Upon entering the Lehmann Maupin Gallery on Chrystie Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side, you are greeted by applause. On a small video screen inserted into a large white wall, a seated audience faces you and claps. Most audience members are enthusiastic, while some appear distracted or bored. Nevertheless, you may well feel pleased, gratified, appreciated. It occurred to me that seeing this would be a lovely way to start each day. The video provides an introduction to Alex Prager's La Grande Sortie, an installation consisting of work related to the production of the Los Angeles-based artist's ten-minute film of the same title commissioned by the Paris Opera Ballet. (It may be recalled in this context that Prager's debut as a … [Read more...]
Doug Aitken: Electric Earth at The Geffen
If you currently have no plans to be in Los Angeles before January 15th, when Doug Aitken: Electric Earth closes at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, make them, as the exhibition is a must see (it will also be shown at The Modern in Fort Worth, May 28-September 24, 2017). The exhibition is well worth the journey as it itself presents a journey, one whose images and experiences will long be impressed upon the eye and mind. The forty-eight-year-old Aitken was raised and trained as an artist in the Los Angeles area--its landscapes, cityscapes and sunsets figure prominently in his art--and he has long been familiar with The Geffen, whose spaces he has reconfigured so as to offer multiple paths of exploration to his work of the past twenty years … [Read more...]
Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles
Five years in Los Angeles and I finally made it to the Craft and Folk Art Museum with a Southern California ArtTable event and I'm glad I did. The museum is practically across the street from LACMA and is a few doors down from the new Los Angeles branch of the Sprueth Magers Gallery. Two exhibitions are on view through May 8, 2016. The first, Little Dreams in Glass and Metal, presents paintings, sculptures and objects selected from a vast collection of American work in enamel dating from 1920 to the present belonging to the Los Angeles-based Enamel Arts Foundation. Bernard N. Jazzar and Harold B. Nelson, who established the foundation devoted to this under-documented art form, are both specialists in design (the latter is Curator of … [Read more...]
On the Opening of Hauser Wirth & Schimmel
Over the course of the past year, I've had the privilege of attending the press previews of three remarkable public institutions devoted to modern and contemporary art. In May, the new Whitney Museum building opened on Gansevoort Street in lower Manhattan. In September, The Broad was inaugurated in downtown L.A. Today, the new campus of Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, located near the Los Angeles River in downtown L.A., offered the press its first view. Wait, you may well say, Hauser Wirth & Schimmel is not a public institution, but a commercial, for-profit gallery, yet another outlet of the mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth with locations in Zurich, London, New York, Somerset (England) and now Los Angeles. However, it is an art center … [Read more...]
Enrique Martinez Celaya Studio Visit
A few nights ago, I had the privilege of visiting the Culver City studio of Enrique Martinez Celaya, whose work I have long admired, together with a small group from ArtTable. Martinez Celaya moved back to Los Angeles two years ago after a ten-year hiatus, during which time he lived in South Florida (where he retains a studio) and Berlin. Martinez Celaya is an old-fashioned artist in the sense that he paints in oil and wax on canvas and creates sculptures cast in bronze that are rendered in a representational manner. However, his works go beyond naturalism to embrace poetry, poignancy and wonder, being rich in implied narrative and displaying a deep-rooted humanism. Each provides a journey into its own world and experience. Each is … [Read more...]
Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2016
Art Los Angeles Contemporary this year had terrific energy and featured a lot of interesting, high quality work. It continues to surprise me, however, given that L.A. now houses one of the world's more dynamic art scenes, being replete with artists of national and international reputation, galleries showing exciting and important work and a growing collector base, that this, the city's preeminent fair focused on current work, which is now in its 7th year, has remained so modest in scale. It is by no means just a local affair, as the galleries indicated below will testify, but I anticipate that in the coming years this fair will greatly expand its scope and become a magnet for collectors worldwide. Soon, the major New York galleries that … [Read more...]
John Outterbridge: Rag Man
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...]