Falling, living, laughing, touching—the still, subdued, painterly fantasies of Anna Weyant sway to and fro from the warmly resplendent hues of the Dutch Masters, to the madness of Otto Dix, to the gold of an Instagram selfie’s golden hour. The work, much of it created under the shadow of a global pandemic, are prime moments of a zeitgeist suddenly hollowed by the screeching halt of life as we know it: backgrounds are blackened out, clouds obscure, and curtains drape with muted uncertainties. Everything is vague and everything is a warm oblivion, like the sand of an hourglass exploded and the grains took the shape of a world that resembled its former self. But time doesn’t stop on a dime, it lurches, chugs forward with ghostlike animation even when your foot is on the break, which is what makes Weyant’s paintings so exciting—brushstroke by brushstroke, they are full of that potential energy. In the following interview, Bill Powers and Anna Weyant discuss her upcoming show at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles. Click here to read more.
Lizzi Bougatsos + Kim Gordon x Penny Slinger @ Blum & Poe In Los Angeles
Lizzi Bougatsos and Kim Gordon perform sonic improvisation to the projections of artist Penny Slinger's early experimental silent films from 1969. After returning from a Gang Gang Dance Japan tour last winter, Bougatsos found herself emerged in the films of Jane Arden, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Penny Slinger, part of an experimental feminist film series curated by Alison Gingeras and Nicoletta Beyer at the Anthology Film Archives. She began writing text while watching the Slinger films in the theater, and thereafter asked her friend Kim Gordon to perform a sonic reaction. The two artists improvised to the films teetering on the elemental, surreal, metaphysical, and distinctly feminine raw poetry of the sublime unconscious -- an almost Artaudian parallel for the unconscious leadings of the nature of improvisation in art and life, shared in the three practices of Bougatsos, Gordon, and Slinger. photographs by Julia Nicoletti
March Avery @ Blum & Poe in New York
Blum & Poe presents a solo exhibition of paintings by New York-based artist March Avery. The exhibition, which is Avery’s first with the gallery, introduces a body of work spanning over five decades and is the artist’s first extensive solo presentation in New York in over twenty years. Focusing on portraiture and landscape and punctuated with still life, the selection of works on view repositions the vitality of moments past through paint applied to canvas. Mothers read bedtime stories; children eat breakfast, sit on laps, and play Chinese checkers; clouds hover over the surface of a cerulean blue lake; and potted plants are placed amongst a child’s toys or present themselves in paintings hung behind a sofa, upon which a young woman reclines in the company of a cat. These diaristic tendencies that characterize Avery’s oeuvre encapsulate a lifelong commitment to the process of painting itself.
March Avery is on view through August 9 at Blum & Poe 19 E 66th St, New York, NY 10065. all images courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo
Highlights From The Printed Matter LA Art Book Fair @ MoCA Geffen
Initiated in 2013, Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair (LAABF) is the companion fair to the NY Art Book Fair. Free and open to the public, the two fairs are among the leading international gatherings for the distribution of artists’ books, celebrating the full breadth of the art publishing community.
Held at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in downtown Los Angeles over three days, the 2019 LA Art Book Fair hosted 390 exhibitors from 31 countries, including a broad range of artists and collectives, small presses, institutions, galleries, antiquarian booksellers, and distributors. The event draws more than 35,000 individuals including book lovers, collectors, artists, and art world professionals each year. With a commitment to diversity and representation, the fair serves as a meeting place for an extended community of publishers and book enthusiasts, as well as a site for dialogue and exchange around all facets of arts publishing. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper
Sam Durant "Build Therefore Your Own World" @ Blum And Poe Gallery In Los Angeles
Blum & Poe presents Build Therefore Your Own World, an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Sam Durant. The title is excerpted from a Ralph Waldo Emerson essay. Durant continues his excavation of marginalized American histories, unearthing counter storylines to the historical canon. In this exhibition he proposes a hybridized cross-pollination between the iconic nineteenth century transcendentalists like Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott, with African writers such as Phillis Wheatley and Lucy Terry Prince, along with abolitionists like Frederick Douglass. Further developing his theses from a recent three-month long public art project in Concord, MA entitled The Meeting House, Durant transforms relics from this politically loaded site of American history into a prescient presentation of culturally charged artworks. Sam Durant "Build Therefore Your Own World" will be on view until February 18, 2017 @ Blum and Poe Gallery in Los Angeles.
Kanye West "Famous" Private View @ Blum & Poe Gallery in Los Angeles
photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper
Private Opening Of High Times, Curated By Richard Prince @ Blum & Poe Gallery In Los Angeles
Blum & Poe presents a collaboration between artist Richard Prince and the paragon of marijuana counterculture press, High Times magazine. Well known for his penchant for outsider aesthetics and subculture iconography, Prince works with High Times for the first time, lending original compositions from his Hippie Drawings series of the late 1990s/early 2000s for the September 2016 special Trippy issue. These drawings exemplify Prince’s practice of investigating the American collective unconscious and pursuing dualities – he mines the marginalized and commonplace, and then filters this content through a discerning, expressive, and painterly tradition. Extraterrestrial, polychromatic figures wielding joints smirk at their viewer; wild and joyful gestures that recall the artwork of children or channel the renderings of a psychedelic trip – Prince says of this series, “Being funny is a way to survive.” In conjunction with the launch of the special issue, Prince has curated a collection of historical High Times covers traversing the publication’s history from 1974-2014. The artist’s practice of gleaning inspiration from news and popular media well documented, here Prince selects covers from the magazine’s archives that reflect certain subjects commonly found in his oeuvre. On the occasion of the special edition issue launch, rolling papers designed by the artist will be produced, along with a marijuana strain. This presentation has been organized in cooperation with Green St. Agency. High Times opens July 26 and runs until July 30 at Blum & Poe Gallery in Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper
10 Must See Art Shows Around The World That You Really, Really Need To Check Out
1. Consumption, sexuality, violence, voyeurism, discomfort, guilt, loss of control, and fantasy at Paul McCarthy’s exhibition at Schinkel Pavillon – on view until November 22 in Berlin, Germany 2. Brad Phillip’s erotic Honeymoon Rehearsal at Rod Bianco opening on November 20 in Oslo, Norway 3. See Niki de Saint Phalle’s psychedelic world at the National Art Center in Tokyo, Japan – on view until December 14 4. Alex Israel’s cool, cool world at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas 5. See the late Dash Snow’s posthumous retrospective at the Brant Foundation in Greenwich, Connecticut 6. Misha Hollenbach and Cali Thornhill Dewitt team up for Hot Fire in Milan, Italy 7. Pablo Picasso’s sculptures are on view at The Museum of Modern Art In New York City, New York 8. The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles, California 9. Josh Jefferson is putting his Head Into The Trees at Gallery 16, opening on November 13, in San Francisco, California 10. Gilbert & George’s subversive banners will be on view at White Cube starting on November 25 in London, Englan
Richard Prince 'New Portraits' @ Blum and Poe in Tokyo
Blum & Poe presents Richard Prince: New Portraits, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Japan in almost twenty years. Prince has pioneered appropriation since the mid-1970s, mining images from mass media, advertising, and entertainment to subvert and redefine concepts of authorship and ownership. The new portraits update this strategy and continue Prince’s exploration of photography through the platform of Instagram. Richard Prince: New Portraits will be on view until May 30, at Blum and Poe, 1-14-34 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku Tokyo.
Love, Commas and Asterisks
Blum & Poe and legendary musician Van Dyke Parks present a selection of work by Maurizio Vetrugno, his first one-person exhibition in Los Angeles. Vetrugno’s practice alters everyday objects, such as cloth and tools, into wry commentary on popular culture of a bygone era. Hand-made, embroidered textiles, woven in Laos, depict the distinctive designs of vinyl record sleeves from the 1950s-1980s. The selected album covers reference the legacies of exotica, modernism, glam rock and the golden age of graphic design in music. Fashion has been a continuing influence on Vetrugno’s work, as exemplified in his female portraits woven in monochromatic hues of blue and green. Sources for these works derive from black and white images taken from fashion magazines of the same time period as the album covers. Models such as Twiggy evoke mid-century popular culture and become self-referential in the works -- the cloth “wears” the model. There is a lushness and preciousness to these labor-intensive textiles, whose technique co-opts and contradicts the Pop content. Maurizio Vetrugno: Love, Commas and Asterisks will be on view until August 25, 2012 at Blum & Poe, 2727 S. La Cienega, BLVD
Banks Violette at Blum & Poe
Blum & Poe gallery in Los Angeles presents an exhibition of new work by Banks Violette, his first one-person exhibition in Los Angeles. Simultaneously rooted in Minimalist form and contemporary in its use of industrial materials, Violette’s artistic practice freely employs diverse media, such as neon tubing, powder-coated steel, glass, salt, resin, and aluminum. Violette draws inspiration from a variety of subcultural communities, including hardcore punk and drone metal bands like Sunn O))), political conspiracy theorists, both left and right-wing religious fanatics, and most recently NASCAR and the iconography which populates the sport’s predominantly southern fan base. As if arrested in time, Violette’s sculptural objects and installations function as elegant reminders of darker moments past and present. On view until February 11, Blum and Poe, 2727 S. La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA