Annie Buckley

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  picks June 17, 2011

  Tom Wudl

  The delicate intricacy and irrepressible zeal of Tom Wudl’s art are on full display in this exhibition of ten small works on paper. Some are no bigger than four by four inches, and the largest is just over a foot wide, but size is no measure of impact here; the ethereal works command a kind of meditative attention—intensity of focus combined with blissful absorption—similar to the immersive concentration necessary to produce this degree of detail at such a small scale.

  Each work depicts a flower—many are studies for the largest work, Cloud Blossom, 2011—composed of microscopic pips (more well

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  picks May 18, 2011

  Ed Johnson

  Ed Johnson uses oil paint to meticulously render fuzzy photographs taken from freeze frames of videos, an ostensibly cumbersome method that results in a fluid mix of the real and the manipulated. A previous body of work was derived from late-night cowboy movies, but all of the five canvases in this exhibition are based on videos the Los Angeles–based artist took in and around his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina. These new pieces constitute a nuanced body of work in which ordinary subject matter—a van, bench, or garden sculpture amid foliage—is just recognizable enough to engender a

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  picks May 16, 2011

  Kim Beom

  In Spectacle, 2010, Kim Beom’s riveting remake of a popular scene in nature programs, an antelope chases a leopard, effecting a paradigmatic shift in the predator-prey relationship on a golden savannah that metaphorically suggests the possibility of a shift in the polarities—age, race, gender—according to which the stubborn and often invisible boundaries controlling access to power are frequently drawn. The reversal is characteristic of this Seoul-based artist’s practice, which over the past two decades has staged poetic complications of numerous accepted truths and categories.

  This exhibition

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  picks March 28, 2011

  “We’re Not Here to Waste Time”

  The three artists in this exhibition––Nena Amsler, Miyoshi Barosh, and Nava Lubelski––make works that resist being slotted into traditional categories like sculpture or painting, decoration or craft. Materially and visually, their pieces exhibit permeability or seepage—holes, drips, and stains figure prominently throughout—indicating a space where one object or concept blends into or creates a dialectic with another. These artists’ material-conceptual investigations invoke the relational perspective of the French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, who writes in her 2008 book Sharing the World

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  picks January 27, 2011

  Nigel Cooke

  With this exhibition, British artist Nigel Cooke continues his interest in the end of days—apocalypse has rarely looked as lovely as it does in his canvases—but here the artist has fine-tuned his subject matter; the neon geometry and inky blackness of earlier works have been joined by pastel washes and realistic portraits in addition to the narrative of two men who appear to be hippies or wanderers. Through eleven paintings and four bronzes, Cooke unravels the obliquely poignant story of a duo caught in a tragedy from which only one emerges alive.

  The centerpiece of the exhibition is a large

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  picks January 27, 2011

  Heather Cantrell

  Since 2001, Heather Cantrell has been using portraiture to explore status and identity, as well as intersections between photography, painting, and performance. In 2008 she began to turn her camera on denizens of the art world, creating an ongoing series titled “A Study in Portraiture”; the first two “acts” of this project include images taken in Cantrell’s home studio and in galleries and art fairs in Los Angeles, New York, and London. The numerous and varied subjects in these photographs and traveling exhibition of her works suggest that artists, collectors, and the like are not so different

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  picks January 16, 2011

  “Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space”

  The five installations in this exhibition, which was curated by Alma Ruiz, exude an effortless chic that seems fresh, contemporary, and, in the context of this venue, synonymous with Los Angeles’s beach-meets-Hollywood milieu. But the works are neither current nor locally made; the large-scale interactive pieces are re-creations of works made between 1951 and 1973 by four artists and one artist team, all from Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela). The resemblance to Light and Space art created predominantly in Southern California during the 1960s and ’70s (and referenced in the

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  picks November 30, 2010

  Alberto Burri

  “Combustione: Alberto Burri and America” persuasively affords Burri a significant place in the narrative of twentieth-century art. Curated by Lisa Melandri with Michael Duncan, the exhibition includes thirty-six paintings and prints that the Italian artist and longtime Los Angeles resident made between 1951 and 1990, and offers a rewarding view of his consistently elegant aesthetic and his fierce commitment to innovation. Early in his career, he made compositions of rags and burlap reminiscent of collages by Picasso and Schwitters, but from there, Burri mined a new vein, influenced by art informel

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  picks October 17, 2010

  Glenn Kaino

  A direct read of Glenn Kaino’s latest exhibition, an ambitious performance-cum-installation-cum–open studio, points toward a simple correlation between art and magic. A more meandering and interpretive dérive of the exuberant project, which was made over the course of the two years the artist spent studying magic and includes new site-specific works and ongoing projects constructed in the gallery, yields a more resonant and surprising association––the artist as optimist or, more specifically, as conduit for the creative act, a more prosaic kind of magic than that of playing cards and wands.

  These

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  picks July 09, 2010

  Denis Darzacq

  The suspended figures that leap, fall, twist, lean, and float in Denis Darzacq’s photographs were not, as one would suspect in a digital era, created on a blue screen; they were captured en marche the old-fashioned way, on location. Since 2005, Darzacq has invited young dancers from working-class neighborhoods in Paris, the city where he lives and works, to participate in his work; the results of this collaborative, performance-based process are infused with the beauty of dance and sociopolitical subtext.

  Included in this exhibition are works from two series: “La Chute,” 2005–2006, shot in and

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  picks June 17, 2010

  Ginger Wolfe-Suarez

  Ginger Wolfe-Suarez’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, “Memory Objects,” functions as a Minimalist playground in which discrete objects and subtle images invite connections, interactions, and reflection—not least on remembrance, as the title suggests. Inspired, like many artists and thinkers, by formless in-between states, the Bay Area–based artist’s works are distinguished by their aptitude at carving out and activating space in quiet but definitive ways.

  Anchor, 2010, a hulking, matte black structure that recalls Robert Morris’s L Beams of 1965, looms near the entrance of the gallery like

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  picks May 26, 2010

  Alice Neel

  Art history’s view of women artists, on the one hand, and the more recent phenomenon of digital technology, on the other, have proven to be double-edged swords for Alice Neel. As the well-worn story goes, she was a figurative painter and a woman at a time when neither was fashionable for an artist; but today, for the most part, the fact of an artist’s gender (or ethnicity) no longer defines her work in critical dialogue and reception.

  This intimate exhibition, running concurrently with a traveling retrospective that opens this month at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, offers the chance to see