Nate Lowman Presents "Never Remember" @ Gagosian In New York

Never Remember—the exhibition title a biting reversal of the slogan “Never forget”—takes place in the very gallery where Jasper Johns’s map paintings were shown thirty years before. Lowman’s Maps expand on his own shaped canvases begun in the early 2000s, depicting doodled hearts, trompe l’oeil decals of bullet holes, and air freshener trees. 

Lowman’s Maps infuse the geometries of the United States with a gritty, gestural tactility, combining chance and intention in the generative possibilities of a single form. With sharp political skepticism, Lowman employs abstraction to point to the arbitrariness of borders and the limitations of jingoism, thus expounding on the complexities and contradictions of the American way. Never Remember is on view through December 15 at Gagosian 980 Madison Avenue, New York. photographs courtesy Gagosian

Martin Parr's "Beach Therapy": A Solo Exhibition & Monograph @ Spazio Damiani In Bologna

Beach Therapy is the first solo exhibition in Italy based on the series of the same name by British photographer Martin Parr. During his long career as a photographer, Parr has always photographed on beaches, particularly in the UK. He has often used the beach as a laboratory to experiment with new cameras and techniques. So, for example, when he changed from black and white to medium-format colour in the early 1980s, his first major project was about New Brighton, a run-down seaside resort near Liverpool. In recent months, he has started exploring the beach with the aid of a telephoto lens. This lens is rarely used in the world of art and documentary photography so it is a challenge to find new ways of using it. Often, this involves incorporating the vegetation on the perimeter of the beach as a backdrop, both in and out of focus. Over his long career he has thus tried everything from a close-up macro lens, a medium-format wide-angled camera and, finally, this latest offering with the telephoto.

On the occasion of the exhibition, a major monograph entitled Beach Therapy was published by Damiani. The book is also available in a special Collector’s Edition of 90 copies that includes the book and a pigment print entitled St Ives, Cornwall, England, 2017 each numbered and signed by the artist. In addition, there is also an even more special Collector’s Edition of 20 copies. It comes with a fabric cover and 5 prints signed and numbered by the artist. After Think of Scotland, Beach Therapy is the second monograph by Martin Parr published by Damiani.

Beach Therapy is on view through February 8, 2019 at Spazio Damiani, Via dello Scalo 3/2 ABC 40131, Bologna. photographs courtesy Spazio Damiani

Nina Chanel Abney's "Royal Flush" @ ICALA

Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush is the first solo museum exhibition of Chicago-born Nina Chanel Abney (b. 1982), and a ten-year survey of the artist’s paintings, watercolors, and collages. Abney is at the forefront of a generation of artists that is unapologetically revitalizing narrative figurative painting, and as a skillful story-teller, she visually articulates the complex social dynamics of contemporary urban life. By engaging loaded topics and controversial issues with irreverence, humor, and lampooning satire, Abney’s works are both pointed contemporary genre scenes as well as scathing commentaries on social attitudes and inequities. Royal Flush will be on view through January 20, 2019 at ICALA 1717 E 7th St, Los Angeles. Photographs by Oliver Kupper

The Sexy Beast Gala Benefit For Planned Parenthood LA At The Marciano Art Foundation In Los Angeles

Sexy Beast for Planned Parenthood Los Angeles is the shared vision of a group of influencers in the arts, united by a mission to harness the goodwill and powerful connections of the creative community to effect positive change, touch lives, and create a meaningful social impact. They believe we should all have access to safe, caring, and affordable healthcare services. During these challenging times for Planned Parenthood, it's more important than ever that the organization has our support, so it can remain focused on the vital care it provides. Since its founding in 2014, the Sexy Beast art auction and gala has raised nearly one million dollars for Planned Parenthood Los Angeles across two milestone events. This year, they raised almost one million dollars in one night alone, bringing Sexy Beast back for an unmissable evening of art, food, music and culture. photographs by Oliver Kupper

Blessing Ngobeni: A Note From Error @ Everard Read In London

A Note From Error is a solo exhibition by Johannesburg based artist Blessing Ngobeni. Fuelled by the social injustices of post-Apartheid South Africa, Ngobeni joins a distinguished lineage of artists who dare to critique the status quo. His work is said to “borrow from the language of Surrealism, the anarchy of Dada and the figurative violence of Neo-Expressionism.” The exhibition is on view through November 10 at Everard Read 80 Fulham Road, London. photographs courtesy of Everard Read London

Zoe Crosher's "Sunlight as Spotlight" Opens @ Patrick Painter In Los Angeles

Zoe Crosher, enamored by Los Angeles, has an obsession that began during her time receiving her MFA from CalArts. Here, she has reimagined her “Day for Night” photographic works. In “Day for Night,” Crosher uses a photography technique used during the Film Noir days of Hollywood, by shooting images in such a way that they look like they were taken at night. She documents the disappearance of the Los Angeles River, using the sunlight to spotlight the image in frame. For this show, she has taken that process a step further and made light boxes out of the photographs, further emulating the film-like aspect by placing light behind the image, creating, in essence, a single-shot movie. Sunlight as Spotlight is on view through November 24 at Patrick Painter B2, 4031, 2525 Michigan Avenue, Santa Monica.

The 2018 FIAC - International Fair Of Contemporary Art - Opens In Paris

The 45th edition of FIAC takes place in Paris from October 18 to 21, 2018 and will host 195 galleries at the Grand Palais. The selection is a composition of modern art galleries, contemporary and design among the most emblematic of the scene internationale and presents the best of artistic creation since the modern masters of the early twentieth century to emerging trends, notably represented by the Lafayette sector. photographs courtesy of FIAC

Preview of Secret Gay Box Curated by John Wolf at the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles

John Wolf Fine Art presents Secret Gay Box with Tom of Finland Foundation. Wolf was raised in an Evangelical Christian home where Homosexuality was viewed as a sin and flaw, and consequently as a child he kept a secret box from his parents. The ability to have a private world, and to collect, is ultimately what led Wolf to art world. Secret Gay Box features over fifteen artists who have navigated their sexuality through artistic expression. Like Wolf’s childhood box, this space will be one where art hides in plain sight, even where people might not think to look. The space itself as well as the artworks in it embrace the creativity that it can take to effectively conceal oneself, but also the beauty that can occur in freedom from whatever ‘box’ one might have. All humans have their own “secret gay box”, either conscious or subconscious. This show, the artists represented, and the act of creating a personal art collection are a way to simultaneously fill the box or open it for those around you. Secret Gay Box will be on view until November 17, 2018 at the Tom Of Finland Foundation, 1421 Laveta Terrace, Los Angeles, CA 90026. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Highlights From Frieze London 2018 @ Regent's Park

Frieze London 2018 showcased the best of international contemporary art, with a discerning selection of around 160 galleries presenting their most forward-thinking artists and imaginative presentations. This year’s themed gallery section, Social Work featured women artists who challenged the status quo and explored the possibilities of political activism in their art making during the 1980s and ‘90s, from Nancy Spero in the US to Berni Searle in South Africa to Ipek Duben in Turkey and Helen Chadwick in the UK. Solo, group and curated presentations across the fair’s sections featured John Baldessari, Michaël Borremans, Zadie Xa, Lubaina Himid, Mary Kelly, Moshekwa Langa, Calvin Marcus, Jim Shaw, David Shrigley, Josh Sperling, Tatiana Trouvé, Hardeep Pandhal, Athena Papadopoulos, Faith Ringgold, Wong Ping and Cathy Wilkes, among many others. photographs by Flo Khol

Claire Colette & Nassim Hantezadeh @ Ochi Projects In Los Angeles

Claire Colette’s Mountains, Time, and Other Devices is a solo exhibition featuring new paintings by the Los Angeles based artist. Mountains, Time, and Other Devices is an investigation into darkness, light, time, and mysticism. A series of quiet, abstract landscapes consider concepts of interconnectedness relating to land, the cosmos, and the self. Like the Transcendentalist painters of the 20th century, Colette links external and internal realities, and infuses her paintings with influences from tantric symbolism and elements referencing nature.

As I Travel is the title of Nassim Hantezadeh’s exhibition. “Since I moved back to the United States from Iran, making daily works on paper where I draw my everyday emotions and sentiments is a way to deal with the isolation and the alienation that the situation initiated to my body. Sometimes the outcome of those drawings is abstract and may prevent a read based on the semiology of the visual system that our eyes are educated with. Other times it is direct enough to make links to familiar forms, such as objects, body organs, and figures.” The exhibitions are on view from September 15 to October 27 at Ochi Projects 3301 W Washington Blvd, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

Cameron Rowland Presents D37 @ MOCA In Los Angeles

“It has been through all the phases of decline and is now thoroughly blighted. Subversive racial elements predominate; dilapidation and squalor are everywhere in evidence. It is a slum area and one of the city's melting pots. There is a slum clearance project under consideration but no definite steps have as yet been taken. It is assigned the lowest of ‘low red’ grade.” 

The following is an essay written by the artist, which serves as the only contextual reference for the show, since the pieces do not include didactics. For a copy of this essay with full footnotes, print copies are available at the entrance of the gallery

Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, Residential Security Map.
Location: Bunker Hill
Security Grade: 4th
Area No.: D37
Date: 2/27/39

Slaves were constructed as property. By withholding citizenship from people who were enslaved, slavery in the United States did not violate constitutional rights. As both persona and property, the slave functioned as a source of labor, chattel, and reproduction for the master as well as the greater economy. Saidiya Hartman describes the efficacy of this dual status:

The protection of property (defined narrowly by work capacity and the value of capital), the public good (the maintenance of black subordination), and the maintenance and reproduction of the institution of slavery determined the restricted scope of personhood and the terms of recognition…In the case of motherhood, the reproduction and conveyance of property in favor with the latter.

State governments considered slaves taxable property. Slave owners were taxed for each slave they owned. Every state which allowed slavery taxed the slaves. States relied on the salve economy to develop state government and infrastructure. These state tax codes formalized governmental involvement in the slave economy. In the United States between 1776 and 1865, the definition of public must be qualified to exclude the entirety of the salve population, and the definition of property must be understood to include the entirety of the slave population. Under antebellum tax codes, slaves were recognized and recorded as equivalent to cattle, pigs, clocks, carriages, and land. In 1860, slaves comprised 20% of all American wealth, including real estate.
Immediately following emancipation, the legal status of former slaves remained ambiguous. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to define their legal status. Section 1 reads:

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the Unite States; and such citizens, of every race and color, without regard to any previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have the same right, in every State and Territory in the United States, to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens, and shall be subject to like punishment, pains, and penalties, and to none other, any law, statute, ordinance, reputation, or custom, to the contrary notwithstanding.

By conferring legal protection “as is enjoyed by white citizens,” the Civil Rights Act of 1866 uses “white citizens” as its benchmark for legal protection. Harman writes, “[T]he rejection of an explicit antidiscrimination clause in the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment in favor of the language of equal protection attests to the nebulous character of the equality conferred. The Civil Rights Act both permitted discrimination in certain arenas and narrowly defined the scope of civil rights.

In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson confirmed the constitutionality of racial segregation, maintaining that the doctrine of “separate but equal” did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. State laws stipulating the terms of segregation came to be known as Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow laws were enforced by both police and white citizens. Lynching secured the racial order of segregation. This order secured control of governments that were designed to serve white citizens at the federal, state, and local levels and to protect property owned by white citizens. After emancipation, citizenship–as defined by the ability to make contracts and own property equal to that of white citizens–remained reserved for white citizens.
Land ownership in the United States is most commonly registered with a deed, which also indicates restrictions of encumbrances on an owner’s use of the land. In 1918, white landowners began to incorporate racially restrictive covenants into their deeds. By 1940, 80% of property in Chicago and Los Angeles carried racially restrictive covenants. As the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported in 1973, the typical language of racially restrictive covenants stipulated:

…hereafter no part of said property or any portion thereof shall be…occupied by any person not of the Caucasian race, it being intended hereby to restrict the use of said property…against the occupancy as owners or tenants of any portion of said property for resident or other purpose by people of the Negro or Mongolian race.

Racially restrictive covenants were implemented on the basis of private contract, but they were utilized collectively among groups of white neighbors. By prohibiting nonwhite ownership, these covenants protected the value of individual homes and maintained neighborhood and regional property values. Because restrictive covenants “run with the land,” all subsequent owners of the property were required to abide by the terms of the covenant. Although Shelley v. Kraemer rendered these clauses unenforceable in 1948, the clauses remain as a part of the deeds they were written into.
The racial restrictions imposed through private contract interlocked with federal policy to maintain segregation by instituting racially restrictive financing guidelines. In 1933, a mortgage company operating as part of the federal government–called the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC)–was established to assist in the refinancing of homes in foreclosure. “According to the 1940 Housing Census, fewer than 25,000 of more than one million homes refinanced by HOLC went to nonwhites. Beginning in 1935, the HOLC surveyed the lending risks of all cities that had a population over 40,000. these surveys were consolidated into Residential Security Maps, which were to be used by lenders to rebuild the real estate market that had been destabilized by the Great Depression. These 239 maps were divided into distinct sections, and each section was given a rating: “Best” A (green), “Still desirable” B (blue), “Definitely Declining” C (yellow), and “Hazardous” D (red). Rae, class, and ethnicity were explicit criteria for the determination of these grades, as indicated in the rating reports. The maps directly influenced the mortgage lending of private banks, the Federal Housing Administration, and the Veterans Administration. Areas rated A were deemed worthy of mortgage financing. Areas rated D were described as “hazardous” and mortgage loans were restricted from them. the restriction of financing on the basis of race became known as redlining. the Federal Housing Administration used and continued to update the maps, continued the HOLC’s use of race and the criteria of “inharmonious racial groups” in their ratings, and recommended the use of racially restrictive covenants. Redlining codified the use of racial discrimination to enhance real estate markets and formalized segregation as federal policy. It also incepted redevelopment projects that resulted in widespread displacement, dislocation, and dispossession. Like sharecropping, redlining systematically maintained racial-economic subordination to white citizens, federally defining the terms of property ownership on the basis of race.

Law enforcement compounds racial definitions of property in its use of asset forfeiture to fund its operations. Asset forfeiture takes numerous forms. Criminal asset forfeiture describes the forfeiture of property from a person charged with a crime. Administrative asset forfeiture describes the forfeiture of property as a result of unpaid debt. Civil asset forfeiture describes the forfeiture of property involved with a crime for which no person has been charged.
Civil asset forfeiture originated in the English Navigation Act of 1660. The Navigation Acts were established to maintain the English monopoly on the triangular trade between England, West Africa, and the English colonies. As Eric Williams writes, “Negroes, the most important export of Africa, and sugar, the most important export of the West Indies, were the principal commodities enumerated by the Navigation Laws. The Navigation Acts stipulated that only English ships were to dock in English ports in both England and the colonies. If this law was vilated, in lieu of pursuing a criminal proceeding, the ship and all property on board were subject to forfeiture.
The Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 allowed police to seize drugs and any property used in their production or transportation. The 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act designated all forfeiture profits at the federal level to be used for law enforcement purposes. Forfeiture laws passed on the state level have created similar provisions. These laws effectively constitute a financial incentive to practice asset forfeiture.
A 1995 report by the Government Accountability Office expressed concern for law enforcement agencies “becoming overzealous in their use of the asset forfeiture laws or too dependent of the funds derived from such seizures.” Federal and state laws have consistently expanded the violations that can result in forfeiture. In a 2001 study of 1,400 municipal and county law enforcement agencies, 60% reported that forfeiture profits were a necessary part of their budget. Forty states have forfeiture statutes that allow law enforcement to keep 45% to 100% of forfeiture proceeds. Through the Department of the Treasury Equitable Sharing Program, local and state police departments can seize property under federal authority, transfer the property to the Treasury Forfeiture Fund, and receive up to 80% of the proceeds from its auction.
Civil asset forfeiture is treated as an in rem proceeding. Rather than charging the owner with a crime, the property itself is charged. As such, forfeiture is now simply based on “whether a law enforcement agency has probable cause to believe that the property is connected to illegal activity.” In many states, assets may be forfeited without a conviction. “[B]ecause the civil forfeiture is deemed an in rem action, the government conducts warrantless seizures baed on probably cause, and unless the forfeiture involves a residential home, claimants are not entitled to pre-deprivation notice or hearing.” Former owners of forfeited property are considered third parties to in rem proceedings and are not entitled to public defense.
In 2015 the average cash seizure in Philadelphia was $192. Low-value forfeitures are less likely to be contested, given that the costs of litigation would outweigh the value of the property in question, and low-income owners are less likely to contest the forfeiture of their property. This creates an incentive for police to target low-income people to seize low-value property, given that it has a higher likelihood of being retained.
In Philadelphia between 2011 and 2013, civil asset forfeiture disproportionately targeted black people, who made up 44% of the population, 63% of all forfeitures, and 71% of forfeitures without conviction. In California in 2013 and 2014, 18% and 85% of all payments, respectively, went to police agencies in majority and minority communities. A survey of forfeitures in Oklahoma between 2010 and 2015 found that nearly two-thirds of forfeitures from traffic stops came from black and Hispanic drivers.
Civil asset forfeiture is also a practice and source of funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 included the creation of three new agencies: United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which processes applications for citizenship, residency, and asylum; Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which enforces law at the border and includes the Border Patrol agents formerly part of Immigration and Natural Services (INS); and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is charged with immigration and customs law enforcement within the border. ICE and CBP frequently overlap in their jurisdictions and functionality. Both can delegate powers to local law enforcement agents. CBP is the largest single law enforcement agency in the country, with approximately 60,000 employees. The Treasury Forfeiture Fund also receives assets from federal enforcement agencies through the Equitable Sharing Program and distributes up to 80% to the seizing agency. Between 2003 and 2013, DHS contributed 53% of the total revenues collected in the Treasure Forfeiture Fund. In 2013, ICE contributed $1 billion in seized property to the Treasure Forfeiture Fund, almost twice that of all non-DHS agencies.
No More Deaths describes the forfeiture practices of ICE, CBP, and Border Patrol as part of the “cycle of dispossession” of people who are undocumented, carried out by

private employers who engage in illegal and exploitative labor practices in the United States; local police and toting companies that seize private vehicles and charge exorbitant daily storage rates; detention bonds and related fees associated with the immigration court system; government officials in Mexico and the United States who solicit bribes or otherwise directly rob migrants of their belongings; private prison companies whose exploitative labor practices fail to follow basic standards established in the Fair Labor Standards Act; and phone, commissary and credit card companies that contract with prisons and extract exorbitant fees for the provision of basic services.

Each of these practices relies on the absence of protections for those rendered as noncitizens. This absence creates vested financial interests in both the labor exploitation of people who are undocumented as well as the enforcement of their “legal status.” These seemingly conflicting interests form a productive double bind that maintains the status of noncitizens. These methods of dispossession have developed to closely resemble the nexus of fines, fees, and forfeitures imposed on those who are incarcerated. Criminal charges eliminate basic protections and incept dispossession through cash bail; public defender fees; court fees; pay-to-stay jail and prison fees; overpriced and monopolized prison commissary, phone, and internet services; administrative forfeiture; criminal forfeiture; and private probation, among other means. Citizenship is explicitly withheld from people who are incarcerated, formerly incarcerated and undocumented; it is implicitly withheld from those who don’t meet the standard of white citizenship. The withholding of citizenship continues to structure the racial terms of dispossession.

42 USC § 1981, “Equal rights under the law,” last updated in 1991, maintains white citizenship as the standard for legal protection in current U.S. statute law:

(a) Statement of equal rights.
All persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall have the same right in every State and Territory to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, give evidence, and to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property as is enjoyed by white citizens, and shall be subject to like punishment, pains, penalties, taxes, licenses, and exactions of every kind, and to no other.

D37 will open on October 14 and will be on view through March 11, 2019 at The Museum of Contemporary Art 250 South Grand Ave, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper


One Day At A Time: Manny Farber And Termite Art @ MOCA In Los Angeles

One Day At A Time is inspired by American painter and film critic Manny Farber and his legendary underground essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” (1962). One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art features approximately thirty artists and more than 100 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, and sound dating from the 1950s to the present. The exhibition is conceived as a cross between a monographic exhibition and a group show—an experiment in exhibition-making in the spirit of Farber’s call for an art of “both observing and being in the world.” The exhibition will open on October 14 and is on view through March 11, 2019 at The Museum of Contemporary Art 250 South Grand Ave, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Ochi Projects Presents 'Soft Pretzel' Group Show @ Vacation Gallery In New York

Soft Pretzel features works that investigate sculptural forms and perceived tactility. Evaluating our ability to anticipate sensory experiences as they are conveyed through visual cues, each work explores implied softness, rigidity, dimension, weight and movement. The exhibition includes works by Tanya Brodsky, Rives Granade, Nasim Hantehzadeh, Lilian Martinez, Daniel McKee, Erin Morrison, Claudia Parducci, Ben Sanders and James Seward. Soft Pretzel is on view through October 28 @ Vacation Gallery, 24A Orchard Street, New York, NY 10002. images courtesy of Ochi Projects

Bernhard Buhmann's 'My Automatic Me' @ Nino Mier Gallery In Los Angeles

Informed by a background in sociology, Vienna-based painter Bernhard Buhmann’s hard-edged, abstracted works speak to larger issues concerning the figure in a modern-day environment and therefore, humanity, as it engages with a society that is technologically advancing at an accelerated rate. The exhibition title, My Automatic Me, suggests themes which belong to today’s world of cyborgian post-humanism, digital avatars, virtual reality and artificial intelligence but with a sense of friendliness that is either uncanny or intimate - or both. As the world advances, forcing our animal behaviors to evolve towards Buhmann’s Automatic Me, the artist examines what it means to be human in this newfangled, spectacular landscape.

Buhmann’s whole body of work eventually fits together to form an integrated aesthetic matrix, capturing performative remnants of a sociological body, the crux of human condition disguised as a computer game, even attempts to calculate consciousness – each work a colorful, geometric portrait of our quickly evolving selves. My Automatic Me is on view through November 17 @ Nino Mier Gallery Two, 7313 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles.

Charles White: A Retrospective Opens @ MoMA In New York

Charles White: A Retrospective is the first major museum survey devoted to the artist in over 30 years. The exhibition charts White’s full career—from the 1930s through his premature death in 1979—with over 100 works, including drawings, paintings, prints, photographs, illustrated books, record covers and archival materials.

The exhibition is organized chronologically, with groupings centered on the cities and creative communities in which White lived and worked. Each section is supported by relevant ephemera and supporting materials detailing White’s working process, political and social activities, and role as a teacher.

The exhibition includes representative work from the three artistic centers in which White lived, created, and taught throughout his life: Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. It begins with early paintings and murals White made for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in Depression-era Chicago, where he grew up. Shortly thereafter, between 1942 and 1956, White lived mainly in New York City, teaching drawing, exhibiting at the progressive ACA Gallery on 57th Street, and supporting the Committee for the Negro in the Arts in Harlem. A selection of White’s personal photographs, also on view in the exhibition, capture his life in New York, while the inclusion of his work for album covers, publications, film, and television emphasize his dedication to more accessible distribution outlets for his art. The presentation concludes with the inventive output from his last decades as an internationally established figure and influential teacher in Los Angeles during the 1960s and ’70s.

The retrospective is on view through January 13, 2019 at MoMA 11 West 53 Street, Manhattan, New York. Following its MoMA presentation, the exhibition will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where it will be on view in Spring 2019. photographs courtesy of MoMA

Madeleine Pfull's Inaugural Solo Exhibition @ Nino Mier Gallery In Los Angeles

Australian artist Madeleine Pfull’s inaugural exhibition at Nino Mier Gallery illustrates a stylized narrative of a complex suburban universe inspired by her youth. Littered with images and subjects that are familial, humorous and peculiar, the paintings center around the lives of these richly imagined characters. The subjects she paints exude a specific type, mostly middle-class women, likely from the 1980s. Her women wear big-box store clothing, live in homely domestic interiors, but with an earnestness and sense of pride that makes them all more intellectually interesting. Pfull explains that ‘they appear as the quotidian details of middle-class suburbs. They can appear fed up or bored but it is more of a sense of importance and stoicism.

The subjects could be one of many mothers, aunts and neighbors, with their familiar awkward sweaters, botched perms, floral aprons and old-fashioned curtains. Most of the works grow richly from these known phenotypes, and the artist enjoys when the viewer enhances the character’s narrative by implying extended storylines. Pfull explains further that her work articulates her fascination with taste and expressing one’s social status and personal pride through material things. For the women she portrays, she asserts that the ones who try the hardest to appear superior are the ones most uncomfortable with their lack of taste. This duality to their identity, of inferiority and superiority, is exaggerated through the medium of painting, where, like the current embracing of retro culture and fashion, time adds prestige to kitsch. Madeleine Pfull’s eponymous solo exhibition is on view through November 17th at Nino Mier Gallery 7313 Santa Monica Blvd.

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer 'The Chiefest Of Ten Thousand' @ Nino Mier Gallery In Los Angeles

Over the course of her career Celeste Dupuy-Spencer has set out to create paintings interrogating the American experience, a subject that she began to believe could not be addressed without attending to the question of religion. The resulting body of work gathered for her exhibition The Chiefest of Ten Thousand offers a depiction of our moment through a series of portraits, religious scenes, and landscapes. Taken together these works present a view that is conflicted, terror-filled, absurd, and marked by a powerful tenderness. This show exposes dark palimpsests of our culture as well as warmth, pleasure, and humor.

This body of work is a record of the deeply felt task of trying to be, and be good, in the contradictions of this moment. The polyvocality the artist brings to each painting, through their images and gestures, make them purposefully hard to grasp, refusing to cohere even as they have a razor sharp affective import. They picture a self that cannot be reconciled as a manifestation of a society that refuses reconciliation. Dupuy-Spencer suggests that there are real and profound ways to save ourselves—finding grace in the mire is an unending and complicated process, but love and community might be an ongoing redemption. The Chiefest of Ten Thousand is on view through November 3 @ Nino Mier Gallery 7313 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles. text by Diana Nawi


Adrian Piper's 'Concepts and Intuitions, 1965-2016' Opens @ Hammer Museum in Los Angeles

Adrian Piper: Concepts and Intuitions, 1965-2016 is the most comprehensive West Coast exhibition to date of the work of Adrian Piper (b. 1948, New York). It is also the first West Coast museum presentation of Piper’s works in more than a decade, and her first since receiving the Golden Lion Award for Best Artist at the 56th Venice Biennale of 2015 and Germany’s Käthe Kollwitz Prize in 2018. Organized by The Museum of Modern Art, this expansive retrospective features more than 270 works gathered from public and private collections from around the world, and encompasses a wide range of mediums that Piper has explored for over 50 years: drawing, photography, works on paper, video, multimedia installations, performance, painting, sculpture, and sound. 

Piper’s groundbreaking, transformative work has profoundly shaped the form and content of Conceptual art since the 1960s, exerting an incalculable influence on artists working today. Her investigations into the political, social, and spiritual potential of Conceptual art frequently address gender, race, and xenophobia through incisive humor and wit, and draw on her long-standing involvement with philosophy and yoga.

For this exhibition, the Hammer is partnering with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA) to present Piper’s work What It’s Like, What It Is #3, a large-scale mixed-media installation addressing racial stereotypes. Adrian Piper: Concepts and Intuitions, 1965-2016 in on view through January 6 at Hammer Museum 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles.