, 2012 Granted, to write a rave review of a show closing in four days is regretable. But when the art work on display and the curatorial excellence is so remarkable, it would be more of a crime not to sing its praises. The exhibition in question is the [...]
