Tom Wesselmann's "Intimate Spaces" Opens @ Gagosian in Los Angeles

A large painting of lips smoking a cigarette. Smoker #8, 1973 © The Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by ARS/VAGA, New York, Photo: Jeffrey Sturges, Courtesy the Estate and Gagosian

Smoker #8, 1973 © The Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by ARS/VAGA, New York, Photo: Jeffrey Sturges, Courtesy the Estate and Gagosian

A defining artist of American Pop Art, Tom Wesselmann produced innovative mixed-media paintings that brought the energy of commercial culture to still lifes, interiors, landscapes, and nudes. The exhibition—Intimate Spaces—concentrates on the artist’s primary subject, the female nude, with key works from Great American Nudes (1961–73) and subsequent series. With a nod to both the great American novel and the American dream, Great American Nudes also refers to Wesselmann’s affinity for the scale of Abstract Expressionist paintings, billboards, and movie screens. Inspired by Henri Matisse’s odalisques, Wesselmann employed a saturated palette, clearly defined contours, and interlocking positive and negative shapes. The paintings are set in domestic interiors and often incorporate collage and assemblage elements, appearing highly contemporary in their provocative discontinuities of style.

Wesselmann’s nudes became icons of the 1960s sexual revolution. Wishing to avoid portraiture, the artist frequently deemphasized facial features, foregrounding both abstraction and overt eroticism. “The figures dealt primarily with their presence,” he wrote (as his pseudonym, Slim Stealingworth). “Personality would interfere with the bluntness of the fact of the nude. When body features were included, they were those important to erotic simplification, like lips and nipples. There was no modeling, no hint at dimension.”

Intimate Spaces is on view through June 16 @ Gagosian 456 North Camden Drive
Beverly Hills

Watch Abraham Cruzvillegas Recite Tres Sonetos By Concha Urquiza @ Regen Projects In Los Angeles

Over the past decade, Abraham Cruzvillegas has explored the myriad ways to represent his life experiences in physical form. His humorous but incisive takes on identity often employ animal avatars to draw out similarities between humans and other species, particularly primates.

At the opening reception for Cruzvillegas’s third solo presentation at Regen Projects, the artist gave a rhythmic reading of three poems by Mexican poet Concha Urquiza. Standing upon sculptural elements from the show that function as performance platform and gallery seating, Cruzvillegas introduced a new series of drawings and paintings produced on-site during the installation of the exhibition.

In this new series of drawings, the artist’s own photographic likeness serves as the basis for such investigations. Thin textiles printed with images of his face act as canvases that the artist embellishes with designs rendered in bold colors. Employing a similar formal language, the artist presents a group of large-scale calligraphic paintings. Composed flat on the gallery floor, he uses a mop or broom to apply paint, tools chosen as a gentle nod to the workers who employ them, in loose, expressive gestures that serve as records of their performative nature. They translate the rhythms and tones of the Urquiza’s poems with precision and grace.

Abraham Cruzvillegas: Tres Sonetos is on view through April 23 @ Regen Projects 6750 Santa Monica Blvd. Los Angeles

Punch, Curated By Nina Chanel Abney @ Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles

Punch, curated by artist Nina Chanel Abney, features thirty-three artists who examine contemporary culture and society through the lens of figuration. The exhibition focuses on artists primarily from Los Angeles in Abney’s circle who explore connections and disconnections between culture and subculture, figuration and abstraction, and the physical and the digital. The pieces featured in the exhibition contain references to art historical precedents such as Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, as well as street art, while integrating elements of design, graffiti, cartoons, and satire. Using painting, sculpture, and performance as acts of defiance, these artists explore how they can create figurative and abstract representations with visual punch while portraying a society immersed in new media and pop culture.

Punch, Curated by Nina Chanel Abney is on view through August 17 at Jeffrey Deitch Los Angeles 925 North Orange Drive, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch

Lee Krasner: Living Colour @ Barbican Art Gallery in London

The first European retrospective of Lee Krasner’s work in over fifty years is now showing at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. Lee Krasner: Living Colour features nearly 100 works made throughout the artist’s career, including self-portraits, energetic charcoal life drawings, as well as her acclaimed “Little Image” paintings. As one of the pioneers of Abstract Expressionism, Krasner created pieces reflecting the feeling of possibility and the spirit of experimentation in post-war New York. Krasner’s talents have often been eclipsed by her marriage to Jackson Pollock, however, this exhibition celebrates the career of a formidable artist dedicated to her dynamic, abstracted vision.

Lee Krasner: Living Colour is on view through September 1 at Barbican Art Gallery Barbican Centre, Silk St, London. photographs courtesy of Barbican Art Gallery

TAL R "ALTSTADT GIRL" @ Cheim & Read in New York

Cheim & Read presents an exhibition of recent paintings and drawings by Copenhagen-based artist Tal R. For the past two years, Tal R has been drawing women in confined interior spaces – hotel rooms, bedrooms, corridors, in the shower, and in front of mirrors. Though carefully chosen, his subjects are strangers and casual acquaintances. Tal R’s artistic process begins when he asks the women to pose for him: the foundation of his paintings rest on the anxiety of an uncertain exchange. This provides his work with palpable intensity and, as he notes, “awkwardness,” and is further emphasized by his use of saturated color and off-kilter compositions. Altstadt Girl will be on view until February 14, 2015 at Cheim & Read, 547 West 25 Street, New York. photographs by Agnes Fischer 

In the Tower: Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko

The second in a series of Tower exhibitions focusing on contemporary art and its roots offers a rare look at the black-on-black paintings that Rothko made in 1964 in connection with his work on a chapel for the Menil Collection in Houston. A recording of Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel (1971), the haunting music originally composed for that space, accompanies the exhibition in the spacious East Building Tower Gallery.  In the Tower: Mark Rothko closes on January 9th at the National Gallery of Art in Washinton.  www.nga.org