November | 2014 | Jonathan Griffin

After the End

Untitled, 2013, pigeon pelt, plastic, 26 × 10 cm. Courtesy: the artist, Michael Benevento, Los Angeles, Clifton Benevento, New York, Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Detroit, KOW, Berlin, and ZERO, Milan

At the start of Michael E. Smith’s recent monograph, published in 2013 to accompany his exhibition at the Ludwig Forum in Aachen, there is a black page with two QR codes printed in white. Underneath each are the capitalized inscriptions: ‘BEETLEJUICE’ and ‘FOR HEADS’. This is the artist’s preface to the book. Read the rest of this entry »

November 14, 2014

Alex Becerra

LTD, Los Angeles

Becerra

Alex Becerra is a young painter who seems to value freedom over pretty much everything else, even at the expense of such musty old notions as moral responsibility or restraint. Left to its own devices, his mind goes, most often, to the naked human form: to pictures of fulsome ladies in compromising positions, up-skirt shots caught in mirrors, women with legs akimbo, examining themselves. In this exhibition, Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) is evoked more than once. Becerra makes unapologetically reckless pictures that are, at their best, thrilling to look at and, at their worst, vexing to think about. In this exhibition, there is never a dull moment. Read the rest of this entry »

November 5, 2014

David Hockney

‘Not Interested in that Sort of Thing’

David Hockney, “Nude, 17th June 1984.” Photographic collage, 63 × 44 ̋. Edition of 20. © David Hockney.

“Well I think she’s rather beautiful,” said my grandmother. It was Christmas. I must have been 11 or 12, and the large book that she had open on her lap—her gift to me—was open at an image so ridiculously sexy that my pre-pubescent cheeks were flushed deep red and my scalp was tingling. Read the rest of this entry »

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November 4, 2014

What Nerve!

Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence

Jim Nutt, Her Face Fits, 1968

The rambunctious exhibition “What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present” began life as an idea for a show about the Hairy Who. Seeking to broaden the scope of the project, curator Dan Nadel traced the lines of influence around the 1960s group of Chicago Imagists to include an alternative, subversive history of modern art that is little studied in art colleges and under-represented in museum collections. Read the rest of this entry »

Jonathan Griffin

Month: November, 2014

November 26, 2014

Michael E. Smith