Pattern Pulp

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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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

 

February 9, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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The art is this week’s gallery picks is all about focus and shifts in practice and process.

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1. Steve Roden went a year without painting and then began again at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
2. Subliminal Shifts unveils an assemblage of artists living and working in New York, Berlin, Paris, and Chicago, all of who predominantly practice an abstract idiom, investigating paint through a lens that is entirely distinct at Tracy Williams, Ltd
3. In “Voyeur”, Vanessa Prager installs sixteen new paintings, some viewable only through a tiny peephole. Prager paints dense and furry oil paintings that relish in the peaks and valleys of extruded oil paint. With multiple colors of paint on the brush she blends pigment not just in the X or Y dimensions but gravity-defyingly outward into the Z. Her subject is the face, and her technique creates an image that hovers between figuration and abstraction in a sort of non-image at The Hole
4. Margo Wolowiec’s Double Blind expands upon her distinct woven practice with three new freestanding sculptures grounded by a large double-paneled wall work. In this body of work, the artist continues her examination of digitally sourced images while presenting the viewer with a conflicted field of doubles through the artist’s process of dye sublimation transfer onto polymer threads and weaving them together on a handloom at Anat Ebgi
5. Emanuel Röhss’ new works in Invitation to Love stem from the artist’s recent examination of the relationship between the Hollywood entertainment industry and the Ennis House in Los Angeles, designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The exhibition’s title is borrowed from the name of a fictional soap opera which appears in the TV series Twin Peaks at Thomas Duncan Gallery
6. Further Notice presents new figurative and abstract paintings in Wayne Herpich’s distinctly rigorous technique, one where he employs a series of reiterative horizontal, sometimes layered, wavelike forms across the surface of the canvas. In full command of his often bombastic decisions in pigment, patterning, and texture, Herpich creates masterful, dissonant, compelling, complex and innovative works that resist classification at Blackston Gallery

 

February 2, 2016 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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Our artists contemplate the ability of the world to transform in this week’s gallery picks.

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1. “The Colossalalia paintings are a rogues’ gallery of old Los Angeles neighborhoods. They serve as visual signposts to a landscape vaguely recalled, or no longer extant. As neighborhoods change through neglect, destruction or development, these paintings remain as souvenirs of a world systematically being erased” – Hilary Baker at Offramp Gallery
2. Mark Ryden’s latest series is informed by the geometric structure “dodecahedron,” a solid figure bearing 12 sides whose perfect symmetry has been the source of extensive query by mathematicians and scientists since antiquity. Drawing upon the form’s mystery and divine connotations as a source of inspiration, Ryden explores the bridge between the physical world and the intangible realm at Paul Kasmin Gallery
3. The vocabulary of images in Mark Ryden’s new body of work remains consistent with his pervasive distortion of scale and his iconic fairytale-like creatures set against seductive landscapes of untouched beauty. However, the subject of his latest series is informed by the geometric structure “dodecahedron,” a solid figure bearing twelve sides whose perfect symmetry has been the source of extensive query by mathematicians and scientists since antiquity Ron English’s Neonature examines the art of evolution, the flaw that propels civilization at Corey Helford Gallery
4. Examining the evolution of the feather at Andrea Rosen Gallery
5. Both David Marc Grant and Adrian Landon Brooks are influenced by the notion of time – past, present and future. Grant continues to explore the idea of a mythical future world in his series of acrylic paintings on wood panel. In contrast, Brooks is inspired by materials and aesthetics of past eras at Campfire Gallery
6. Whitney Bedford’s exhibition will include a series of uniformly scaled landscapes; these images of a tropical desert form an exploration of the sublime, of Eden, of the origins of awe in nature, that hints at the cinematic. Bedford will also present a trio of monumental landscape paintings rendered in gold ink with her exemplary draftsmanship and painterly exuberance at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

December 22, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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In this week’s gallery picks, our artists explore mediums and their artistic relationships.

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1. Choosing to work both within the figurative and more abstracted realms, Rich Jacobs crosses back & forth with no set boundary lines, or strict purism at Artists Republic
2. O’Keefe’s newest body of work, Things as They Are consists of ten photographs of distilled compositions of three boards, plexiglass and dowels that allow color and light to become the true material subject. Paradoxically, these straightforward photographs often defy understanding of how they were made or even that they are photographs at all at Denny Gallery
3. In her new work, Yunhee Min continues to explore the sensorial potential of color, light, and gesture. Movements refers both to literal and suggested motion and change: her gestures on the canvas, the viscosity of her paint, and the way these actions combine to produce a shifting spatiality within her compositions at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
4. The paintings, works on paper and sculpture on view in Eat A Peach are linked by saturated color, textured surfaces and replication of forms. Mirroring, symmetry and tactility suggest both growth and abundance at Jeff Bailey Gallery
5. Handmade Abstract brings together 13 emerging and mid-career artists who are dedicated to the visual language of abstraction and whose work emphasizes the handcrafted nature of the art and processes of fabrication. The exhibition will focus on work that is inspired by the quality and physical nature of its materials and at times shows the influence of crafting techniques; merging the abstract form with a sense of the handmade, tactile, quirky, and personal at BRIC
6. Julia Bland’s large-scale works incorporate painting and weaving, exploring the structures and patterns that combine disparate elements into a whole. Ropes, painted canvas, and fabrics woven by the artist are stitched together, forming boundaries that further bind the work – warp to weft, image to object at On Stellar Rays

September 8, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

Tuesday's Gallery Picks




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The details are in the dialogue in this week’s gallery picks.

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1. T. Kelly Mason has produced work across a range of media, including sound, video, installation, painting, and sculpture, addressing the relationships between reality, perception, representation and interpretation. In his current exhibition, Mason uses these relationships as lenses to examine dichotomies of scale: internal vs. external, human vs. cosmic, actual vs. imagined at Cherry and Martin
2. Focusing on four groups of artists practicing away from the cultural capitals of New York and Los Angeles, What Nerve! presents an alternative history of American art since the 1960s at Matthew Marks
3. The prime subject matter of Bertozzi & Casoni’s sculpture is modern consumption and its resulting detritus. The artists initially consider the process of decay because, as they state, “it is a very intense vision of the world…the true essence of things can be found in decay, in everything that has been rejected, in junk, in rubbish.  It is in decay where you can perceive true life, where you can see a human being’s essence.” at Sperone Westwater
4. CHROMA is the result of a long distance collaboration between Lisa Soloman and Christine Tillman that explores color theory through objects from everyday life, expressed through crowd sourced installation, drawings, and sculpture at Gallery CA
5. In Bart Exposito’s new work, forms suggestive of typographic characters are rendered with sensitive lines over opaque and ambient planes of dusty color. The result is a duality, or contradiction, in the appearance of the paintings: flatness can be experienced as both dense and atmospheric, as foreground and as background, and often these states are indeterminate at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
6. Metamodern will explore the idea of a contemporary cultural movement in painting and sculpture that has developed in dialogue with and in response to modernism and postmodernism of the 20th century at Denny Gallery

 

July 21, 2015 | By: Shayna Kulik

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