On a sunny autumn morning, in Jessie Homer French’s garage-studio, up several miles of mountain switchbacks from Palm Desert, Calif., a dozen canvases are propped on shelves in various stages of completion. Most are landscapes. Three depict cemeteries, a recurrent subject for the 83-year-old self-taught artist. Standing out among the browns and the greens, however, are two pictures of wildfires, in furious tones of orange, yellow and black.
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To mark the occasion of his double-bill exhibition at both the Bury Street and Helmet Row galleries of Modern Art in London, Ron Nagle had his nails done. Specifically, just his thumbnails: black on his right, pale pink on his left.
Read the rest of this entry »Canal Projects, New York
The story, as literary theorist Peter Brooks has observed, is today’s dominant cultural form. To Brooks, this “overabundance” of narrative is worrying: he criticizes the deference of virtually all strands of culture (not only literature, TV, and movies but art, museology, and—especially—news media) to the persuasive rhetorical power of the story.1 I share many of his concerns. “The universe is not our stories about the universe,” he writes, “even if those stories are all we have.”2
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In 2018, the artist Richard Mosse was understandably weary. He had spent most of the last decade in places torn by conflict and civil unrest.
In the early 2010s, the Irish-born New York-based artist had worked for five years in the Democratic Republic of Congo, photographing and filming the humanitarian disaster that has claimed millions of lives and displaced millions more. That project led to another video and photographic series focusing on the European refugee crisis unfolding around the Mediterranean. Before that, he had embedded with the U.S. Army in Iraq.
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The Broad, Los Angeles
I predict few will linger long enough to absorb the four paragraphs of potted biography on the neon yellow wall welcoming visitors to ‘Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody’, before surging onward into the first gallery, which is painted with fluorescent pink and orange stripes. The green and orange Statue of Liberty (1982) commands the room, graffitied to high heaven by Haring and his then-15-year-old collaborator, LA II (Angel Ortiz). Nearby is a Corinthian column, similarly improved, while on the walls hang Haring’s Day-Glo paintings on muslin, aluminium and Formica.
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The painter Richard Mayhew, who recently celebrated his 99th birthday, has lived through as broad a swath of this nation’s history as anyone you might hope to meet.
Sitting at a patio table outside his cedar-shingled suburban home in Soquel, near Santa Cruz, Mayhew leaned back in his chair and reflected on his long life.
“I drove across the United States six times,” he said. “Three over, and three back, from New York to San Francisco. I was always looking.”
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A confession: the last time Ei Arakawa performed in Los Angeles, I was out of town. I had it in my diary, but when I realized I couldn’t make it, I wasn’t particularly upset. Besides the event’s title – GET BACK / GET OUT – and the scheduled date, 9 April 2022, the email from the artist’s gallery, Reena Spaulings Fine Art, had offered scant details of what to expect. One piece of information stood out: ‘2 – 6pm (open rehearsals and performance)’. The performance, it seemed, would not be differentiated from its rehearsal. I’d attended too many proudly shambolic, deskilled art performances before, I thought, and I wasn’t so sad to miss another. I was wrong.
Read the rest of this entry »Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles
My attention is more or less guaranteed by any exhibition that offers, within the initial sweep of its first gallery, a painting of an airport luggage carousel; a near-monochrome canvas, composed from grubby, rectilinear sections; a close-up picture of a blowjob; and a boisterous abstraction incorporating a tail-wagging dog and a swipe of glitter.
Read the rest of this entry »Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles
At the Charlie James Gallery, in the Chinatown neighborhood here, a surprising exhibition of spiritually reflective and esoteric artwork opened recently. Surprising because the artists, Patrisse Cullors and noé olivas, are known for their activism and social engagement, and because the works in the show, “Freedom Portals,” reject the strident, declamatory tenor of much political art.
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Richard Tuttle’s work in sculpture, drawing, installation and poetry is delicate and attenuated, rarely exceeding the bounds of carefully measured economy. Subtlety and ambivalence have long defined his oeuvre. This month in Los Angeles, however, he is the architect of something close to a grandiose gesture. ‘Calder/Tuttle: Tentative’ spans two neighbouring galleries, David Kordansky Gallery and Pace Gallery, and platforms a conversation between two artists and two bodies of work, over eight decades apart.
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Jonathan Griffin 