This week’s artists challenge limits and the manner in which we look at things.
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1. The works in Salmon Eye feature a unique marriage of Eddie Martinez’s gifts as a draftsman and a painter. Many of the paintings in the exhibition originated as small, sharpie drawings on paper. The drawings are enlarged and silkscreened onto the canvas. Using this black silkscreen as a starting-point, Martinez then builds up shapes and layers, sometimes using the outline of the silkscreen as a formal blueprint, or sometimes disregarding the lines or covering them entirely at Mitchell-Innes & Nash
2. Patrick Brennan’s Up Against Natureconcerns ideas around the natural world and its limits – promoting an experience that comes out of looking at the landscape but also questioning our connection to it. Confronting the natural world with a synthetic dream-like version of its self, these paintings decontextualize our understanding of traditionally perceived ideas around the sublime at Essex Flowers
3. Ellen Berkenblit’s paintings are vibrant celebrations of color – neon greens, pinks, blues, and oranges are cut and shaped with an array of blacks that reveal the artist’s dedication to mixing her own colors as she works. Berkenblit’s practice complicates the polarity between representation and abstraction. Through her capricious application of paint and calligraphic line, she creates a wickedly comical atmosphere where cartoonish representation and serious abstraction fuse and overlap at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
4. Betty Woodman’s Breakfast At The Seashore Lunch In Antella challenges the eye to reconcile two- and three-dimensional spaces simultaneously: flat tables battle the perspectival architecture that surrounds them for perceptual dominance. Each painting is a window into a realm of vibrant possibility, one in which idealized, even abstract, beauty reaches its highest expression in the tactile, utilitarian, and embodied objects and activities of everyday life at Salon 94
5. Ted Gahl, Shara Hughes and Christoph Roßner’s work all exist in the borderland between representation and abstraction. With deft understanding of painterly tradition, these three artists confidently and independently traverse the pictorial plane, adding their own personal interpretation. The paintings feel as if they are in this cyclical feedback with their maker, without concern for a viewer, while simultaneously rewarding any viewer who looks at Romer Young Gallery
6. In Andrew Holmquist’s STAGE LEFT painting is re-conceived as a tool or device for exploring the way that other mediums – film, costuming, comic books and ceramic sculptures – can meld together to assemble a fictionalized alternative to reality at Carrie Secrist Gallery
