Suzanne Hudson

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  print March 2019

  Vanessa Maltese

  For a 2016 show at Cooper Cole in her native Toronto, Vanessa Maltese referenced the story of Zeuxis, painter of grapes so luscious that birds were wont to peck at them. At Night Gallery, for her first solo show in Los Angeles, she continued the theme with Duped by the grapes (all works 2018), a wryly fragmented scene that exuberantly plays up the fruit’s fictive status. As in the other six flatly graphic geometric oil paintings on view that evoked the bright, interlocking compositions of Memphis design, she employed trompe l’oeil drop shadows and visual cues for recession (space in her work is

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  print February 2019

  Sara Gernsbacher

  Last spring, Sara Gernsbacher showed hanging sculptures of silicone, acrylic, and canvas at the Franklin Parrasch Gallery in New York. In her home base of Los Angeles, she offered a new group of the slippery-looking cutouts, which appear to be remnants imbued with purpose through lavish care. This set was colored with pigments and spray paint and set into interlocking plaited or abutted configurations. The represented shapes—including cavities (plugged with black silicone or open to the supporting wall); petals; and spindly, rodlike sticks—felt elemental, ever malleable, even as they were fixed

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  print December 2018

  “3D: Double Vision”

  The mechanics of binocular vision—the method by which a single three-dimensional image emerges from the brain’s synthesis of two perceiving eyes—subtend human perception. In the 1830s, the process was, in effect, operationalized with the invention of the stereoscope, in which technological means were employed to harness biology in the service of illusionism (within the same decade, Louis Daguerre’s camera likewise debuted). “3D: Double Vision” is apparently the first survey of this nearly two-hundred-year history of 3-D objects and their apparatuses to be shown in a North American art

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  print November 2018

  Jay DeFeo

  Despite having had a full-dress retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2013, Jay DeFeo is still best known for a single work, The Rose, 1958–66, on which she labored in a monumental and duly mythologized process, regularly applying pigment and scraping it off, carving a ground that had long since thickened into a sculptural relief. Measuring approximately ten feet by eight feet and weighing nearly a ton, the behemoth was finally extracted from her apartment via forklift, an outside wall sliced open for the occasion. If this remained one’s image of DeFeo, the smaller

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  slant October 31, 2018

  On the Ground: Pittsburgh

  PITTSBURGH IS A CITY OF THREE RIVERS and many more bridges, the latter cutting across steeply rising banks verdant and overgrown from a year of record rainfall. In many ways this is still Andrew Carnegie’s Appalachia, with the Carnegie International—this year sited exclusively in the institution if not the actual building that he opened in 1895—an emphatically historical bequest. Ingrid Schaffner, a Pittsburgh native, suggested as much in her opening remarks to the fifty-seventh edition, which she helmed, calling the show “august” and everywhere relating it to its place of becoming.

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  print October 2018

  James Turrell

  It was in Los Angeles that James Turrell first recognized the kinds of perceptual acuity possible in smoggy, irradiated air. His first light projects—experiments with incandescence filtering through jerry-rigged apertures in his Santa Monica studio in 1966—were harbingers of his subsequent tests of the fugitive, natural environment in increasingly architectural terms. His long-standing embrace by the city is understandable, but his apotheosis will unfold elsewhere: in an extinct volcano in the Painted Desert northeast of Flagstaff, Arizona, for the forty-year project of Roden Crater,

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  print September 2018

  Susan Cianciolo

  “RUN 12: God is a Jacket” was Susan Cianciolo’s first exhibition in Los Angeles since her 2016 survey of works from the 1990s to the then present at 356 S. Mission Rd. There, her kits—Fluxus-inspired cardboard boxes packed with handmade clothing and ephemera—featured prominently. Here, Cianciolo offered another means of retrospection in framing the show through RUN, the label she managed between 1995 and 2001. A willfully inefficient production system, predicated on improvisatory and seemingly ludic collaborations involving friends and family members with varying technical skills, it yielded

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  previews September 2018

  AMY SILLMAN

  Long-admired stateside for her deft, often euphoric take on the vivid and irrevocably desublimated legacy of the New York School, Amy Sillman is being given free rein over all three gallery spaces at Camden Arts Centre for her first institutional exhibition in the United Kingdom. This show—gathering a career-spanning selection of her defiantly feminist paintings, gestural drawings, digital and silk-screen prints, video animations, and incisive, gallows-humor-ridden publications—will feature thirty new works on canvas as well as a zine created especially for the CAC, which

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  print Summer 2018

  Alison Saar

  For Alison Saar’s most recent show at L.A. Louver, “Topsy Turvy,” she took as her muse the character of Topsy from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, recasting the slave girl of the Civil War–era novel as a figure for our time. The “wooly hair . . . braided in sundry little tails” remained, but here became an emblem of implacable defiance. In ten new sculptures and six related paintings on variegated supports pieced together from indigo-dyed seed sacks, vintage linens, denim, and one found trunk, Saar rendered Topsy with dark and sometimes patinated skin (the sculptures comprise admixtures

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  print May 2018

  “Public Fiction: The Conscientious Objector”

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  previews May 2018

  “Ellen Gallagher: Nu-Nile”

  For more than two decades, Ellen Gallagher has navigated the fluid geographies of realms both imagined and terrifically real. This exhibition, her Canadian debut, encompasses drawings (from earlier works featuring midcentury glamour shots peddling pomade to new creations populated with coral spawn and seagrass) and paintings, including selections from her recent “Sea Bed” canvases, conjuring the Middle Passage and the wide, watery grave across which slave ships ferried human cargo. Films will also be on view, chief among them her and Edgar Cleijne’s

• previews May 2018

  Mary Corse

  Given Mary Corse’s consistent, multi-decade creative output, this museum survey, the artist’s first, is “long overdue”—really a tired euphemism for the consequences of exclusionary gender politics (and a belated apotheosis of art from the Southland, and not just, though especially, for women). The exhibition promises to assemble exemplars from her early shaped canvases, freestanding sculptures, and light encasements made with Tesla-coil-based generators of Corse’s own design, as well as of the nontechnological but still perceptually fugitive White Light paintings, begun

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  print April 2018

  Vija Celmins

  Vija Celmins’s show at Matthew Marks Gallery was her first exhibition of new work in Los Angeles in more than forty years. It represented a kind of homecoming for an artist once closely identified with the University of California, Los Angeles, and the beaches of Venice, which she perennially alludes to in her transcriptions of water into the surface tension of untitled, placeless waves. All eighteen of the paintings, sculptures, and works on paper in the show were made in the past decade, and seven of them were also shown at the New York gallery last spring for her first presentation of new

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  print March 2018

  Frederick Hammersley

  Frederick Hammersley epitomizes hard-edge midcentury Los Angeles painting, his reputation having been established in Jules Langsner’s legendary 1959 show “Four Abstract Classicists.” Hammersley lived in LA until 1968, when he moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. The following year he learned Art1, a new computer program written for artists by Katherine Nash and Richard Williams at the University of New Mexico. Hammersley used the program—entering designs in early IBM computers via punch cards—to make what he dubbed “computer drawings,” which were realized with line printers. Often consisting

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  print February 2018

  Shana Lutker

  On a low, mirrored tabletop reflecting the ceiling, Shana Lutker set out more than three hundred leather gloves that, despite their superficial anonymity, constitute something like a group portrait. Each glove in a.k.a. Public Opinion (all works 2017)—the fifth installment of her ongoing series “Le ‘NEW’ Monocle: The History of the Fistfights of the Surrealists,” begun in 2012—represents, in a winking metonymic sleight, a Los Angeles–based artist. The contributors sent Lutker a tracing of their nondominant hands, and Lutker then transformed the drawings’ contours into oversize gloves

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  print January 2018

  Ruth Root

  In a press release for a 2008 show at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York that transcended the largely gratuitous genre, Ruth Root offered a page of source images absent of any explanative text. She instead arranged thumbnails in gridded rows, their tidiness belying a capaciousness of interest, showing beachy toilet-encircling bath mats and forlorn-looking ski socks interspersed with exemplary works by Josef Albers, Lygia Clark, and Blinky Palermo, among others. All added up to her eccentrically shaped paintings: wafer-thin enamel-on-aluminum compositions of shifting color planes within extruding

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  previews January 2018

  “Kiki Smith: Procession”

  The first major European survey of the German-born artist’s oeuvre, this show promises a capacious and medium-traversing exhibition spanning three decades of work in sculpture, drawing, etching, lithography, bookmaking, photography, and video. Illuminating Smith’s trajectory from her emergence amid the aids crisis to her more recent sympathy for nature, narrative, and myth in the contemporary world, the selection of works frames Smith’s deft evocation of the necessarily transitory experience of the somatic through material means: bronze and plaster, glass and beeswax.

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  slant December 14, 2017

  On the Ground: Saskatoon

  THE REMAI MODERN opened on October 21 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. A city of 250,000 founded as a dry temperance colony, supported by stores of potash and oil, and frequented by hobby hunters dispersing into the great Canadian prairies, Saskatoon would seem an unlikely place for a 130,000-square-foot beacon to modern and contemporary art. While a precirculated press release notes that its “launch aligns with the international trend of world-class museums opening in unexpected destinations”—boilerplate become gospel in the first weekend’s official ceremonies—there is much that such an

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  print December 2017

  George Egerton-Warburton

  For “The weapon soup boils over, as stocks in metaphors plummet,” George Egerton-Warburton’s first solo show in Los Angeles, the Australian artist showed three kinetic sculptures—Sisyphean motors powering nothing—and a suite of photographs from 2017. He pasted text on each of the images and ensconced the collages in crudely assembled shadow boxes, into which he deposited desiccated California soil. The photos comprise groupings of bucolic sheep, mobs grazing in the landscape of remote Western Australia. Taken in 2013 by Egerton-Warburton’s father on his farm upon the artist’s request,

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  print October 2017

  Helen Pashgian and Brian Wills

  A two-person show of Helen Pashgian and Brian Wills, “Transient” modeled the visual volatility characteristic of many 1960s Southland art practices. Despite its moorings in a Los Angeles vernacular of Light and Space—that likewise conjures a very specific horizon of military and commercial development and the coincident artistic appropriation of such technologies—this occasion eschewed historical specificity in favor of a formal, phenomenological dilation of temporality licensed by the same origins. (The press release casts “light” as atemporal, “as old as the universe itself,” and