Artist. Visionary. Hipster. Mystic. Voracious consumer and conduit of modern culture. Wallace Berman immersed himself in all these guises, with a selftaught fervor and disarming sincerity. To those who know his artwork, he remains a uniquely prescient and compelling figure, even 50 years after his death in 1976, from a tragic accident caused by a drunk driver on the eve of his 50th birthday.
Read MoreThe title of the exhibition Bruce Conner: It’s All True, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, comes from a letter the artist wrote, late in life, in which he listed 61 labels the media had attached to him and his work. These included “artist” and “anti-artist”, “feminist” and “misogynist”, “spiritual” and “profane”, “accessible” and “obscure”, “realist” and “surrealist”.
Read MoreWhen Bruce Conner died in 2008, it wasn’t the first time. In 1960, the artist staged his own death in his first solo show, titled “The Work of the Late Bruce Conner.” By 1970, he had also convinced “Who’s Who in American Art” directory that he was deceased.
Read MoreBruce Conner was one of the great outliers of American art, a polymathic nonconformist whose secret mantra might have been “Only resist.” In multiple media, over more than five decades, this restless denizen of the San Francisco cultural scene resisted categorization, art world expectations and almost any kind of authority.
Read MoreDeparting from the stock footage that characterizes Bruce Conner’s earlier films, LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1959–67/1996) is his first color film and consists of footage he shot while living in Mexico in 1961–62, as well as some earlier shots of him and his wife, Jean, in San Francisco.
Read MoreAs a child, the late artist Bruce Conner overheard his father exchanging pleasantries with a neighbor in their front yard. Their conversation was so stilted and trite that the young Conner thought they must have been speaking in code. At that moment, as his story goes, he reckoned that adults must be using language to hide something from children. “I learned to distrust words,” he told an interviewer in 1986. “I placed my bet on vision.”
Read MoreBruce Conner (1933–2008) was one of the foremost American artists of the postwar era. Emerging from the California art scene, in which he worked for half a century, Conner’s work touches on various themes of postwar American society, from a rising consumer culture to the dread of nuclear apocalypse.
Read MoreAmerican art had been drawing from Sunday newspaper funnies in various ways long before Roy Lichtenstein’s painted comic books panels Popped onto the gallery scene. In 1950s New York, Robert Rauschenberg affixed Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley, and Terry and the Pirates onto his paintings and assemblages, recontextualizing them with coded signals about his closeted desires.
Read MoreSunday 19 June 10:00 - 10:45 Lumiere Theatre
People perceive the visible as real, and don’t distinguish between what is real versus what is perceived to be. We’re all subject to the influence of ‘hyperrealities’ being constructed around us.
Read MoreJoin us this time for a special episode dedicated to the influential Los Angeles artist Wallace Berman (1926-1976). Our guests are Hollywood gallerist Michael Kohn, who walks us through the retrospective exhibition “Wallace Berman—American Aleph,” on view at Kohn Gallery through June 25, 2016, and the artist’s son, the author and publisher Tosh Berman, talking about his father’s craft and character, and his importance in the mid-century West Coast cultural scene.
Read MoreBRUCE CONNER: IT’S ALL TRUE is the artist’s first monographic museum exhibition in New York, the first large survey of his work in 16 years, and the first complete retrospective of his 50-year career. It brings together over 250 objects, from film and video to painting, assemblage, drawing, prints, photography, photograms, and performance.
Read MoreIf the art world is all about finding the next big thing, Los Angeles might be it.
A slew of well-known galleries has opened branches here this year, including Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, Sprüth Magers, and Maccarone.
While that’s generated lots of buzz for L.A.’s art scene, those moves mean a more competitive environment for homegrown gallerists who have their own following of notable collectors and links to prominent artists.
Read MoreThis show is on the radio so if you are listening, even reading, you may know about the existence of that life transforming invention, the transistor radio. Small and portable, it meant that you could listen to the ball games as they happened.
Read MoreAt Kohn Gallery, “Wallace Berman: American Aleph” paints an intimate picture of the legendary artist who was at the center of the scene when Los Angeles came into its artistic own.
Read MoreKohn Gallery is presenting Wallace Berman—American Aleph, the artist’s first comprehensive Los Angeles retrospective in almost four decades. Commemorating the 40th anniversary of Berman’s accidental death at age 50, the exhibition surveys the entire oeuvre of this seminal American artist from the late 1940s until 1976.
Read MoreFrom 1957 to 1961, Wallace Berman lived in the Marin County township of Larkspur, California, where he took over an abandoned house on Madera Creek and turned it into Semina, a private gallery space where he would host one-day art exhibitions featuring his own work (and those of his contemporaries).
Read MoreOn meeting Ori Gersht at his studio, I am greeted by a warm welcome and also his dog, an adorable terrier who stands on its hind legs with delight when it realises there is a definite fan standing in close proximity.
Read MoreBerman, “American Aleph,” at Kohn Gallery. This is the first comprehensive Los Angeles retrospective for the pioneering Southern California assemblage artist in roughly four decades. The artist, who was also the publisher of the influential arts and literary magazine Semina, had an international influence.
Read MoreWallace Berman was a seminal figure in the post-war Los Angeles art scene, having made his solo LA debut at the legendary Ferus Gallery in 1957. Despite his crucial role at the intersection of assemblage, collage, mysticism, and poetry, he has not had a proper retrospective almost since his death 40 years ago.
Read MoreRosa Loy was one of the few female members of post-reunification Germany's New Leipzig School, but her paintings are 100 percent woman. We talked to the artist about working with history, what it's like to be part of a "movement," and why she only paints the feminine.
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