Camden Art Centre, London
Asteroids are a rather on-the-nose motif in Liz Larner’s otherwise unpredictable visual and conceptual lexicon. Hurled out of the cosmos, they arrive on Earth as airborne readymades, small miracles from deep space that can have cataclysmic consequences when they make impact with our world. Larner’s best work feels much like this. Not made but discovered. Excavated, maybe. Modest, but potentially Earth-shaking.
Read the rest of this entry »François Ghebaly, Los Angeles
Patrick Jackson did not make the cobwebs that, on my visit to his show, tangled around the scaffolding supporting his billboard sculpture Memorial, 2026, but he didn’t brush them away, either. Visitors who venture behind the giant forty-four-foot-wide printed image that splits the gallery diagonally encounter a “behind-the-scenes” area of dusty and cramped corridors that establishes a complicated set of relations between frontality and interiority, contrivance and authenticity, desire and disappointment. The exhibition’s title directs us to the artist’s position: “All Signs Fail.”
Read the rest of this entry »House of Seiko, Los Angeles
The defining quality of any hyperrealist artwork is situated in the degrees to which it deviates from—or falls short of—the object it seeks to reproduce. If a Photorealist painting were indistinguishable from a photograph, there would be nothing to look at, nothing to think about.
Read the rest of this entry »Aspen Museum of Art
Writers from Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille to Lewis Hyde have contributed to the notion of art as a veiled gift, with strings attached. Generosity and withholding are not antitheses; many of the best artworks are both withholding—in their minimalism, obscurantism, or elusiveness—and, despite their outward reserve, unexpectedly generous.
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Aesthetically, Los Angeles is mostly a mess. Unplanned, mismatched buildings sprout like fungus among the grid of its streets, whose orderly classicism is often disrupted by tectonically induced hills. Curbs crumble and sidewalks crack beneath telegraph poles festooned with cables. Flamboyant succulents mingle with scrubby native plants.
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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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.
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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Tala Madani, who was born in 1981 in Tehran but now lives in LA, has been exhibiting her outrageously funny, politically caustic paintings and animations since the mid-2000s. She has long shown herself to be a deeply skilful painter, even virtuosic, as visitors to her mid-career survey Biscuits at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles can judge, although her ability sometimes manifests in surprising ways. She has established herself as a master of the faecal smear, just as she is adept at painting the prismatic effects of projected light.
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