Jonathan Griffin

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 »

2 Comments

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 »

October 31, 2014

The History of Technology

Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

Philipp Timischl

When Aristotle imagined a technological future in which ‘every instrument could accomplish its own work’, it was to the weaver’s shuttle and the lyre-player’s plectrum that he turned for examples. It is probably just coincidence but, in ‘The History of Technology’, woven fabrics and the sonorous tones of a stringed instrument featured prominently. Read the rest of this entry »

October 28, 2014

Daniel von Sturmer

Young Projects, Los Angeles

danielvonsturmer-cinemacomplex

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 »

October 20, 2014

Korakrit Arunanondchai

Arunanondchai7

The Mistake Room, Los Angeles

I seem to be in the minority in my cautious enjoyment of Korakrit Arunanondchai’s spectacular installation Letters to Chantri #1: The lady at the door/The gift that keeps on giving (2014) (made in collaboration with transgender artist boychild). Most people I spoke to professed to hating it. Arunanondchai is a divisive figure, as is any young artist who rises rapidly to international prominence on waves of hyperbole and who enjoys the rewards of a buoyant market enamoured with large abstract paintings made by people with unusual biographies. Read the rest of this entry »

September 23, 2014

Josh Mannis

Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles 04 - Upstairs, Downstairs

A couple lie naked on a rug with their feet lolling in the air. She smokes; he holds his chin in his hands and gazes sideways at her, a quiet smile on his lips. They’ve probably just had sex. She is looking directly at us, or she would be – except her large, oval eyes have been entirely blacked out by the artist. They are unnerving empty holes. Read the rest of this entry »

September 16, 2014

Tony Greene

MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles

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 »

August 22, 2014

Jamian Juliano-Villani

"Before Supper", 2013, Acrylic on Canvas, 24"x24"

The riotous, lurid paintings of Jamian Juliano-Villani speak in a language familiar from popular culture, but they articulate things never dreamt even by the most twisted imagination. Aliens having sex, suicidal trousers, and deviant Japanese river imps are just a few of the images that populate her paintings. Despite her work’s irreverent tone, Juliano-Villani is involved in a serious, introspective exploration of her own psyche, of the ethics of appropriation, and of the possibilities for contemporary painting.

We spoke in her Brooklyn studio in May 2014. Read the rest of this entry »

3 Comments

July 31, 2014

Joe Goode

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 »