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

print Summer 2019

Sam Gilliam

“Starting: Works on Paper 1967–1970” was a rare chance to see sixteen of Sam Gilliam’s early, never-before-exhibited works, shown alongside a typeset poem, ca. 1965. Each piece was small in size and expansive in metaphoric scale. The palette ranged from deep and muddy in the 1967 “Rock Creek” series to full-on electric in others. Untitled, 1968, seemed to figure an aurora borealis in an already Technicolor sky, its expansiveness belied by the modest physical dimensions of the vertical page. The overlapping splatters of blue, brown, and yellow in “Rock Creek,” especially in Untitled, 1967, were

picks May 24, 2019

June Edmonds

Jasper Johns famously attributed the origin of his iconic painting of the American flag to a vision he had at night; likewise, June Edmonds arrived at her first stroke-by-stroke reconstitution of a flag through a dream she had in 2017, after she returned to her home town of Los Angeles from a residency in Paducah, Kentucky. In her case, though, it wasn't about the same stars and stripes; during her residency, while driving to Memphis, she had seen a wall-size Confederate flag—a looming, unapologetic beacon still standing on the Southern hillside—to which she later responded in a series of

print May 2019

Nancy Shaver and Emi Winter

“Gathering texture, following shape” featured Nancy Shaver’s sculptures and Emi Winter’s woven rugs and paintings. While the works’ vocabularies did not always rhyme, their joint installation set up a visual call-and-response that made itself at home in the many rooms of the Parker Gallery, located in a house. Both artists also share a sympathy for what Shaver has called “collective history,” perhaps more broadly understood as the lives and works of others, and the circumstances of their coming together.

One especially eloquent room contained Shaver’s sandbox-like Blue Pool, 2018, a horizontal

passages April 2019

ROBERT RYMAN

I MET ROBERT RYMAN IN 2003, when I was a graduate student seeking out the would-be subject of my nascent dissertation. I had been curious, mostly, about the man whose ostensibly minimal paintings had already irrevocably altered my understanding of the medium. I was shocked to discover my West Village apartment was only a few blocks north of his studio, which was located in a tall, skinny building next to a then-empty parcel that I had long walked past without really noticing it. When I rang the buzzer, Bob appeared, bespectacled and well-groomed, framed through the window grille. I was a nervous

print April 2019

Gary Hume

Spread across the Matthew Marks Gallery’s two locations in this city, Gary Hume’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in more than twenty-five years revealed the tenacity of certain long-standing concerns and the emergence of others. Among the eight recent paintings (enamel on aluminum or paper) and three painted-steel sculptures on view, a giant trompe l’oeil of vertical boards crisscrossed with super-glossy white x’s suggested the flattening of a barn’s side and the sliding plane of its door. Titled U.S.A., 2018, it recalled Hume’s other portals, the big rectangular slabs of the “Door”

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

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

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

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

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.

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,

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

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

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

print May 2018

“Public Fiction: The Conscientious Objector”

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

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

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

Suzanne Hudson