Daniel Gerwin

  • Trenton Doyle Hancock, Metes and Bounds, 2022, acrylic, graphite, paper, canvas collage, and plastic bottle caps on canvas, 36 x 25 1/4 x 3".
    picks October 04, 2022

    Trenton Doyle Hancock

    What do you get when a consummate graphic talent and profound thinker spends two years in Covid seclusion? “Good Grief, Bad Grief,” Trenton Doyle Hancock’s second exhibition in Los Angeles. A group of roiling, byzantine mixed-media paintings detail the urban development of the Vegans, central characters in Hancock’s fictional universe. Three Vegan suburbs and one city (each the subject of an individual work), as well as the epically cinematic The Skint Alterpiece: Vegans Make Deposits at the Tofu Bank, 2020, are rendered in black, white, and touches of red. Hancock’s images are as antic as ever,

  • Ever Baldwin, A Brave Face, 2021, oil on canvas in carved and charred wood frame, 32 x 24 x 5".
    picks April 18, 2022

    Ever Baldwin

    The seven abstract paintings on display in Ever Baldwin’s first West Coast exhibition include a hand-built sculptural frame for each work. Baldwin integrates the image and its external support like other contemporary artists—including Alex Anderson and Stephanie Temma Hier—whose approach to framing becomes a fundamental aspect of the artwork. While Baldwin clearly demarcates the chunky wooden enclosure from the picture, they often make these elements formally contiguous by extending shapes and patterns from the painting directly into the surrounding structure. The armatures are built raw: Grinder

  • View of “Amanda Valdez: The Deep Way,” 2021–22. From left: The Deep Way, 2021; A Sure Thing, 2021.
    picks December 04, 2021

    Amanda Valdez

    Amanda Valdez’s new works here—abstract canvases that incorporate paint, embroidery, sourced fabrics, and handwoven or hand-dyed textiles—recall the coastal sea stacks in the Pacific Northwest, where the artist grew up. Geomorphic shapes rise from the bottom edge of each picture but scarcely touch the surrounding borders. Some of these masses contain imagery of hills and fields, as in Autumn Flight and Dusk Remembrance, both 2021. Others are more biomorphic, including Sugar Bowl 2 and 4, both 2021—each one resembles a crotch and thighs in contrapposto.

    Two larger works take a different tack:

  • View of “Em Kettner: Slow Poke,” 2021.
    picks July 13, 2021

    Em Kettner

    One is instantly charmed, disarmed, and utterly moved upon encountering Em Kettner’s diminutive ceramic figures. The viewer initially looks down on her doll-like sculptures because they inhabit a subtly carved white-ash platform, which rises just thirty-one inches off the ground. Be they at play, at rest, or having sex, Kettner’s zany and at times abject beings cannot be grasped from above; one must quickly get down to their level.

    Kettner weaves silk and cotton threads into intricately detailed textiles, which not only clothe the porcelain forms but hold them together. Out of nineteen characters,

  • Lavar Munroe, Virgin and Child, 2020, acrylic, spray paint, mousetraps, bubble gum, pearls, bath towel, and thread on canvas, 70 1/2 x 40 1/2".
    picks December 28, 2020

    Lavar Munroe

    Lavar Munroe’s first solo exhibition on the West Coast is a concise affair, comprised of just three paintings, though each one is large: roughly six feet tall and four feet wide. Made on unstretched canvases, they are intentionally raw, cut into with holes, layered with thick lumps of paint and haphazardly stapled canvas scraps, and glued with all manner of items, including mousetraps, beads, and plastic bags. The warm-weather attire worn by Munroe’s characters seems to locate his narratives in the Caribbean—albeit a fantastical version of it—where the artist grew up and still lives part-time.

  • Amir H. Fallah, The Animals of the World Exist for Their Own Reasons, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 66 x 96".
    picks October 02, 2020

    Amir H. Fallah

    Known for his maximalist, floral tableaux and portraits of people shrouded by richly patterned fabric and often surrounded by objects referencing their own histories, painter Amir H. Fallah presents a new body of work here that departs from his earlier style. The three large tondos in this exhibition are closest to his previous efforts because they repeat signature floral motifs. While still suffused with all manner of flowers and ornamentation, these have now been infiltrated by illustrations taken from children’s literature. The show itself is a kind of children’s book, each piece conceived

  • Srijon Chowdhury, Red Morning Glory, Red Knife, 2019, oil on linen, 24 x 18".
    picks November 07, 2019

    Srijon Chowdhury

    Life and death spiral around each other in “A Divine Dance," Srijon Chowdhury’s first exhibition at Anat Ebgi. Two sober, modestly scaled paintings represent life with particular frankness: Birth (all works 2019) documents Chowdhury’s child emerging from his girlfriend’s straining body, while in the dark and tender 3am, close inspection reveals a hand holding a bottle to an infant’s mouth. Similar subjects are given a different treatment elsewhere, as in A Divine Dance, which towers more than eleven feet high. Its physical edges are doubled by two hands whose elongated fingers meet at the top

  • View of iris yirei hu and ivan forde, 2019.
    picks October 07, 2019

    iris yirei hu and ivan forde

    At the center of iris yirei hu’s installation is a tapestry hanging from a Navajo loom atop clay shards that resemble dry earth mounded over a grave. The woven image is of a weaver, a picture hu pairs with a print of a woman weaving silk (the source image is a Chinese work found in the nineteenth century), which rests on the clay bed. Elsewhere in the gallery is hu’s rendition of an ancient diagram for the development of qi, a practice akin to weaving with life energy instead of with thread. On the wall are two large pictures of flowering yuccas (made in collaboration with Paula Wilson) that

  • Erin Trefry, spirits muse and envelop the torso with winged victory, 2017–19, stoneware, purse handles, fabric, drawer pulls, zip ties, 25 x 24 x 9".
    picks September 23, 2019

    Erin Trefry

    Erin Trefry kept her brushes heavily loaded to make the four large paintings on view in “If the Moon Turns Green,” her first solo presentation and the sixth exhibition at the new Lowell Ryan Projects in Los Angeles. Each canvas is dominated by a tangled armature delineated by thick ribbons of paint. In three of the paintings, the central form appears to be partly a complex architectural idea and partly some fantastical beast determined to lay waste to the nearest town. Shoelaces detail the edges of some shapes while ceramic shards are embedded in the thick impasto, lending a sedimentary quality

  • Suzanne Jackson, Moons in Double Copper Sea, 2017, acrylic, wood veneer, and detritus on paper, 35 1/2 x 45".
    picks February 25, 2019

    Suzanne Jackson

    History reverberates throughout this small exhibition of Suzanne Jackson’s recent work. Jackson was born in Saint Louis in 1944, and, in 1953, her family moved to Fairbanks, Alaska; in 1961, she began studying art and dance at San Francisco State University. The O-Town House gallery is on the second level of the Granada Buildings, just a few doors down from the erstwhile location of Gallery 32, which Jackson opened in the same building and ran from 1968­ to 1970. Having studied with Charles White at Otis Art Institute in the late 1960s, she took to heart his injunction that art be a vehicle for

  • Yevgeniya Baras, untitled, 2017, oil on burlap, 28 x 25".
    picks February 19, 2018

    Yevgeniya Baras

    Yevgeniya Baras’s abstract paintings embody a beauty we don’t see much of these days: scummy, grubby, and gnarled. She has a knack for using colors that are somewhere between merely unappealing and utterly revolting: mustards, moldy grays, dirty peach putty, and bilious greens. Against these she sets forms in black, white, lavender, bright blues and greens, fluorescent orange, gold, copper, and silver. The result is not exactly luminous, but she makes her hues ignite like flint against steel. Baras pulls off a similar trick with the physical construction of her works: She sometimes paints on

  • View of “Jessica Jackson Hutchins and Rebecca Morris: Secret Sister,” 2018.
    picks January 23, 2018

    Jessica Jackson Hutchins and Rebecca Morris

    This exhibition, displaying two of Rebecca Morris’s paintings and four of Jessica Jackson Hutchins’s sculptures, feels perfectly tuned. Morris’s signature forms, such as steps reminiscent of a household staircase or front stoop along with blotchy patterning suggesting bacteria or leopard print, are deployed for Untitled (#09-17) (all works 2017), a large canvas glowing in soft salmon pink. The imagery here feels more biomorphic than usual for the artist. Her use of gauzy edges, staining, and pale hues paired with blacks and grays causes the painting to move in and out of focus, a wondrous effect