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Los Angeles based artist Kate Barbee is not afraid to unabashedly explore the intimate escapism associated with the trials and tribulations of young adulthood in her work. Her vivid large-scale paintings play with an expansive color palette that delineate abstract dreamy figures amidst the presence of mixed media like waxes, scraps of quilts, and other textiles.
Read MoreWhen Sophia Narrett traded in her paint tubes for embroidery thread, she never looked back. The switch happened while the New York artist was completing an MFA in painting at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design and found herself experimenting with thread. “I fell in love with the process right from the start,” she says. The medium has certainly worked for her: Last year, Narrett was named the winner of Galerie’s Emerging Artist Award and received the $10,000 prize by Galerie’s editors and a jury of art-world luminaries, who reviewed over 400 artist portfolios.
Read MoreART: Caroline Kent: A Sudden Appearance of the Sun and Sophia Narrett: Soul Kiss at Kohn Gallery. Interested in a reevaluation of abstract painting, Kent’s practice is founded on notions of language and textual translation.
Read Moremyselves is an opportunity to see and be seen by the artwork of emerging and mid-career artists as they probe into the architecture of identity. Featuring traditional painters, textile artists, mixed media artists, and photographers, Joshua Friedman has curated a broad foundation of unique makers to explore the shape-shifting theme of identity.
Read MoreAs far as anyone can know or prove, homebrewed existentialism is blossoming indoors—a philosophical trend as invisible as the poison in the air that prompted it. Like mold spores in a shower stall, a scentless gas leak, or this lingering unseeable virus, the pandemic has revealed ourselves to ourselves, whether we know it or not. The self likes it indoors. It’s why we have skulls.
Read MoreHow does an artist shape and portray their identity? Curator Joshua Friedman explores the question in myselves, a group exhibition at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles until October 31. The group show features work from 25 contemporary artists, including Amoako Boafo, Heidi Hahn, Bruce Conner, Loie Hollowell, Jesse Mockrin, Xiuching Tsay, and Naotaka Hiro.
Read MoreContemporary painting is usually characterized by the specific stylistic orientation of an artist; however, it is not that rare that one’s artistic practice is a mix of different formal and conceptual persuasions. Take for instance the Israeli born, New York-based artist Nir Hod, who manages to express himself through both figuration and abstraction.
Read MoreWith galleries slowly reopening across the Americas, especially in cities where the curve has been flattened, we took a look at the solo shows on view and found a number of exhibitions dealing with concepts of art-making in fresh and exciting ways.
Read MoreArtist Nir Hod has had his share of opening parties and solo shows, but his latest debut at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles offers an unveiling like none other. Opening on July 16 and running through the end of August by appointment only, the show entitled, “The Life We Left Behind,” pushes Hod’s work with chrome to new depths.
Read MoreA new site-specific artwork by Lita Albuquerque, “Red Earth,” greets visitors at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens as garden areas reopen after a closure of more than three months as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally scheduled to go on view in March, the temporary installation centers around a boulder capped with bright red pigment placed among towering bamboo in a grove of the Japanese Garden.
Read MoreBuddhist teacher and author Stephen Batchelor and artist Lita Albuquerque discuss their views on life, death, and the concept of impermanence with KCRW host Jonathan Bastian. This interview has been abbreviated and edited for clarity.
Read MoreKohn Gallery in Los Angeles has added Chicago-based painter Caroline Kent to its roster. The gallery will present Kent’s first solo exhibition in L.A. in September. Works by the artist, who is known for her explorations of language and abstraction that unfold on black canvases, can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. She has previously exhibited at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, the FLAG Art Foundation in New York, and elsewhere.
Read MoreKohn Gallery in Los Angeles has added the New York-based artist Sophia Narrett to its roster. Known for her elaborate embroidered canvases that explore gender and notions of intimacy and identity, Narrett will have her first solo exhibition in L.A. with the gallery in September 2020.
Read MoreThe human race is better equipped to talk a lot of nonsense than to save itself from extinction. Octavio Abúndez’s exhibition at Kohn Gallery made the point with a resounding crash of cant. The main room was hung with some of the Conceptualist’s hard-edge “stripe” paintings, outfitted with the umbrella title “We Could Be So Much Better,” 2015–, and composed of stacked bands of color.
Read MoreThe newest addition to this blue-chip cohort is Tony Berlant’s sculptural triptych The Marriage of New York and Athens, a work with a one-of-a-kind provenance. Berlant, a Los Angeles–based sculptor, made the pieces between 1966 and 1968 to serve as an element of his studio’s interior design, and for a few years, they did just that. But when he became busier and needed more space, he removed them and loaned them to a then-upstart architect who had become a close personal friend. That architect: Frank Gehry.
Read MoreDiva painting might be its own notable genre, given such exceptional practitioners as Kurt Kauper and Marilyn Minter. Their work doesn’t merely show as vivid, dramatic subject matter an array of imperious opera singers, fashion models, Hollywood icons at home or sex-tape-style celebrities-in-the-making. Instead, it forthrightly asserts that, in an era in which any form of art-making is possible, painting is a diva too.
Read MoreBurn Out in Shredded Heaven is the first solo exhibition in Los Angeles by New York-based artist and painter Heidi Hahn at Kohn Gallery. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Hahn creates introspective paintings that engage with the female body.
Read MoreGuadalajara, Mexico-based artist Gonzalo Lebrija is represented by Los Angeles’ Kohn Gallery as of last November; Veladuras Nocturnas is his first solo exhibition there, and the show spans all three of its exhibition spaces.
Read MoreAfter signing on with Kohn last fall, Mexican artist Lebrija makes his debut at the gallery this year with an ambitious exhibition. On view are paintings from the artist’s signature Veladuras series, which feature layers of muted semi-transparent paint that form prismatic abstractions, as well as a new sculptural work and film installation. Lebrija is not quite as well-known to American audiences as he is in his home country, but hat may be changing soon.
Read MoreIt is difficult to categorize the boundary-breaking, multi-media trajectory of American artist Bruce Conner (1933 – 2008). Constant change and a wide-roving, obsessive curiosity are perhaps two constants in Conner’s work, which ranges from assemblage to drawing, painting and sculpture to conceptual art and experimental film.
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