Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles
Brown furniture, they call it. It’s the stuff that nobody wants: wooden wardrobes, dining tables and armoires, too bulky for the contemporary home, once family heirlooms but now superseded by disposable Ikea furniture. When an artist needs some wood, the source closest at hand is usually not the lumberyard but the thrift store. Read the rest of this entry »
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
I don’t believe it is cruel or unfair to say that a museum is probably not the natural home for Frances Stark’s work. The artworks that she has made over the past 24 years (the timespan covered by this retrospective) are many things – epistolary, diaristic, notational, self-referential, accretive, serial, slapdash, intricate – but they are not, in the main, the kinds of forms that museums are traditionally built to house. Read the rest of this entry »
CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco
We all know that Random International’s Rain Room (2012), drawing crowds most recently at MoMA, and Carsten Holler’s slides, coming soon to the Hayward Gallery, signal the end of days for art. Or at least that’s the established view amongst the cognoscenti. Hands-on experiences in art galleries, the argument goes, turn the brain off. Read the rest of this entry »
Various Small Fires, Los Angeles
What’s the most grindingly dull subject you can think of for a painting? How about a college faculty meeting? 75-year old Mernet Larsen, of Tampa, Florida, has made a whole series of paintings depicting meetings at the art school where she still teaches. Two of them are included in her exhibition Chainsawer, Bicyclist and Reading in Bed, and boring they are not. Read the rest of this entry »
Blum and Poe, Los Angeles
An artist like Alma Allen causes certain categorical predicaments for those who try to write about the extraordinary objects he has been quietly making for over two decades. He is a self-taught artist who is far from Outsider, a craftsman who makes furniture as well as functionless objects, an artist who in 2013 was plying his trade at the Echo Park Craft Fair and in 2014 was lauded as a highlight of the Whitney Biennial, and a private figure whose troubled backstory adds gravitas to his outwardly quixotic creations. Read the rest of this entry »
Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles
I was once in the house of some very wealthy people (OK, some billionaires), and the French curator of their furniture collection was showing me how a sheet of marble can be folded, with 45-degree cuts, to create the impression of a solid block. He told me that he was surprised how easy it was in Los Angeles to find the craftsmen skilled enough to achieve such seamless illusion. Read the rest of this entry »
Young Projects, Los Angeles
Upstairs in the polished, air-conditioned and usually deserted corridors of West Hollywood’s huge Pacific Design Center, time seems to move at a slower pace than on the noisy summertime streets outside. Where better, then, for an extensive survey of the patient studio experiments of Melbourne-based video artist Daniel von Sturmer? Read the rest of this entry »
MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles
Tony Greene, …understand…, 1989
Courtesy of Judie Bamber © The Estate of Tony Greene
When Tony Greene made the 20-odd works in this exhibition, all dated between 1987 and 1990, he knew he was dying of AIDS. This very fact makes even his least political paintings almost unbearably poignant. Greene’s art is devastating and immediate because it is his answer to a question that everyone should consider from time to time: What would you make if you knew you only had a few years to live? Read the rest of this entry »
Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles
Joe Goode has long made pictures designed to be looked through, not at. His work is deadpan, and seemingly innocuous. The LA Times critic William Wilson, in 1971, called it ‘neutrality-style art’. Perhaps this mildness is why he never got quite as much attention as his childhood friend Ed Ruscha, who also does deadpan but who usually cuts his neutrality with non-sequiturs (often verbal) that are arresting and funny. Goode only trades in the very lightest of humorous touches – a milk bottle painted mauve, for instance, placed on a shelf in front of a mauve monochrome canvas. That was his early Milk Bottle series, (1961-2), still amongst his best-known work. Read the rest of this entry »
Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles
John Tweddle is one of those artists who never really fitted into any scene he found himself in. The astonishing, eccentric body of work that he has produced during his lifetime may be both the cause and effect of this condition. Born in 1938, he left rural Kentucky to go to art school in Kansas City and Atlanta, then moved to New York at the end of the 1960s. A decade later, appalled by the commercial art world, he turned his back on the city and moved back South. Today he lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which seems about right for an artist of his bent. Read the rest of this entry »
Jonathan Griffin 