Lyra Kilston

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  picks April 13, 2011

  R. B. Kitaj

  For much of the first half of the twentieth century, a stretch of Fourth Avenue in Manhattan known as “book row” was considered by some to be the greatest book street in the country. Several blocks teemed with labyrinthine rare and used book shops and their attendant ilk of bibliophiles. R. B. Kitaj was one of the latter. His self-professed bibliomania led to the portfolio titled In Our Time: Covers for a Small Library After the Life for the Most Part, 1969, for which photographs of the covers of fifty books from his library were enlarged into screenprints, forming a winsome index of idiosyncratic

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  picks January 20, 2011

  “Los Angeles Museum of Ceramic Art”

  Perhaps a glut of cold Conceptual “strategies” in art, and virtuality in the digital world, has left us hungry for matter—for texture, grit, and mud. Whatever the root, ceramics has looked especially appealing lately, with its lean toward tactility and accidents. “Los Angeles Museum of Ceramic Art,” organized by artists Roger Herman and Monique Van Genderen, is titled in jest, since no such museum exists. But this exhibit, which features 150 works by twenty-four Los Angeles–based artists, offers such a marvelously varied range of approaches to clay—as painting, vessel, totem, tile, or frieze—that

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  picks September 27, 2010

  Deborah Aschheim

  The sketchy drawing Chandler No. 2 (Mom in Front of Buildings You Can’t See Anymore, Los Angeles, 1968), 2010, depicts a woman on a city sidewalk wearing sunglasses, the curve of a pale midcentury building arcing behind her. The title makes you look twice, ushering in an air of obsolescence that haunts many of the nearly four dozen ink on Dura-Lar drawings by the Los Angeles–based artist Deborah Aschheim in her latest exhibition, “Nostalgia for the Future.” Made between 2009 and 2010, the works in this show pay homage to the futuristic symbolism and ironic, but inescapable, aging (or destruction)

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  picks June 14, 2010

  Andrew Lord

  Andrew Lord first gained attention in the late 1970s for ceramic vessels that looked like they had been plucked from Cubist still lifes. While he has since moved on to other thematic pursuits, the uncannily rendered household or decorative clay object remains his most common and compelling subject. This exhibition surveys the past two decades of Lord’s work, presenting five series that comprise nearly thirty sculptures on pedestals and one video. For Breathing, biting, swallowing, tasting, smelling, listening, watching, 1994–2000, Lord molded vase-, cup-, and pitcherlike vessels with the parts