ARTILLERY BEST IN SHOW 2017
Moving well past a theme dominant in recent contemporary fine (and popular) art, Friedman’s brilliantly curated (and gorgeous) show of painting saw us through to a deeper, more complex and nuanced—and richly generative—consideration of identity in the 21st century
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Before Kohn had fully installed its exhibition of paintings that address the fluidity of gender, collectors had already bought 70% of its contents. Of the 17 artists in the show, buyers came hungry for the names Loie Hollowell, Jesse Mockrin, Tschabalala Self, Jansson Stegner, Emily Mae Smith and Christina Quarles.
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The 17 painters included in “Engender,” a show at Los Angeles’s Kohn Gallery, aim to tackle these questions. The artists, ranging from well-known figures like Nicole Eisenmanand Hernan Bas to rising stars like Firelei Báez and Tschabalala Self, contribute to a conversation about how to expand and deconstruct the visual language of gender identity.
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Kohn Gallery , in Los Angeles, presents Chingaderas Sofisticadas , an unprecedented exhibition that brings together nine outstanding artists living in Guadalajara, whose varied practices contribute to the growing cultural ascent and international recognition of that Mexican city.
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Today’s show: “Chingaderas Sofisticadas” is on view at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, through Saturday, November 4. The group exhibition, curated by Samantha Glaser and Esthella Provas, presents the work of nine Guadalajara, Mexico–based artists.
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The late actor Dennis Hopper is remembered for a lot of things. There is the volatile hippie he portrayed in “Easy Rider,” the 1969 counterculture classic he also directed. And there’s his depiction of an unhinged Frank Booth in David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” in 1986.
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Dennis Hopper’s The Lost Album, a collection of the late actor’s poignant black-and-white photography on view now at L.A.’s Kohn Gallery through September 1, was made possible by two key actors: his Rebel Without a Causecostar James Dean, who encouraged him to try his hand behind the camera (albeit as a director), and his first wife, Brooke Hayward, who bought him a Nikon mirror flex in 1961.
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Simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, utopian and dystopian, Dean Byington’s complex canvases are the result of a meticulously refined process that is both digital and analog. Byington begins by collaging photocopies of his own drawings in parallel with fragments from 18th and 19th Century prints.
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I WAS ALWAYS AWARE THAT MY WORK WASN’T POP. And Walter Hopps knew it too, even though he included me in the Pasadena Art Museum’s “New Painting of Common Objects” in 1962. I had the attitude of, I don’t care where you show me as long as you show me. It’s not very often I choose to revisit a series I’ve done before.
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Dean Byington's work references religious conflict and terrorism in the Middle East and Western Europe alongside the damage wrought by human processes such as climate change and urban sprawl into previously uninhabited regions. On view at his new solo exhibition at Kohn Gallery will be the painting, Theory Of Machines (Grand Saturn), the third and most complex version of the Saturn series, which engages with issues of humanity’s impact on the world
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One of Joe Goode’s fond memories of the New York art scene of the '60s was when the great Andy Warhol invited him to dinner at “my favorite restaurant.” Goode, who was then so poor he had hitchhiked to Manhattan, was dazzled. Would it be Grenouille or maybe the Cote Basque, where Truman Capote nestled among his entourage of millionaire fashionistas?
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Part Kubrickian, part Wilsonian (as in Robert), with a nod to Isadora Duncan, Lita Albuquerque’s “hEARTH,” a performance installation created with her daughter Jasmine Albuquerque and composer Kristen Toedtman, on view at Sunnylands Center and Gardens (the former Annenberg Estate in Rancho Mirage), served as a kind of prequel to outdoor exhibition Desert X 2017.
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Mark Ryden is on something of a sugar high. Backstage at Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Center for the Arts, the painter giddily navigates a luscious candyland of his own creation — something he’s now seeing fully realized, onstage, for the first time.
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With her gaze turned skyward, Light and Space artist Lita Albuquerque draws inspiration from the cosmos.
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So much art wants to move you. Lita Albuquerque’s art, on the other hand, wants to ground you, align you to the cosmos, and connect you to a world bigger and deeper than the one you know.
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The desert has long exercised its fascination over the minds of artists, architects, musicians, writers, and other explorers of landscape and soul. From the theological cast of the Biblical desert wilderness to the secular observations of Joan Didions Holy Water, it is a place of scarcity, of stark contrasts, crude survival, mystery and transformation.
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In an onstage conversation Wednesday, Oct. 26, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where Directors’ Circle donors were previewing “Bruce Conner: It’s All True,” it was emphasized that Conner, “the quintessential artist’s artist” by museum director Neal Benezra’s description, was a man of paradox.
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There are some artists you know are great immediately because they provoke such disparate and conflicting emotions simultaneously that they practically throw you physically off balance. John Altoon is one such artist.
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The Museum of Modern Art has wisely advertised its Bruce Conner retrospective with an image ofBombhead, a 1989/2002 print in which an army general’s head is replaced with a mushroom cloud. This is a show that promises to blow your mind, and it lives up to that threat. Trippy, disturbing, entertaining, and whimsical all at once, “Bruce Connor: It’s All True” is a marvelous look at a figure whose gleefully anarchic work called for the end of culture as we know it.
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In 1963, Bruce Conner decided to find himself. He was back in San Francisco, after a year in Mexico documenting his search for mind-altering mushrooms (Timothy Leary has a flickering cameo in the resulting short film).
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