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Tony Berlant has been a busy man lately. The 77-year-old artist, a crucial influence in the West Coast Pop Art Movement of the 1960s, recently debuted a solo exhibition of new work at Kohn Gallery in Hollywood — and after six decades of making art, “Fast Forward” may be his most energetic show to date.
Read MoreAYREUTH, Germany — In the 142 years since Richard Wagner made front-page news in New York with the first Bayreuth Festival, Americans have sung here, conducted here, made countless pilgrimages up a little green hill to sit, sweltering, in the temple that the composer built to his own art. But until now, no American had been entrusted with a production.
Read MoreFor most of his life, Tony Berlant has surrendered himself to his obsessions. Aside from making his own large-scale collages from vintage metal street signs and advertisements, the Santa Monica painter and sculptor has spent decades collecting ancient objects made by unknown artists.
Read MoreWhether in his collage-based art or his activities as collector/scholar/curator of ancient artifacts, Tony Berlant is penetrating into hidden levels of meaning.
Read MoreThe Bay Area of the 1950s was the West Coast epicenter for poetry, jazz and art. Part of the excitement came from the close connections between those three art forms. This was especially true in collage, art composed from fragments of photographs, advertisements or newspaper articles, elements brought together in unexpected ways to tell new stories.
Read MoreTo visit “Jess — Secret Compartments” at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles is to glimpse a soul who couldn’t care less about stylistic consistency (or establishing his brand as an artist). Instead, Jess did what he did because it seemed right at the time.
Read MoreThere’s a lot going on in Jonathan Lyndon Chase’s chaotic paintings of gay black men, often in sexual congress. They capture the inchoate feelings of intertwining oneself with another body, but they also reflect a raw engagement with fragmented facets of gender, racial and sexual identity.
Read MoreAs a painter, Mark Innerst is an intimist of spectacle. The closely held visual language of quiet French domestic scenes — think Édouard Vuillard or Pierre Bonnard — is relocated into the modern, usually urban American public sphere, where it blows up into a showy pageantry of anonymous pomp and circumstance.
Read MoreLike a huge butcher’s mallet, a slab of silvery architecture seems poised to crush a multilevel aggregation of urban commuters, cowering in a bluish, semi-dark tunnel. This painting, “Strata,” shows a rare intersection between the two principle worlds of painter Mark Innerst, who is showing 28 new works at the Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles.
Read MoreFew artists capture the awe and beauty of the built environment like Mark Innerst. His gleaming, vertiginous skyscrapers, sometimes abstracted into pure shape and color, reflect a love for both painting and urban life reminiscent of the affection paid to nature in more traditional landscape painting.
Read MoreA touching show by the late American artist Bruce Conner in an unfinished church is a highlight of the city's burgeoning art scene.
Read MoreAffiliated with California’s neosurrealist assemblage scene from the 1950s onwards but a mystic-minded outrider even there, Bruce Conner was determinedly elusive in life.
Read More“Bruce Conner: Out of Body” at Bellas Artes Projects, Outpost, Makati and Bagac, Bataan
Read MoreBELLAS ARTES PROJECTS IS PLEASED TO PRESENT BRUCE CONNER: OUT OF BODY, THE FIRST MAJOR PRESENTATION OF THE ICONIC AMERICAN ARTIST BRUCE CONNER (1933–2008) IN SOUTHEAST ASIA.
Read MoreThe construct of what makes us male and female is perhaps one of the most obdurate that we as a society face. More often than not, in our need to make comfortable our understanding of things not simply defined, we seek to classify in extremes, simplifying what should be a delightful spectrum into simplistic, unthreatening terms of black and white.
Read MoreAs Hollywood continues to reckon with widespread allegations of sexual assault and toxic masculinity, L.A.’s art scene has offered some solace in the form of the binary-smashing exhibit “Engender.” The show, which opened at Kohn Gallery this weekend, attracted a tide of progressive arts patrons, including actress and survivor Rose McGowan, who is currently leading the charge against Harvey Weinstein and gendered power dynamics in the industry.
Read More“Engender” is a group exhibition featuring seventeen contemporary artists who are revolutionizing the way one visualizes conventional gender as exclusively male or female. Through painting, a medium that has traditionally embraced this binary, these artists are pushing the genre in new, unprecedented directions, challenging the ways in which paintings can be used to deconstruct and rewrite conventional notions of personal identity.
Read MoreKohn Gallery in Los Angeles recently announced their upcoming Fall exhibition, Engender, focusing on male and female gender classifications. Through works by seventeen contemporary artists the show will examine this timely topic attempting to revolutionizing the way we visualize conventional gender as exclusively male or female.
Read MoreMany artists, stuck glamorizing the “starving artist” cliché they’ve been conditioned to revere, come off as uncomfortable with success or, worse, ungrateful. This is not the case with painter and contemporary artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn. In his work and his life, Quinn recognizes that every individual is comprised of a multitude of layered life experiences.
Read MoreChingaderas Sofisticadas — sophisticated f**kers — is the provocative title of a group show of artists associated with the culturally rich city of Guadalajara. Organized by Esthella Provas with Samantha Glaser, it includes a marvelous painting by Jorge Méndez Blake.
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