Annie Buckley

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  picks September 30, 2012

  Dimitri Kozyrev

  Wassily Kandinsky begins “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” (1911) by railing against attempts to “revive the art principles of the past,” but makes an important exception for art that resuscitates “the external forms which served to express those inner feelings in an earlier age.” Viewed through this lens, Dimitri Kozyrev’s joyously complex paintings revitalize the idealism and vigor of an earlier time, recalling Kandinsky’s own radiant abstractions and, in their hints of representation, those by Arshile Gorky. Like Kozyrev, both of these artists often relied on memories of their homeland for

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  picks September 27, 2012

  April Street

  The tenuous solidity of April Street’s new paintings places them in dialogue with the informel, or formless, as defined by Georges Bataille and taken up by Rosalind E. Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois in their 1997 book of the same title. Yet the materiality of Street’s painted and sculpted nylon, and its indexical relationship to the body, echoes less ephemeral work by the likes of Eva Hesse and Alina Szapocznikow. Street begins each piece by wrapping her body in paint-soaked fabric and reenacting, on canvas, the positions she imagines she has taken while sleeping. She proceeds with a series of

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  picks June 05, 2012

  Dinh Q. Lê

  Time appears to collapse before our eyes on the textured surfaces of Dinh Q. Lê’s latest woven photographs. Lê’s technique of interlacing, which is based on a traditional Vietnamese weaving technique, hasn’t lost any of its power since the early 1990s, when he began to exhibit works made in this way. Here, framed photo-weavings are presented in horizontal groupings or vertical stacks. Black-and-white photographs, cut into strips, are woven together to create composites; ancient Sumerian ruins (in modern-day Iraq) and contemporary pictures of Iraqi citizens, culled from the Internet, are threaded

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  picks April 25, 2012

  Hugo Wilson

  Hugo Wilson’s sumptuous oil paintings and delicate drawings, rendered in a dramatic-realist style reminiscent of Dutch masters, depict endearingly quirky subjects—a proboscis monkey elegantly perched in a wooden frame; a collection of claws, feathers, creatures, and a highly detailed human heart—that charm and seduce viewers into the more implicit topic of his work: the amorphous space in which meaning is made. Wilson gravitates toward the past but is informed by a contemporary idea; hauntology, recently in vogue in literary theory, came to light with Jacques Derrida’s Spectres de Marx (1993),

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  picks February 28, 2012

  Alina Szapocznikow

  Fortunate viewers will already be familiar with the art of Alina Szapocznikow, but most of these likely reside in the artist’s native Poland, where her sculptures and drawings were widely exhibited during her too-short career in the 1950s and ‘60s. But for this viewer, the survey of her work, organized by a phalanx of international museums, offered that rare luminous sense of discovery that comes with encountering a phenomenal artist for the first time. The pieces on view, impressive in both number and variety, chronicle Szapocznikow’s singular vision; through explorations in media, starting

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  picks November 04, 2011

  Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken

  “Speaking in Tongues,” curated by Claudia Bohn-Spector and Sam Mellon, pairs Wallace Berman, a spiritual father to LA’s “Cool School” of the 1960s and ’70s, with Robert Heinecken, who shared with Berman an interest in pushing the boundaries of photography as well as a close friendship. The exhibition covers the years 1961 to 1976, a time when photographic innovation meant something entirely different from the myriad forms of digital manipulation it often implies today. One fascinating aspect of seeing these artists’ works side by side is how, together, they signal both the durability and the

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  picks October 13, 2011

  Charles Gaines

  Whether in peacetime or in battle, freedom is reanimated whenever it is demanded by a people who have risen up around its cause; Charles Gaines’s new body of work embraces the historical tide of protest and change fueled by these recurrent calls for liberty and, as such, is flooded with dimension and vitality in the wake of the Arab Spring. A three-panel LED light box, Sky Box I (all works 2011), experientially engages viewers in the ebb and flow of struggles for sovereignty over time. Each panel is inscribed with a text on human rights, starting with “A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed of

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  picks October 04, 2011

  Lee Mullican

  Though not officially related, Lee Mullican’s luminous paintings from the 1950s serve as a fitting prelude to “Pacific Standard Time” (PST). Typically using the edge of a palette knife to apply hundreds of blunt lines of oil paint, Mullican built the surface of each canvas into a tactile and layered field of pulsating colors including gold, orange, deep burgundy, and olive green. Perhaps most striking are two works from 1958 that discard color in favor of an impressively wide range of whites. Several compositions draw on Native American motifs and symbols of ancient cultures that call to mind

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  picks September 09, 2011

  Linn Meyers

  Numerous site-specific works have graced the expansive wall that flanks the wide staircase leading up to the galleries of the Hammer Museum; Linn Meyers’s Every Now. And Again, 2011, a deep violet and pale yellow wall drawing of rolling swirls, constitutes one of the space’s quieter and yet more memorable pieces. Indeed, it speaks volumes for the rare but powerful use of subtle sensitivity that an artist can bring to bear in addressing a public space. Using a process that pulls equally from intuitive choice and rigorous focus, Meyers has painstakingly applied each line of butter-colored ink to

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  picks August 22, 2011

  Keith Walsh

  Fusing space travel with art practice might seem far-fetched, but it becomes more fathomable when outer space is defined as everything beyond the boundaries of a sleek handcrafted vessel that doubles as the artist’s studio. Parked at the center of Keith Walsh’s exhibition, this angular, jet-black craft-cum-studio, were it outfitted with an engine, would make the perfect ride for a postmodern Batman.

  Walsh made the sculpture and then compacted his tall frame into its tiny upholstered interior for hours at a time over a period of several months, creating the collages and drawings displayed on the

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  picks July 23, 2011

  Bas Jan Ader

  A seamless integration between life and art, as well as liberal doses of death and myth, permeate any discussion of the Dutch-born artist Bas Jan Ader, who lived and worked in Los Angeles until his mysterious death in 1975. That Ader was lost at sea en route across the Atlantic in a twelve-and-a-half-foot boat, the smallest yet to attempt the journey, during the second phase of his three-part project In Search of the Miraculous, only adds to the mystique. But even beyond the facts surrounding his oceanic demise, there is a feeling of something unknown and assuredly treacherous that echoes

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  picks July 05, 2011

  “Street Cred”

  This exhibition may initially appear as yet another street art show, but it was, in actuality, announced six months in advance of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s major gathering “Art in the Streets.” It also fills a vital gap in Jeffrey Deitch’s extravaganza: the social and cultural legacy of Los Angeles, where cholos marked territory with elaborate placas (plaques) as early as the mid-1930s, predating the explosion of style writing on New York subways by more than three decades. Curated by Steve Grody, author of the 2007 book Graffiti LA, and Shirlae Cheng-Lifshin, this exhibition