Suzanne Hudson

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  print December 2022

  Beatrice Wood

  Beatrice Wood died in 1998 at the age of 105. Her life was fantastic, if implausible in the details that made it so, seemingly even to her (she titled her 1985 autobiography I Shock Myself). While she was dubbed the Mama of Dada for her involvement with Henri-Pierre Roché and Marcel Duchamp—with whom she formed the Society of Independent Artists and published the journal The Blind Man—it was nevertheless the ceramics she made beginning in the 1930s, after moving to Los Angeles in 1926, that have been the subject of more recent recuperation. Featuring iridescent puckered lusterware skins, these

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  print October 2022

  “The Sum of the Parts: Dimensions in Quilting”

  This year marks the twentieth anniversary of “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” an epic exhibition that opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and traveled for four years. The show helped to reframe its titular objects—made exclusively by Black women in rural Alabama—as modernist artworks. Writing about the presentation when it was on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art for the New York Times, Michael Kimmelman was palpably enthused, finding in the quilts’ ingenious geometries “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced,” noting the formal apposition of the designs

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  print Summer 2022

  Victoria Gitman

  The press release for Victoria Gitman’s master class of a retrospective “Everything Is Surface: Twenty Years of Painting” shares that the show owed its title to a line from John Ashbery’s 1974 poem, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Ashbery’s text is also an homage—the title was borrowed from a sixteenth-century tondo painted by Italian Mannerist Parmigianino, an image the poet first encountered in reproduction. Parmigianino’s work is remarkable for how he depicted himself: His reflection is distorted by the curvature of the titular looking glass, but the panel on which the image was created

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  print May 2022

  Jordan Nassar

  For his Los Angeles debut at Anat Ebgi in 2017, Jordan Nassar presented a selection of small cotton-on-canvas panels featuring silhouetted embroidered images of swelling, often mountainous terrain. Each thread painting offered a complex and surprisingly tender evocation of a landscape receding into pictorial space, seemingly predicated on a structuring of distance: These environments were simultaneously close but inaccessible, formal yet geopolitical. Much of this effect stemmed from Nassar’s use of Palestinian tatreez embroidery, a form of traditional hand stitching used by women to decorate

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  print April 2022

  CLOSE-UP: WITHIN LIMITS

  A DECADE AGO, painter Cameron Martin abandoned full-bleed compositions and the “inherent illusionism” (as he explained it at the time) of motifs that spread edge to edge across the support. He began to bracket selected details of his source images—natural environments appropriated from found photos and his own snapshots—within increasingly emphatic framing devices. The paintings remain recognizable as landscapes, if mediated by redoubled borders and geometric overlays. Their blanched geographies, rendered in gray scale, are cropped, as if to emphasize the genre’s ever-encroaching gaze, its wanton

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  print March 2022

  Sylvia Snowden

  “Sylvia Snowden: Select Works, 1966–2020” was the eighty-year-old artist’s first show at Parrasch Heijnen gallery in Los Angeles. Making up for lost time, this historical (but not chronological) survey of expressively rendered canvases with thickly encrusted surfaces—the paint troweled and visibly mixed in the act of conjuring bodies from the obdurate material—was a contrast to the more focused “Sylvia Snowden: The M Street Series, 1982–1988,” which was concurrently on display for her debut presentation at New York’s Franklin Parrasch Gallery. The latter’s tight grouping featured portrayals of

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  print February 2022

  Francesco Clemente

  “Twenty Years of Painting: 2001–2021” was the first show of Francesco Clemente’s work in Los Angeles in almost two decades. (The artist’s last outing, an elegiac 2003 Gagosian presentation that spanned New York and LA, offered a selection of then-recent works that conspicuously absented the human figure—a resonant meditation on loss.) Here, in a decommissioned and vacated Depression-era post office in Santa Monica, thirty pieces were spread across some fifteen thousand square feet of exhibition space. The spare Moderne interior, all rose marble and stained wood, supplied a surprisingly pitch-perfect

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  print December 2021

  Lee Bontecou

  Although Lee Bontecou remains better known for her sculptures—such as the bulbous, seamed, and multipaneled wall reliefs organized around a central cavity, or the chitinous insectoid objects that hang from ceilings—her career-spanning works on paper have generated due attention in the past few years, most notably in the 2014 exhibition “Lee Bontecou: Drawn Worlds” at Houston’s Menil Collection, curated by Michelle White. The Menil show spanned fifty years and presented drawings done in soot—a welding-torch by-product the artist discovered while on a Fulbright Fellowship in Rome in 1957 and used

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  print November 2021

  Susan Silton

  “We,” Susan Silton’s first solo show with Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, featured a suite of sixteen photographic prints of the Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve in Northern California. Each black-and-white work presents two nearly identical views of coastal redwoods, resolutely earthbound trunks emerging from the grassy floor. Silton shot them on her iPhone; vantages capture clearings and the receding spaces of deep, dense groves that eschew the aperture of sky. She subjected the snaps to Apple filters (more limited than what is currently available, because she made the images between 2014

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  print October 2021

  HIGHER GROUND

  IN 1981, Jay DeFeo was newly ensconced in a loft in Oakland, California, her largest work space in sixteen years. Her last had been the flat she shared with then-partner Wally Hedrick from 1955 to 1965. It was there, at 2322 Fillmore Street in San Francisco—amid a circle that hosted Robert Duncan and Jack Kerouac at the Six Gallery and showed at Dilexi (where Dorothy Miller, of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, encountered DeFeo’s work and curated it into the 1959 exhibition “Sixteen Americans”)—that she strove for eight years on The Rose, 1958–66, the one-ton, nearly eleven-foot-tall canvas with

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  print September 2021

  Star Montana

  Over the past few years, Star Montana has framed presentations of her photographs as chapters, arranging them into tightly conceived groupings that reveal something of the lives of her neighbors in East Los Angeles and chronicle the experiences of Montana’s family among them (most profoundly in a series exhibited at the Vincent Price Art Museum in Los Angeles in 2016 and revolving around the untimely death of the artist’s mother). Montana stays close to her subjects, and there is a mutuality of recognition. She images vulnerability in a way that remains resolutely personal even as she insists

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  print May 2021

  Emma McIntyre

  For the inaugural show at Chris Sharp’s new, eponymous gallery, Emma McIntyre presented a lush, terrifically vital suite of abstract paintings that evoke the seasons and their elemental atmospheres. Made with oils that she brought to California when she moved there from New Zealand last year, they represent a continuity of palette—especially in those acid brights that glow from within, as well as in the more punctual interference of small fluorescent-orange polka-dot floaters (sunspots?) that commingle with dusty polluted violet-tinged grays and an assortment of pinkish browns. The works also