A lithe group of dancers, acrobats and contortionists graced the stage for the high-voltage presentation of Yazbukey Fitness Club – surrealist designer, Yazbukey’s full-throttle spring/summer 2019 collection. Her latest works inspired by the current obsessions with fit culture, fitspo, and the like are a welcome alternative to the dominating athleisure forces as of late. photographs by Flo Kohl
ISLAND is the second solo exhibition that James Herman has presented with Ibid Gallery. Using sculpture, painting, and printmaking alongside his homesteading practice, Herman’s work straddles alternative off-the-grid building methods with the legacy of Postwar American painting in his psychedelic, referential-laden forms and their social function. Herman’s painted plywood panels and architectural dwellings act as reflectors and spatial activators for his ultimate conceptual practice: a radical domesticity based in sustainability, self-reliance, subsistence, and repetitive labor. ISLAND is on view through October 27 at Ibid Gallery 670 S Anderson Street, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock
Don’t turn off the light is the second solo exhibition at Fridman Gallery for Brazilian artist, Nino Cais. It presents the artist’s take on male and female forms through installation, assemblages, and film. The artist utilizes his unique syntax, juxtaposing the banal and the fetishized, to create dreamlike unions of household objects and found photography. To read our 2014 interview of the artist, click here. Don’t turn off the light opens tonight @ 6pm and is on view through November 3 at Fridman Gallery 287 Spring Street New York. images courtesy of Nino Cais and Fridman Gallery
Rubbish and Dreams: the Genderqueer Performance Art of Stephen Varble, is an exhibition focusing on a performance artist who became iconic in 1970s New York for his disruptive interventions into galleries, public spaces, and financial institutions. Varble would engage in unauthorized and impromptu performance wearing elaborate drag costumes made from street trash, food waste, and stolen objects. His work was decidedly anti-institutional and he disrupted the business of art in the 1970s. For these reasons, he was soon written out of history, and no substantive piece of writing on his practice has been published for 40 years. This exhibition draws on a number of private archives in telling Varble’s story for the first time. RUBBISH AND DREAMS: The Genderqueer Performance Art of Stephen Varble is on view through January 6, 2019 at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, 26 Wooster Street, New York.
The Los Angeles cultural world came out in droves to the Underground Museum September 15 to celebrate the closing of Water & Power and the opening of Muddy Water. Water & Power featured four artworks from the MOCA permanent collection, curated by the late Noah Davis at the Underground Museum. Muddy Water is a solo exhibition by Karon Davis currently on view at Wilding Cran Gallery through November 4. photographs by Lani Trock
Glass Sabbath, a solo presentation of new works by Melanie Schiff is the artist’s first exhibition at the gallery. Schiff’s photographs revel in an assertion of the physicality of objects. Isolated from their use value, items are connected by an attention to shape and texture that nods to the tradition of still life painting. Glass Sabbath is on view through October 6th at Night Gallery, 2276 East 16th Street, Los Angeles, CA, 90021. photographs by Lani Trock
A sculptural interpretation of a drawing Nicole Nadeau made as a child, A Flower By Another Name is a conversation between present and past. Curated by Kyle DeWoody, the ceramic sculptures are the artist’s 3D interpretations of the drawing. In order to better understand the subconscious messages embedded in the flowers, Nadeau had her twin sister, Coryn Nadeau, a clinical art therapist, psychoanalyze the original drawing using Lowenfeld theory, The Silver Drawing Test of Cognition & Emotion, Kellogg & assessment symbology. Her finding help to inform the dimensional translation.
She suggested that the four flowers were an abstract representation of the four members of Nadeau’s family. Noting we have a capacity for symbolization in art, whereby we unconsciously project transitional objects or the family dyad onto the work. When objects are repeated in the same number sequence as the artist’s family dyad, it is said to reflect that individual’s family. This may be why the flowers are disproportionately large to their surroundings, given the strong feeling attached to them. The flowers are also the only objects in the drawing that exhibit variation, most noticeably in colored – even the rainbow is monochromatic. A Flower By Another Name was presented by That That Gallery from September 20-27 at WNDO 361 Vernon Avenue, Venice 90291. photographs by Oliver Kupper
Jeffrey Deitch has just opened his new Los Angeles gallery with a museum-scale exhibition entitled, Zodiac, by Ai Weiwei. This inaugural exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery Los Angeles, is one of three major exhibitions by the artist concurrently on view in Los Angeles.
The center of the space is filled by one of the artist’s most remarkable works, Stools (2013), comprised of 5,929 wooden stools from the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties and the Republican period, gathered from villages across northern China. Very few of these stools remain in Chinese households today, but they were once a ubiquitous staple of domestic life. Each stool reveals traces of use and evokes the experience of generations of lives. Ai Weiwei admires the stools for their simple design and solid structure, a design language that remained unchanged for thousands of years.
Complementing the stools is a new series of Zodiac works composed from thousands of plastic LEGO bricks. The set of twelve works incorporates imagery from two well-known series by the artist. The twelve LEGO Zodiac animal heads deriving from his sculpture series Circle of Animals / Zodiac Heads (2010) are overlaid onto twelve landscapes and monuments from Ai’s Study of Perspective (1995–2003) series of photographs. He appreciates how LEGO is accessible to everyone, especially young people. His use of LEGO components is a response to the pixelated structure of digital images.
Both the Stools and the Zodiac installations are assembled from accumulated elements, a creative method that Ai has employed in many of his best-known works. His interest in accumulation and collecting relates to his desire to understand how an individual relates to society, to memory, and to objects that evoke a particular time. His use of antique stools and modern LEGO bricks are examples of how his art redefines these elements, subverting their history and nature.
The sculpture Grapes (2017) reassembles the stools into a completely different shape but uses the original structural logic so that it remains true to its original form. It provides a graceful and whimsical counterpoint to the accumulation of the 5,929 stools. Zodiac is on view through January 5, 2019 at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery 925 N Orange Drive, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Kupper
Life Cycle is Ai Weiwei’s first major institutional exhibition in Los Angeles and features the new and unseen work Life Cycle (2018) – a sculptural response to the global refugee crisis. The exhibition also presents iconic installations Sunflower Seeds (2010) and Spouts (2015) within the Foundation’s Theater Gallery. On view for the first time in the Black Box, Life Cycle (2018) references the artist’s 2017 monumental sculpture Law of the Journey, Ai’s response to the global refugee crisis, which used inflatable, black PVC rubber to depict the makeshift boats used to reach Europe. In this new iteration, Life Cycle depicts an inflatable boat through the technique used in traditional Chinese kite-making, exchanging the PVC rubber for bamboo. Life Cycle in on view through March 3 2019 at the Marciano Art Foundation 4357 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper
The exhibition, THREES COMPANY, is titled in response to Marnie Weber's chimp sculpture. It is a platform of association to the exhibition of 33 artists and their works. The exhibition includes works from Andrew Arduini, John Baldessari, Devandra Banhart, Tami Demaree, Aryo Toh Djojo, Jason Roberts Dobrin, Jon Elder, John Emison, Jamie Felton, Ryan Fenchel, Matt Fishbeck, Daniel Gibson, Dan Graham, Gibby Haynes, Steven Hull, Allie Ihm, Johanna Jackson, Patrick Jackson, Chris Johanson, Janet Jenkins, Caleb Lyons, T Kelly Mason, Stefan Meier, Robert Moreland, Max Ostrow, Nate Page, Ornella Pacchioni, Taylor Marie, Prendergast, Ariel Rosenberg, Mira Schnedler, Tran Truong, Alex Wallman and Marnie Weber. The exhibition is on view through September 30 at Dan Graham 3.0 670 Anderson Street, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock
How likely is it that only I am right in this matter? is an exhibition of new and recent work by Wolfgang Tillmans. Tillmans here eschews his signature style of floor-to-ceiling installations in favor of a more minimal, linear presentation concise in subject matter as well as scope. Featuring photographs, video and sound, and a spoken-word piece, the show revisits themes explored by the artist throughout his thirty-year career, but also initiates a subtle reevaluation of how to portray a world consistently in flux. How likely is it that only I am right in this matter? is on view through October 20 at David Zwirner 519, 525 & 533 West 19th Street, New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer
Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art provides a unique opportunity to examine affinities in intention and imagery between works executed across a broad span of time. Endless Enigma explores the ways artists have sought to explain their world in terms of an alternate reality, drawn from imagination, the subconscious, poetry, nature, myth, and religion. Works on view range from gothic gargoyles; masterworks from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by Herri met de Bles, Hieronymus Bosch, Piero di Cosimo, and Titian; seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works by Damiano Cappelli, Pietro Novelli, and Salvator Rosa; nineteenth-century works by William Blake, James Ensor, Francisco de Goya, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and James Ward; and works from the twentieth century to the present day by Eileen Agar, Francis Alÿs, Louise Bourgeois, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Leonor Fini, Robert Gober, José Gutiérrez Solana, Sherrie Levine, René Magritte, Roberto Matta, Pablo Picasso, Wallace Putnam, Man Ray, Kay Sage, Yves Tanguy, and Lisa Yuskavage, among others. The exhibition is on view through October 27 at David Zwirner 537 West 20th Street, New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer
The speed of your attention is the new solo exhibition of Olafur Eliasson, it explores geometry, light, perception, and movement in new works that offer an array of interactive and meditative experiences as the viewer wanders through the galleries. In the entry, the viewer encounters Moving together, a freestanding installation of 54 crystal spheres. Arranged in a grid of six rows and nine columns, the spheres transition from completely transparent—in which the viewer sees her own upside-down reflection—to varying degrees of transparency and black, to solid black, depending on the viewing angle and the viewer’s movements. The speed of your attention is on view through December 22 at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery 1010 North Highland Avenue, Los Angeles. photographs by Summer Bowie
Chris Emile and No)one. Art House presented a choreographed performance in response to Haegue Yang’s Strange Fruit (2012-13), part of MOCA’s permanent collection. Yang’s work takes its title from the anti-lynching anthem famously recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939. Using Yang’s installation as its stage, Emile’s performance examines the public display and consumption of violence against marginalized bodies and investigates how Black Americans process trauma. The performance expands the dialogue between Yang’s Strange Fruit and the protest song of the same name. Chris Emile, the choreographer, is the cofounder of No)one. Art House, a collective that produces movement-based installations in unconventional spaces throughout Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock
Just as North Carolina faced yet another “500-year storm,” Los Angeles saw the opening of Karon Davis’s Muddy Water at Wilding Cran Gallery. The show takes it’s name from Bessie Smith’s 1927 recording of Muddy Water, a song about the Great Mississippi Flood. The body of work reflects on the effects of climate change, and subsequent migration and displacement, offering a glimpse into the experiences people encounter during natural disasters. Muddy Water is on view through November 4th at Wilding Cran Gallery 939 South Santa Fe Avenue Los Angeles. photographs by Summer Bowie
Few artists are as synonymous with the history of 20th and 21st-century American art as Frank Stella. His work across media, from painting to sculpture to printmaking, has continuously broken ground at each stage of his decades-long career, remaining influential and relevant to subsequent generations of contemporary artists. The selection of recent works presented at Sprüth Magers highlight the artist’s ongoing experimentation with spatial representation and includes the début of a new painting series. This is the first solo exhibition of Frank Stella’s painting and sculpture in Los Angeles since 1995. The exhibition is on view through October 26 at Sprüth Magers 5900 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036. photographs by Summer Bowie
Miu Miu Type is a capsule collection featuring poplin shirts, cotton hoodies and track pants that will be patched with one, two or three letters from the Miu Miu alphabet. A female face or body interlaced with a letterform coming together to create an alphabet of gestures created in collaboration with Miuccia Prada by M/M Paris for the Fall 2018 Collection. photographs by Summer Bowie.
“What’s returning and why was it repressed?” asks Ben Lee Ritchie Handler of Robert Yarber at the press preview for the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in over twenty years. The double entendres abound and the disarming deconstruction of the artist’s psyche takes a crystal clear focus. The loss of innocence, the loss of control, the liberation therein, the empowerment in being ostracized by a professor, and the lasting impression left by witnessing the assassination of of President John F. Kennedy. The simultaneous flood of immediacy and nostalgia is disorienting and thrilling—his paintings are a cutting visual counterpoint to critical theory, anchored through dramaturgical events and eclipses of subjecthood. Backlit and reflecting a palette at once surreal and familiar, his forms summon those of Tintoretto on an acid trip, or maybe Titian on ecstasy. While his forbearers looked up to the heavens, however, Yarber’s is the iridescent chiaroscuro of nightlife long past the witching hour. Return of the Repressed is on view through October 20 at Nicodim Gallery 571 S Anderson Street Ste 2, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Kupper
A group of new paintings, drawings, and watercolors are currently on view at Kayne Griffin Corcoran, and they’re not at all for the faint of heart. They touch on the dark dualities of our most sinister dreams and tickle us in that somewhat uninvited, but not exactly unappreciated sort of way. Within these works Lynch functions as an omnipresent narrator who candidly describes his representation of objects and figures in situations that are simultaneously commonplace yet unexpected. I Was A Teenage Insect is on view through November 3 at Kayne Griffin Corcoran 1201 South La Brea Avenue Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Kupper
