Michael Ned Holte

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  print May 2006

  Chris Lipomi

  In his recent head-spinning exhibition at Daniel Hug Gallery, Chris Lipomi blanketed the walls, floor, and ceiling with work to create a fusion of floral shop, tribal arts museum, flea market, and “tropical” prop room—all stand-ins for the contemporary art gallery. Even the show’s nonsensical, Jabberwocky-like title, “Makawana Omawaki,” seemed to connote plenitude and exoticism. Incorporating a diverse array of sculptures, assemblages, and readymades, as well as paintings on canvas, walls, and mirrors, the show was the result of exactly one year’s worth of work, a period that concluded with a

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  print April 2006

  Alice Könitz

  In her 2004 exhibition at Susanne Vielmetter, Alice Könitz presented an absurdist video featuring four characters in an idyllic natural setting, all wearing geometric masks that looked at once primitive and fashionable. Such images represented a way for Könitz to begin negotiating the complex symbolic terrain between exteriority and interiority. In her latest show she continued to use formalism as a vehicle for moving from idiosyncratic concerns—recurring modular shapes, familiar low-budget materials, a limited palette now further refined to brown and metallic colors—toward an investigation

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  print March 2006

  Richard Artschwager

  The fourteen new paintings in Richard Artschwager’s recent exhibition at Gagosian Gallery hardly comprise a series or even suggest a cohesive totality. Rather, a number of overlapping connections held the show together as Artschwager recycled from his archival treasure trove, often redeploying materials and motifs as sly sight gags and perceptual bluffs. In several works, for example, the artist borrows objects from his 1974 “Door Window Table Basket Mirror Rug” series, relocating the drawings’ woven basket into a distorted and slightly creepy dungeonlike interior in Walking Man, and isolating

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  picks February 06, 2006

  Joe Zucker

  As if to show us the trippy fun we’ve been missing, Solo Projects is hosting Joe Zucker’s first one-person exhibition in Los Angeles. It’s a smart, chronological selection of ten increasingly busy works on paper from the 1970s—most created as studies for monster-size paintings incorporating signature shallow relief materials such as cotton and rhoplex. Zucker’s loopy drawings are half-baked but never absent-minded: A split second before the rollercoasting marker work edges any one of these apparent doodles toward collapse, a defiant image magically emerges from the fray, revealing itself

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  print February 2006

  Lecia Dole-Recio

  In her third solo exhibition at Richard Telles Fine Art—six new works, all Untitled, 2005—Lecia Dole-Recio has aggressively built upon the foundations she laid down four years ago at the same gallery. The smallest of them, about a foot square, is unquestionably the most straightforward of Dole-Recio’s works to date and served as the show’s cornerstone. A collage of relentless diagonal strips of red and black paper, which are slightly at odds with a canted grid of squares cut from and returned to the surface, it suggests the propulsive dynamism—and palette—of El Lissitzky’s “Prouns” but might

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  print January 2006

  Michael Wilkinson

  It’s not surprising that mirrors, as both pictorial subjects and actual objects, appeared frequently in the art of the 1960s, when many artists were staking their claims on the treacherous interzone between painting and sculpture. Roy Lichtenstein painted “mirrors” in graphic shorthand, while Robert Smithson, Dan Graham, and Art & Language, among others, employed the real thing to great and varied effect. Richard Artschwager approached the looking glass from both sides, so to speak, and no artist of the period used the mirror—with its unsparingly honest and insistent reflections, and the

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  print December 2005

  Marcel Broodthaers

  Between 1957 and his death in 1976, Marcel Broodthaers made approximately fifty films. The exact number is difficult to determine: Several no longer exist; some are multipart “programs” assembled from groups of short films (many appropriated from industrial or otherwise “authorless” sources); and others are subtle variations on previous works. A recent exhibition at pioneering curator and collector Thomas Solomon’s new gallery, Solo Projects, paired a 16-mm silent film, Un Voyage en Mer du Nord (A Voyage on the North Sea), 1973–74, with a thirty-eight-page, French-bound book that shares its

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  print November 2005

  Mark Grotjahn

  The “butterfly” has become to Mark Grotjahn what the target is to Kenneth Noland, the zip was to Barnett Newman, and the color white is to Robert Ryman. Of course Grotjahn is goofing on these and other classic motifs, but more important, he is using the immediately recognizable trademark as a means to interrogate the slippery nature of the artistic signature. Grotjahn’s abstracted geometric figure is suitably elusive. In fact, the more familiar it becomes, the more he refines its ability to surprise and, perhaps paradoxically, takes it further away from actual butterflyness.

  Grotjahn started

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  diary October 19, 2005

  Ninety-Nine Percent Perspiration

  Los Angeles

  My faithful photographer and I arrive ridiculously early at the opening reception for the group exhibition “Both Ends Burning.” The show, at David Kordansky Gallery, is a reunion of sorts for four Los Angeles-based artists—Amy Bessone, Thomas Houseago, Matthew Monahan, and Lara Schnitger—who all met, circa 1994, at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. This is the first local gallery exhibition for them (though Schnitger appeared in “Thing” at the Hammer earlier this year), and anticipation runs high. Walking into the densely installed gallery, I immediately sense the show’s confrontational tone,

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  picks October 04, 2005

  Anthony Caro

  Sir Anthony Caro has gradually emerged as the great anti-hero of 1960s sculpture. The popular historical nutshell places Caro at the end of a formal trajectory later derailed by minimalist revolt, despite the best efforts of anti-“literal” evangelist Michael Fried. Reality is more complex, of course, and sculptors such as Charles Ray have gained traction in synthesizing the Brit with, say, Donald Judd. Rarely seen in Los Angeles despite enormous local fervor for formal sculpture, Caro suddenly appears in two complementary gallery exhibitions. Daniel Weinberg features two works hovering between

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  print October 2005

  Liz Larner

  In her first exhibition on home turf since a 2001 retrospective at LA MoCA, and her first solo show at Regen Projects since 1997/98, Liz Larner positioned herself as a dedicated, if sly, student of her own sculptural genealogy and a vital force in the emergence of Los Angeles as an epicenter of sculptural innovation. Compared to the retrospective’s centerpiece, Untitled, 2001, a massive fractal sphere finished in iridescent green-purple automotive paint, Larner’s new work feels rougher around the edges, and better for it.

  Occupying the corner opposite the gallery entrance, Diamond Deserts,

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  picks September 12, 2005

  Carter Mull

  For two years Drew Heitzler and Flora Wiegmann have been operating as Champion Fine Art, providing fellow artists a venue in which to curate exhibitions outside of the commercial vortex. Flying largely under the radar—first in Brooklyn, now in Los Angeles—the exhibitions have been as diverse as the artists composing the checklists, and exhibition #2 (counting down from #21 toward planned obsolescence) is no exception. Curated by New York painter Michael Zahn, Carter Mull’s large scale, site-specific photograph State of Shifting Mirrors, 2005, is the first monographic exhibition presented