After more than five years of hosting leading-edge gallery shows in the heart of Downtown LA, Bermudez Projects has announced the opening of an expansive second exhibition location in a brand-new building in Northeast LA’s trendifying Cypress Park. It is just a block from the bosky Vista del Rio Park.This new space will introduce art-loving […]
Month: July 2018
Jason Rhoades Finally Has First Major Retrospective Thanks to Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel
Eleven years after his death at 41, legendary installation artist Jason Rhoades finally has his first big retrospective in his adopted home town of Los Angeles. Covering two-thirds of an acre at Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel’s sprawling DTLA showplace, it will amaze many and, as Rhoades thoroughly, even gleefully, anticipated, offend not a few. Just […]
Amanda Beckmann | 21st Century Modernist
“Telling artists that you do collage is like an insult – like saying you do scrap-booking,” asserts Long Island-based collagist Amanda Beckmann. “They feel it is crafts-fair stuff.”But to Beckmann, collage is great art – just as it was to greats like George Braque and Pablo Picasso, when they re-invented it over a century ago, […]
Silt, Soot and Smut. Alison Saar’s Hauntingly Beautiful Exhibit at LA Louver
In an interview not long ago, Los Angeles painter Alison Saar said of African American artists that “there is some tendency toward their taking the real heavy stuff and adding some levity to it.” Certainly this has been true of her work in the past. But in this new show, the heft prevails over the […]
Emmanuel Crespo’s Modern Mythology
Emmanuel Crespo’s broad-spectrum personal iconography includes whales, paper boats, grasshoppers, goldfish, umbrellas and other images drawn from the bottomless depths of his imagination and memory. It is the juxtaposition of these immaculately rendered creatures and objects, sometimes conjoined and sometimes simply hovering in space, that fill his pictures – and their viewer – with an […]
Lautner’s Otherworldly Beverly Hills House Goes to LACMA
Wave your hand at a bright object like a small desklamp and out pours a generous stream into the greenish crystal sink of the master bathroom of the Sheats-Lautner-Goldstein house. If you remove the long glass prism that serves as the plug, the water drains into a slot in the floor.That’s just one of the […]
What Could Be Better Than a Meta-Modern Confectionary Box to Confine the Glistery Riches of the New Petersen Automotive Museum?
Architects Kohn Pedersen Fox’s Petersen Museum is mostly about externals. It looks like a great heap of molten peppermint candy. Like Tom Wolfe’s “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” you think: cars as sweets. What could be better than a Meta-Modern confectionary box to confine all these glistery riches of the road that comprise the Petersen […]
Intense Blur: Sean Patrick Sullivan’s Debut Painting Exhibition
Missouri-born Sean Sullivan’s artworks can remind you of the Action paintings of 60 or 70 years ago. It particularly partakes of the work of Action Abstract creators like Jackson Pollack, whose “canvas as an arena” connected the viewer with the subconscious inner self. There is also something reminiscent in Sullivan’s of the late surrealist oeuvre […]
They Came, They Saw, but Did They Conquer? Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel’s New Los Angeles Art Megastore
The two and a half acres of galleries at Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel, spread over a full downtown city block and among several buildings, feel measureless to man. The spaces themselves seem to be on display. Skylights and clerestories ascend from roofs several stories up and away. The showy front gallery, with its smooth, ascending […]
An Astronaut of the Universe
Kellan Shanahan tells us that “Nature itself is the greatest teacher.” He is an astronaut of the universe within us. His ink-on-paper renderings – both in color and black and white – suggest correspondences between the smallest of organisms, patterns and perceptions and the infinite, extra-galactic cosmos. The virtuosic San Diego 25-year-old’s work will be […]