Art Review | Jonathan Griffin

Raster Raster

Aran Cravey, Los Angeles

Artie Vierkant, Air filter and method of constructing same 18, 2013, US Patent 8118919 B1, aluminum, charcoal fiberglass mesh, organza, 68 x 32 in

Any post-Postmodernists who dared hope that contemporary art had become ‘post-movement’ must have been dispirited, in recent years, to see the tag ‘post-Internet’ growing in ubiquity. Art magazines have done their best to nail down a definition of this vague field, in some cases recruiting the same curators who are bold enough to try to identify its principal characteristics and exponents in group exhibitions. Read the rest of this entry »

April 28, 2014

Joel Kyack

François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles

Joel Kyack is an artist not naturally given to subtlety. His last, maniacally overhung exhibition at François Ghebaly Gallery, in 2011, was titled Escape to Shit Mountain, and it included a large banner painted with the words ‘Kill all endings’. Old Sailors Never Die, his latest outing and only the second exhibition to take on Ghebaly’s new and enormous gallery space, reveals some remarkable and uncharacteristic moments of restraint. Read the rest of this entry »

March 28, 2014

Karin Apollonia Müller

Diane Rosenstein Fine Art, Los Angeles

There are two opposing critical interpretations of the aerial panorama. Looking at the earth from above is, on the one hand, a way to see patterns, systems or gestalts not visible at close quarters – the behaviour of crowds, for instance, or the geological growth of cities. This distanced perspective might also, conversely, be considered generalising, flattening and simplifying. From afar, everyone looks the same. People move like water or gas, and the built environment appears biological. Do these similes point to profound universal truths, or are they delusions? Personally, I lean towards the latter view. Read the rest of this entry »

October 15, 2013

Ed Fornieles

Mihai Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles

If Britney Rivers didn’t exist, someone would have to invent her. She is the epitome of Generation Y narcissism and vapidity, a creature who gives fullest expression to her life on Facebook and Instagram, whose pronouncements are specially keyed to half-bored, half-horny social media browsers. Her Tweets include such gems as: ‘Cute guy emails 2 ask me out on coffee date but “sent from droid” so now i’m like :-/’. I’m Facebook friends with her. You should be too. Read the rest of this entry »

July 17, 2013

Charles Garabedian

LA Louver Gallery, Los Angeles

There is a painting in Charles Garabedian’s current exhibition at LA Louver titled Beauty (2013). It is one of the ugliest works in the show – and it has some stiff competition. Blue Lipstick (2013), for instance, portrays the cyanotic features of a person of indeterminate gender who appears to have been recently chewing on an ink cartridge. Giotto’s Tree (2012) shows an ungainly woman with big legs and no arms (literally – no arms!) entangled in the branches of a sapling. Read the rest of this entry »

May 26, 2013

Olga Koumoundouros

Suzanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

In February 2012, Olga Koumoundouros broke into her neighbour’s abandoned house in east Los Angeles, thinking that she and her partner might squat there while they rented their own home. They were struggling on mortgage payments and feared repossession. Instead, as she became embroiled in the lives of the house’s former occupants, she made art from their discarded belongings and spray-painted a rainbow that wove across the walls of every room. She painted the outside of the house gold, and titled it Notorious Possession (2012). Read the rest of this entry »

March 22, 2013

Jordan Wolfson

REDCAT, Los Angeles

The HIV virus, in case you didn’t know, is depicted in molecular biology as an icosahedron (a 20-sided polygon) or a sphere, out of which protrude peg-like nodules representing the glycoproteins that fix onto and infect other cells. Dozens of these jolly red forms bounce across the screen in Jordan Wolfson’s part animated, part live-action film Raspberry Poser (2012). Their rubbery pegs wobble as they jump on the sinks in posh showrooms and across the wooden floor of a luxury gym. They bound through the sunny streets of New York’s Soho, and swell to bursting against photographs of scantily clad teens on spring break. As they frolic amongst these scenes of shameless desire they are buoyed by the heavy, synthetic beats of Beyoncé Knowles’ Sweet Dreams from her 2008 album I am … Sasha Fierce. Read the rest of this entry »

January 26, 2013

David Ostrowski

Ltd Los Angeles

The day I visit David Ostrowski’s exhibition, it’s raining. The unusually inclement weather seems appropriate for these battered, defeated-looking paintings. I am reminded of the terrible storm that hit New York recently. Ostrowski’s work corresponds to images of Chelsea-gallery employees hauling drenched canvases out of waterlogged crates. Read the rest of this entry »

December 7, 2012

Andrea Longacre-White

Various Small Fires, Venice, CA

One day, someone will curate an exhibition of antique digital art that features iPhones, iPads, Photoshop effects, email threads and inkjet prints. The glass and chrome gadgets will seem hopelessly quaint. (‘How did we ever carry this stuff around?’ we’ll ask each other, incredulously.) The work of Andrea Longacre-White will probably be included in the show. Read the rest of this entry »

October 5, 2012

ACIREMA

Honor Fraser, Los Angeles

Have you figured it out yet? It took me a while. ‘ACIREMA’ is America spelt backwards; this exhibition, curated by Cesar Garcia, takes as its conceptual motif the famous drawing by Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García of South America upside down. América Invertida (Inverted America) (1943) does not feature in the exhibition. Instead, curator Garcia has convened eight artists from South and Central America born since 1980 who, he argues, ‘actively challenge the conventional framing and contextualizing mechanisms through which their practices are often situated’. Read the rest of this entry »

Jonathan Griffin

Category: Art Review

May 27, 2014