print September 2020

Sharif Farrag

For his first show at François Ghebaly, in late 2019, Sharif Farrag debuted pots sprouting arms and gargantuan, technically improbable vases cleaved to expose orifices. Overall, their anthropomorphism was unapologetically libertine, their sensibility underscored by glistening coats of lavish glaze: Sometimes it dripped down the clay contours as an independent, physicalized entity; at others it became nearly selfsame with the forms. Six months later, Farrag presented new porcelain and stoneware works, one of which he made in quarantine, alongside related works on paper. (The drawing Signal Hill

print May/June 2020

Claire Tabouret

Where some of Claire Tabouret’s older paintings represented groups (of debutantes as well as refugees) and couples (pairs of lovers, wrestling children), those hanging in her second show at Night Gallery mostly framed a single sitter in her signature loose, assertive strokes. With captivating immediacy, these works apprehend the mutability of expression as it plays across a face, registering pursed lips and shafts of light animating a cheek just so. “The Pull of the Sun” consisted of so many profiles of the artist’s partner and friends, who seemed to pivot, instinctually, to the source of

print April 2020

Helène Aylon

In 2012, Helène Aylon published Whatever Is Contained Must Be Released: My Jewish Orthodox Girlhood, My Life as a Feminist Artist, which gives some indication of both where her life started (she was born in 1931, raised within the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community of Borough Park in Brooklyn, and later married to and widowed from a rabbi) and where she has ended up. In between, Aylon produced significant series, process-oriented material abstractions that gave way to, among other things, large and fiercely accusatory installations stemming from her antinuclear protests. As was true last year in

print March 2020

Sylvia Fein

Born in 1919 in Milwaukee and engaged early on with a circle of artists associated with the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Sylvia Fein moved to California in the late 1940s after a yearslong stay in Mexico and received her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1951. She has long since been based in and associated with the East Bay (where she still resides, in Martinez, cultivating an orchard of olive trees that appears in some of her paintings). Yet her work has willfully eluded such paradigms as Abstract Expressionism or, closer to home, Bay Area Figuration. Instead, her

print February 2020

Christine Frerichs

Christine Frerichs’s “interior portraits” are diminutive, closely observed paintings on paper that frame her home and studio, sites of domesticity and labor. They are much smaller than the canvases on which she has often worked, whose larger scales summon landscapes and climates as well as emotions. Indeed, she began making the pieces shown here under the exhibition title “Viewfinder” in 2018 as interim compositions of light and mood, adjacent to the other work; they are now a project of their own, an ongoing chronicle of place and a mnemonic device for the things—often exterior—that come to be

print January 2020

Kevin McNamee-Tweed

For his solo debut in Los Angeles, the Iowa City–based artist Kevin McNamee-Tweed clustered dozens of objects—many small enough to hold in your palm, and all solicitous of visual if not tactile intimacy—into wall-mounted vignettes. Shelflike relief sculptures made of found wood braced diminutive glazed ceramics. Alongside these altar-like installations were carefully considered arrangements of his earthenware paintings (flat panels the size of a book or a tablet), acrylics on muslin with bilateral symmetry (hence their designation as the “Butterfly Series,” 2019–), drawings, and ephemera. Despite

picks December 06, 2019

Franklin Williams

Franklin Williams recently retired from the California College of the Arts, where he taught for more than half a century and earned the honorific in this exhibition's title: “The Inimitable Professor Emeritus.” The ten fantastic paintings on view are collaged with past work and family mementos (sea shells and a Welsh love spoon among them); dotted with acrylic and so many swarming, glistening beads; laced with cherry-red yarn; and visually pieced together with tight sutures that become dimensional fringe-like extrusions. Several were completed after his tenure at CCA, and they evince his having

diary December 02, 2019

High Water

THE RAINS WERE BIBLICAL, justifiably accusatory. In a remarkable occurrence, the lagoon overtook most of the city, flooding the chamber on the Grand Canal where Veneto’s right-wing regional council had, minutes before, just rejected measures to fund renewable energy sources and minimize plastic use, among other climate-change proposals. Images of waterbuses beached near a drowned Saint Mark’s Square made the rounds, with some vessels conspicuously bearing bubblegum-pink ads for the fifty-eighth edition of the Venice Biennale: “May You Live in Interesting Times.” The Peggy Guggenheim Collection

print December 2019

Allison Miller

The six paintings in Allison Miller’s “C A P R R I U S,” her second solo outing at the Pit, preserve certain elements of her earlier work, spindly tracery and webs chief among them. Drips, black on black and goopy in the upper-left corner of Sister (Gemini) and in the upper right of Sister (Capricorn) (all works 2019), are a hallmark. So are arrows: Two, registered in thin black contours and ending in sharp tips, hold together the overlapping rectangular color blocks of Curl Arch like looping seams or the rings of a spiral notebook. Others—such as those that fill the round cartoon thought bubble

picks October 14, 2019

Jacinto Astiazarán and Veli-Matti Hoikka

The Queens program template involves a larger show accompanied by a modest presentation in a flat file set into a gallery wall. This fall, Jacinto Astiazarán’s Red Saturn, or Images of a gratification that would dissolve the society which suppresses it, 2019, a two-channel video, holds the main space, cycling through cosmic and cellular imagery, pictures of homegrown tomatoes and emergent life, scenes of the Los Angeles sky fading into flashes of color with a propulsive force. It literally casts its light across the blacked-out space, edging toward the files.

There, each of the five wide and

print October 2019

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon

In the span of a year, San Francisco–based designer and writer Barbara Stauffacher Solomon unveiled a new mural commissioned by the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and was the subject of a solo presentation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Another large show, appropriately titled “Breaking All the Rules,” opens at the Palm Springs Art Museum Architecture and Design Center in California this month. Solomon was born in 1928, and her current West Coast visibility represents a recognition of her years of practice, the context of which is now being

previews September 2019

“THEASTER GATES: ASSEMBLY HALL”

Curated by Victoria Sung

For his most significant US exhibition to date, Theaster Gates promises to transform the Walker galleries into a sprawling, monumental Gesamtkunstwerk: an immersive aggregation of objects that Gates gathered over the past decade through his work with his Dorchester Projects, 2009–, in Chicago. Fifteen thousand books, periodicals, items of furniture, and other ephemera from the Johnson Publishing Company Archives & Collections join some sixty thousand slides of art and architectural history from the University of Chicago collection of glass lantern slides, as well as a

Suzanne Hudson