Paper Paradise
So charming and evocative are Ana Serrano’s creations that you want to knock on their little doors, then peer inside – curious at what they may contain. Serrano terms them sculpture. You might call them “habitations.” They are 2-dimensional friezes and 3-dimensional tiny model homes, ...
Topsy Transmuted
“Oh Lord, Miss Eva, I is tryin’!” said Topsy, wiping the tears from her eyes. “But Lor’ it is so hard to be good! `Pears like I ain‘t used to it, no ways.”“Jesus knows it, Topsy; he is very sorry for you; He will help you.’’– “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” by Harriet Beecher StoweSince her firs...
Movin’ On Up!
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 Vi...
Jason Rhoades Finally Has First Major...
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 th...
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, w...
Silt, Soot and Smut. Alison Saar’s Ha...
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 prev...
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, sometime...
Lautner’s Otherworldly Beverly Hills ...
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.Th...
What Could Be Better Than a Meta-Mode...
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...
Intense Blur: Sean Patrick Sullivan’s...
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 rem...
They Came, They Saw, but Did They Con...
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 ga...
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-galact...
A Bon Voyeur Party for a Voyage to Ut...
Johnny Taylor’s paintings reiterate a lifetime of travel and study, meditation and movement. There is a Japanese aesthetic, a classical Chinese modality, and an overlay of pure nature, such as suffuses both Japan and his home base in Vancouver, British Columbia. His latest body of work also sh...