Among the recent works by John Outterbridge on view at Art + Practice in Los Angeles are two very different series of modestly-scaled, wall-mounted assemblages, each of which evokes aspects of the African-American experience. One is sculptural in nature, the works being made with a wide assortment of castoff objects; the other is aligned with painting, the pieces consisting both of flat and "stuffed" (puffy) pieces of fabric painted in bright colors. Both series consist of works that appear to have been constructed in a most casual and offhand manner. Although contemplation reveals that formal and conceptual clarity underlies these works, their literal scrappiness and wholly unpretentious (almost Outsider Art) nature is fundamental to … [Read more...]
Notes on Shanghai: Hugo Boss Asia Art
Do not rush to see the Hugo Boss Asia Art award exhibition at Shanghai's Rockbund Art Museum. While it is an intriguing show presented in a handsome Art Deco building, the exhibition is currently over and Shanghai's air quality is frightening, the AQI (Air Quality Index) in the "very unhealthy" range. Walking to the museum wearing a 3M particle filtering respirator mask, I felt that I had entered a dystopian future, which was made all the more horrible by the realization that this "future," for millions of the world's occupants, is now.The exhibition Hugo Boss Asia Art: Award for Emerging Asian Artists, which is in its second year, presents work by six artists who live and work in China, the Philippines, Cambodia, Taiwan and Myanmar. … [Read more...]
Sarah Sze on My Mind
While Sarah Sze's last show at Tanya Bonakdar consisted of several dazzling, sensorial and thought-provoking installations, one modest, barely there assemblage lingers in my mind's eye. Entitled Lavender Landscape Standing (2015), it consisted of a small (perhaps 3 x 2 inch) rock that had been split down the middle, two torn sheets of paper, one all black, the other in shades of lavender, apparently fragments of images printed out from the Internet, and tiny blobs and thread-like strings of blue paint supported by (or otherwise set in relation to) a tall, thin stainless steel armature.This was just one of a myriad of freestanding pieces that made up the environmental installation occupying the main downstairs space in Sze's exhibition, … [Read more...]
Njideka Akunyili Crosby on the Rise
If you haven't yet heard the name Njideka Akunyili Crosby, then you haven't been paying attention, as she is a young (32-year-old) Los Angeles-based artist on a meteoric rise and her work is phenomenal--the most jaw-droppingly wonderful and accomplished work I have encountered in an age. That said, I walked right by it at the New Museum's 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, where both her two paintings on view and I were overwhelmed by the hubbub. Akunyili Crosby has since gone on to have simultaneous solo exhibitions at L.A.'s Hammer Museum and Art + Practice and to win the Studio Museum in Harlem's Wein Prize. As of November 23, 2015, a billboard entitled Before Now After (Mama, Mummy and Manna), which reproduces one of her paintings, … [Read more...]
Gego at Dominique Lévy Gallery
Works of Gego's Reticulárea Series (1969-82)--sculptures in which slender lengths of wire are used to create space-enclosing networks of lines in undefined shapes--have increasingly appeared in museum collections and art fairs over the course of the past decade. Yet this German-born, Venezuelan artist, who died in 1994, remains underknown by North American audiences. A small survey of her work at the Drawing Center in 2007 attracted some attention, while a show at the Americas Society in 2012 was all but ignored. The tightly-curated, museum quality exhibition Gego: Autobiography of a Line, currently on view at the Dominique Lévy Gallery in New York, may finally do the trick in establishing her reputation. The show is timely, coming at a … [Read more...]
Picasso Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art
All hail the genius of Picasso! When visiting Picasso Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, it is impossible not to stand in awe before the work of an artist who, although primarily a painter, revolutionized for all time what a sculpture can be. At the same time, as this survey exhibition well demonstrates, he produced a host of the 20th Century's most iconic sculptures using an inconceivably wide range of materials, processes and forms. While Picasso's achievements in his work in three dimensions are of high seriousness and continue to be of formidable influence (more on this later), it is clear that his attitude in making sculpture was often remarkably casual--at times, he appears to have been just fooling around.I confess that I had the … [Read more...]
Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth at the Hammer Museum
In the way that Noah Purifoy's assemblage-based art had its source in the Watts Rebellion of 1965, Mark Bradford's artistic practice can be understood to have had its roots in the backlash after the Rodney King beatings in 1992, which Bradford experienced as a young man working in his mother's beauty shop in South L.A. For a gay, black youth, the police brutality and resulting race riots, which came at a time when he saw the AIDS epidemic running rampant around him, exerted an indelible formative influence. Since 2001, when Bradford emerged as a fully mature artist, his art has addressed injustice to African Americans, gays and women in an extension of the "Identity Politics" of the art of the late '80s and early '90s, but which … [Read more...]
Notes on Beijing: My introduction to art in China
First, some general comments with regard to Don's and my hotels and sightseeing during our brief stay in Beijing. Whereas we stayed in the nondescript Westin Hotel Bund Center in Shanghai, in Beijing we spent several nights luxuriating at the Opposite House, located in a lovely neighborhood replete with high-end stores and foreign embassies. The hotel is new, hip and styling (part of the Swire Hotel chain, which also manages the Upper House in Hong Kong, another of our favorites) and we were upgraded to an enormous, incredibly well-appointed room, which we loved. As it was raining the night of our arrival, we ate in one of the hotel's restaurants, Sureno. Don and I sent back a shrimp appetizer that we found sub-par, only to have the chef, … [Read more...]
Notes on Shanghai: My introduction to art in China
In late July, I accompanied my husband, Don, who had business in Shanghai and Beijing, on my first trip to China. Although my exposure was limited to a few days and venues in each, I found the contemporary art scenes in both cities astounding. What follows here and in the post on Beijing are a few random notes on what I saw and experienced.In Shanghai, other than the Untour Shanghai Food Tour, which provided a wonderful introduction to Shanghai's old French Concession neighborhood and its enticing street foods, the Shanghai Contemporary Art Museum, better known as the Power Station Museum of Art, was a standout. Situated in a converted electric plant on the Huangpu River, the museum is China's first state-run museum devoted to … [Read more...]
Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada at LACMA
Despite the existence of a 10-acre sculpture park devoted to his work in Joshua Tree, CA, Noah Purifoy was largely unknown to the mainstream art world until the Getty's Pacific Standard Time exhibitions shed light on the artist, his career and his contributions. A single junk assemblage by Purifoy appeared in Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970, at the Getty proper and a half-dozen works were featured in Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 at the Hammer. It is perhaps as a result of this newfound exposure that America Is Hard to See, the exhibition that opened the Whitney Museum's new building, presented a work by Purifoy in its "Scotch Tape" section devoted to assemblage and collage (see image below … [Read more...]