Thomas Duncan Gallery, Los Angeles
Sean Kennedy is not a great painter. His brushwork is hesitant, his mark-making is sloppy and inconsistent, and his colouration, though vivid, seems uninterested in harmony. Against these odds, however, he has created a suite of great paintings. If indeed paintings is what they are. Read the rest of this entry »
David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
When John Wesley makes paintings of women, which he does very often, he makes paintings about men. Against powder-blue backgrounds, he floods their lithe bodies with a flat shade of pale pink, except for a hotter tone used for lips, nails and nipples. These are pictures of heterosexual male desire. When men appear, they tend to be woefully disproportioned and eccentrically dressed. His women, by contrast, are the sylphs of an imagination fired by the dreamy perfection of women in magazines and dampened by the comic pathos of real-life encounters. Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
When asked about scale in a recent interview, Urs Fischer said that ‘the physical size of the art work doesn’t make it big or small.’ The scale of an object, he argued, is the size it assumes in the viewer’s mind; not its size in the gallery space. Fischer has become known for making very large art works – often from seemingly small ideas – as well as small works based on big ideas. This discrepancy has won him as many admirers as detractors. Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
Alyse Emdur, Four Corners Books
Remi Emdur, Bruce Emdur and Alyse Emdur, Bayside State Prison, Leesburg, N.J. 1988
“MY SISTER AND I could go to the beach,” writes the artist Alyse Emdur, “but our brother could not go with us.” That is because he was incarcerated at the Bayside State Prison, in Leesburg, New Jersey. Instead, the trio posed in front of a photograph of a tropical beach at sunset, two palm trees framing the glowing sky. A Polaroid photograph of the make-believe excursion, taken in the late 1980s, is included on the back cover of Emdur’s recent book, Prison Landscapes. Read the rest of this entry »
International Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles
The cartoon is from the Daily Mirror, 6 January 1967. In an art gallery, a man is pinned to the wall inside a picture frame. The caption underneath reads ‘… and then I thought to myself, what can I put in the exhibition this year?’ It’s a lame joke. But it seemed fitting in this extraordinary exhibition, in which intense blooms of sensation were prised from their original habitats and transplanted into the subdued environment of an art gallery. Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
‘I guess I do a lot of complaining,’ admitted Llyn Foulkes recently. ‘But I think I have a lot to complain about!’ His comment came during a performance at the Hammer Museum of the byzantine musical apparatus he calls the Machine; it is just like Foulkes to toss out an acerbic aside even when it looks like he’s having fun. Over half a century since Foulkes began his career, he shows little sign of mellowing. Read the rest of this entry »
356 South Mission Road
You should have seen them at the opening. The people, that is – moving slowly through the large warehouse and thronging around two bars, a taco stand, a ping-pong table and a dance floor in the yard behind the building. The paintings, too, looked terrific. Twelve huge canvases, each approximately three-and-a-half metres high, faced each other on opposite walls of the space. They seemed to smile down on the bustle of sociability that unfolded between them. Read the rest of this entry »
Jonathan Griffin 