2019 LAXART Benefit Celebrates The Discovery Of Art As A Gateway Drug To Culture

LAXART celebrated its 2019 Benefit on Friday, November 8 in Hollywood, bringing together major figures in Los Angeles’ contemporary art community to celebrate the nonprofit art space founded in 2005. Beginning the evening at LAXART on N Orange Dr, guests were presented with a reception and discussion between Director Hamza Walker and artist Phil Peters whose exhibition Outside/In, done with Karen Reimer, presents an audio installation derived from microphone recordings of fracking sites in West Texas, with Reimer’s quilted hand dyed fabric hanging above throughout the space. The show’s audio component also pays homage to the history of the building that houses LAXART as the legendary former recording studio Radio Recorders. photographs courtesy of Jojo Karsh/BFA.com, courtesy of LAXART

Swingers: A Group Show @ Greene Naftali In New York

Swingers is a group show featuring seven artists who explore structures of desire within the context of the culture industry. Taking its title from Lutz Bacher’s 2018 series, the exhibition focuses on artists who use photography and video to scrutinize how desire has been calculated, monetized, and leveraged by consumer culture. While some works target the modern subject’s participation in a neoliberal paradigm where individuality and desire are harnessed as forms of capital, other artists pursue more personal approaches to mine the ways one’s subjectivity can merge with its own objectification. Aware of their status within this creative economy, the works in Swingers take different approaches to uncover how the representation and commodification of desire in turn mediates the relationship between self and other. Swingers is on view through December 15 at Greene Naftali 508 West 26th Street Ground Floor & 8th Floor New York. photographs by Emma Orfield Johnston

Group Show “How They Ran” @ Over The Influence

Taking the name from the second chapter of Germaine Greer’s landmark text “The Obstacle Race” from 1979, “How They Ran” brings together a selected group of LA-based artists whose diverse practices represent the heartbeat of the Los Angeles art scene today. Greer’s book presented an art historical account of artists who are missing from academic literature and how they overcame historical obstacles to achieve notoriety anyway. Through this lens, Over the Influence will present a group exhibition of LA-based artists from different backgrounds, practices, and generations. "How They Ran" is on view through September 5th at Over The Influence 833 East 3rd Street Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

This Brush for Hire: Norm Laich & Many Other Artists @ Institute of Contemporary Art

This Brush for Hire: Norm Laich and Many Other Artists surveys an array of world-renowned artists and one indispensable assistant—the Los Angeles-based artist, sign painter, and fabricator Norm Laich. The exhibition will consist of paintings and graphic installations fabricated by Laich over the past three decades. Laich has been a key contributor to the production of many iconic works by a range of artists including Ed Ruscha, Paul McCarthy, Barbara Kruger, Allen Ruppersberg, and Jenny Holzer, among many others. The exhibition is on view through September 2 at Institute of Contemporary Art 717 East 7th Street Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Barbara Kruger 'Early Works' Show Extended @ Skarstedt

Skarstedt gallery in London has extended its exhibition of seminal early works by American artist Barbara Kruger. The exhibition features Kruger’s large-scale black and white photographs, overlaid with provocative captions in bold Futura type. This group of works, selected from the 1980s, examines the cultural constructions of power, identity and sexuality through their juxtaposition of text and imagery. Barbara Kruger 'Early Works' will be on view until April 25, 2015 at Skarstedt Gallery, 23 Old Bond Street, London.