Barbara Kruger Survey Decodes The Powers That Be @ Sprüth Magers In Los Angeles

The work of Barbara Kruger—bold, trenchant and unmistakable—has made an indelible mark not only on contemporary art of the last four decades, but also more broadly on everyday visual culture. She developed her concise, forthright aesthetic in the early 1980s, and since then has deployed it across myriad forms, from small-scale tactile objects to monumental public facades. Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers present this exhibition of new and historical works by Kruger at the Los Angeles gallery timed with her major exhibition, Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You., on view across Wilshire Boulevard at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (March 20–July 17, 2022).

As visitors enter the gallery, they first encounter Kruger's large-scale triptych, Untitled (Never Perfect Enough) (2020). The format of the appropriated image, in tandem with the added text, recalls the practice of phrenology, a nineteenth-century pseudoscience in which the shape and size of people's heads was thought to determine their character and mental abilities—and often used historically to argue for white supremacy and class distinctions. Kruger's triptych updates this urge to divide, categorize and control, situating these long-standing human pursuits squarely in the present while simultaneously picturing the connections between "beauty" and the punishing regimens that accompany it.

A group of twenty collages from the 1980s, related to some of Kruger's early and best-known works, completes the exhibition. The artist refers to these objects as "paste-ups," the term for cut-and-paste mockups used in the field of graphic design, which reflects Kruger's time as an editorial designer for Mademoiselle magazine and her work designing book jackets and picture editing in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Displayed together, Untitled (Never Perfect Enough) and Kruger's collages span the artist's career both temporally and conceptually. They offer compelling insights into her process and practice, and they illustrate the many ways in which her work has infiltrated our understanding of mass media and the power structures that control and manipulate contemporary culture.

Barbara Kruger is on view now through July 16 at Sprüth Magers, 5900 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles.

James Gobel Presents Shadrach, Meshach, and Abedne’no She Betta Don’t @ Bozo Mag In Los Angeles

BLACK SCREEN

Twenty-five lines of bright light slowly open across the screen. The lines continue to broaden, revealing that we’re looking through window blinds that are being opened. The light is from a rising sun. Handclaps fade up. Cheerleader claps. A hypervariation of the old “Wipe Out” riff. Stomping feet come in. Then a bass line. The sound is jagged and jubilant. The martial music of the suburban high school tribes. The title track surges in and we:

CUT TO

CHEERLEADERS

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abedne’no She Betta Don’t is on view by appointment through April 4 @ Bozo Mag 815 Cresthaven Drive, Los Angeles

Nikita Gale's Thank God You're Here @ 56 Henry In New York

“Thank God you’re here” is an exclamation of relief at the presence of another person. This presence offers a sense of safety or comfort—delivery from whatever was occurring before they arrived. The phrase is also a simple instruction: thank God—a body that is both present and absent, a body whose presence is contingent on social agreements that are substantiated through ritual and repetition—that you are here.

The differences in meaning are less important than the situation that is implied: an experience of the presence of others. Each of the works presented in this exhibition is a meditation on the indeterminate boundary between presence and absence, and, in particular, how presence is read in the absence of bodies.

Like lungs, caves are hollow spaces within solid forms. They delineate—and facilitate exchanges—between inside and outside, whether by providing people with shelters or forums for sharing information. Caves are the ancestral homes of homo sapiens. In caves, we began to tell stories to one another with sounds and images—around fires, surrounded by walls inscribed with records of our experiences. (In a cave in Indonesia, archaeologists recently discovered a life-size painting of a wild pig that was made 45,500 years ago, making it the oldest known cave drawing.) Just as caves were spaces in which domestic, social, and theatrical life coalesced, COLLAPSE I–IV, a series of collages, compresses images of caves onto those of coliseums, arenas, and other types of performance venues. The formal gesture of collapsing these images into a single plane allows the prehistoric to haunt the present. The erasure of the distinctions between the contemporary categories of domestic, social, and theatrical throws into relief the discursive relationship between them.

Thank God You’re Here is on view through March 22 at 56 Henry Street New York

Sue Williams Paintings And Collages @ 303 Gallery In New York

In 2020, the brutal reality of living in the waning days of American Empire has allowed Williams to consider how we might have arrived at this point. Her new paintings are suffused with images of colonial times: disembodied Pilgrim clogs, Tudor cabins, horses outfitted with blinders, the literal nuts & bolts that prefigured the industrial revolution, Betsy Ross as a dinosaur. The suggestion that America is founded on violence and manipulation, that the post-truth, post-Trump, post-COVID world is not an anomaly but a continuation of a status quo built over the past 400 years, doesn't seem far-fetched. A painting titled "Land Of Profit and Coincidence" would resonate equally in 1620 or 2020.

There is a wry and impertinent classicism in Williams' compositions - at first glance, they suggest the kind of maps early land surveyors might use. They also may intimate the strewn wreckage of a natural disaster, here the relentless and sadistic subversion of democracy, the American dream, and E Pluribus Unum. Couched in the archetypal imagery of our noble forefathers, of amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties, American idyll itself becomes Machiavellian. Williams herself sums it up with two quotes: "The American people are the most brainwashed in the world" (Adam Curtis), and a hopeful note courtesy of Woody Guthrie: "You fascists never gonna win."

Sue Williams’ solo exhibition is on view through January 30 @ 303 Gallery 555 W 21st Street

The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles Presents Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019

The first comprehensive survey in the United States of drawings and works on paper by the Los Angeles–based artist Paul McCarthy (b. 1945, Salt Lake City), Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019, reveals a rarely examined aspect of the artist’s oeuvre. Produced in thematic cycles, McCarthy’s drawings share the same visual language as the artist’s sculptural and performance works, addressing themes of violence, humor, death, sex, and politics, and featuring extensive art historical and pop-cultural references. By presenting his expansive career of more than five decades through the focused lens of drawing, the exhibition offers a greater understanding of this influential artist and social commentator.

Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019 features 600 works on paper selected from McCarthy’s archive. The works incorporate and utilize a variety of mediums, including charcoal, graphite, ink, marker, and collage, as well as more unorthodox materials such as ketchup and peanut butter. A consummate and accomplished draftsperson, McCarthy approaches his daily drawing practice as a way of thinking—a blueprint for projects and a tool to flesh out complex ideas. Since the 1970s, McCarthy has also incorporated drawing into his performances, implementing it as part of an action and often drawing in character. In recent years, this practice of drawing in character has become central to his large-scale video performance projects, such as WS White Snow (2012–13), CSSC Coach Stage Stage Coach (2017), and NV Night Vater (2019–). In a process McCarthy terms “Life Drawing, Drawing Sessions” the artist and his actors produce drawings in costume among the props and simulacrum of his film sets. These works bring together the materials and crude gestures that have been present in the artist’s work for the greater part of his career.

Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019 will be on view throughout May 10, 2020 at The Hammer Museum 10899 Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles, CA. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Dorothea Tanning: Worlds In Collision @ Alison Jacques Gallery In London

Alison Jacques Gallery is pleased to announce the solo exhibition Dorothea Tanning: Worlds in Collision. The exhibition features a rarely displayed body of late work dating from 1981 to 1989, which is being shown together for the first time in the United Kingdom. It includes large scale works on paper in media as varied as graphite, charcoal, crayon, watercolour, gouache, and collage, many of which focus on imagery of the bicycle which preoccupied Tanning at this time. The exhibition coincides with the publication of the monograph Dorothea Tanning: Transformations by Victoria Carruthers, which will be released by Lund Humphries on 31 January 2020.

Worlds in Collision will be on view through March 21, 2020 @ Alison Jacques Gallery 16-18 Berners St. London W1T 3LN. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Tomashi Jackson Presents Forever My Lady @ Night Gallery In Los Angeles

Tomashi Jackson’s multimedia practice places formal and material investigations in dialogue with recent histories of displacement and disenfranchisement. Drawing centrally from Josef Albers’ research on the relativity of color and the unconscious processes by which the brain organizes and reconciles information, Jackson’s work bridges gaps between geometric experimentation and the systematization of injustice, incorporating images hand-painted from photographs and materials chosen for their relevance into formalist compositions. 

Jackson’s latest body of work principally concerns the question of democracy, taking up its conceptual origins in Ancient Greece, with its contingent notion of obligatory civic participation. She compares this history of democracy to the realities of the present-day United States, with particular attention to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, written to prevent discriminatory practices at the state and local levels that prevented Black Americans from exercising their right to vote. Jackson cites the enactment of this law as the true beginning of American democracy, though she points to subsequent public crises – the rise of gerrymandering and the the crack epidemic that began in Los Angeles in the 1980s – to question democracy’s true status in the US today. 

Forever My Lady is on view throughout February 8, 2020 @ Night Gallery 2276 E 16th St. LA. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Miyoshi Barosh Presents Love @ Luis De Jesus In Los Angeles

"The work of art created as a labor of love may sound cynical, yet it is made in good faith and contains a deep utopian wish for social change, no matter how naive and nostalgic that dream is."  ~ Miyoshi Barosh

Over the last fifteen years, Miyoshi Barosh made her work with humor and dystopian irony in a style she called "Conceptual Pop."  With an emphasis on cultural blindness toward death, decay, and the disintegration of both utopian social constructs, and ultimately the individual body itself, Barosh saw her work as "a manifestation of competing emotions around cultural conceits and identity politics through a handmade carnivalesque, mischievous confrontation."  Given her untimely death, her message is made even more poignant, if not tragic, because she lived it.  

LOVE was the first large-scale work that Barosh created using repurposed afghans -- those lonely and discarded, hand-made blankets which "in itchy, acrylic coziness embody feelings of dependency, obligation, and guilt." Together with I Keep Going On, these collaged and crocheted pieces play on the notion of a "labor of love." Making afghans is traditionally a women's craft that, according to the artist, refers to both the "ideal of self-less love and to the idea of unconditional love, that is expected of, but not a reality of, family." These pieces are "deliberately imperfect, damaged, and irregular like the human condition, pulled by conflicting desires for independence and dependency, freedom and obligation."

Love will be on view through February 15, 2020 @ Luis De Jesus Los Angeles 2685 S. La Cienega Blvd. LA. Concurrent exhibitions honoring the life and work of the late Los Angeles artist, who died in 2019, will be held at Night Gallery in downtown LA and The Pit in Glendale. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Rashid Johnson: The Hikers @ Hauser & Wirth New York

The Hikers unfolds through five rooms in a formal arrangement that echoes the fragmentation and accumulation of Johnson’s mosaics and collaged works on display. The viewer is first greeted by three monumental mosaics, each comprised of myriad materials familiar from the artist’s practice: multi-color ceramic and mirror tile, oil stick, black soap, wax, and branded red oak flooring. These works evolved out of Johnson’s Anxious Men and Anxious Audiences (2015 – 2018), earlier series in which frenzied, abstracted faces were rendered in black soap and wax on a grid of white tiles. Here, his images of Broken Men and their fellows explode in a storm of bold hues, errant drips of wax, splashes of paint, and splintered surfaces.In these new works, Johnson pushes the anxiety of his figures to a breaking point, both metaphorically and physically. Whether portrayed alone or in groups, as in ‘Broken Crowds’ (2019), on view in the exhibition’s second room, these broken figures speak to collective and individual identities caught in the midst of shifting social realities. As injustices and racial conflicts in the US have continued to flare, Johnson’s works have likewise become more charged and dystopian than their earlier Anxious counterparts.

Rashid Johnson: The Hikers is on view through January 25, 2020 @ Hauser & Wirth 548 West 22nd Street
New York

Judith Supine Presents "MANLBDRO: The Cowboy Series" @ Muddguts in New York

Throughout the Cowboy series, Judith Supine uses one of the most iconic and impactful brand images of the past century: Marlboro Man advertisements from the 1960s and 1970s that symbolize a heroic desire for adventures to the unknown, valor and daring independence. Supine breaks the barrier of gender norms and social constructs by twisting the archetypal narrative and cultural context of the connotations likely associated with the cowboy and interjects his own personal associations with gender and sexuality. Re-writing the age-old narrative to include one where balance, nurture, environment and intimacy are at the forefront of inclusivity. 

MANLBDRO: The Cowboy Series is on view through August, Saturday-Sunday 12pm-8pm or by appointment at Muddguts 427 Graham Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211. photographs by Brian Karlsson

Judith Supine: Manlbdro: The Cowboy Series @ Muddguts in New York

 
 

Judith Supine’s latest solo show at Muddguts called, Manlbdro: The Cowboy Series features all new works by the artist. Throughout the Cowboy series, Supine uses iconic Marlboro Man advertisements from the 1960s and 1970s that symbolize a heroic desire for adventures of the unknown, valor, and daring independence. Supine breaks the barrier of gender norms and social constructs by twisting the archetypal narrative and cultural context of the cowboy figure, and interjects his own personal associations with gender and sexuality. Re-writing the age-old narrative to include one where balance, nurture, environment and intimacy are at the forefront of inclusivity, the Cowboy series is a continuation of the artists pursuit of placing art between the worlds of abstraction and representation.

Judith Supine: Manlbdro: The Cowboy Series is on view through August 25 at Muddguts 247 Graham Avenue Brooklyn, NY. photographs courtesy of the artist and Muddguts

Liz Johnson Artur: If you know the beginning, the end is no trouble @ South London Gallery in London

Liz Johnson Artur’s first solo show in the UK presents new sculptural works incorporating photographs selected from her substantial archive of images documenting the lives of people from the African diaspora. While Artur has taken photographs across Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean for more than three decades, this exhibition focuses on images that capture the richness and complexity of Black British life in London.

Liz Johnson Artur: If you know the beginning, the end is no trouble is on view through September 1 at the South London Gallery 65-67 Peckham Road, London. photographs courtesy of the South London Gallery

amy von harington: Buyer Beware @ Rude Drawing in Los Angeles

For the first time ever, amy von harington is showing a selection of collages from her three-year project on Instagram at Rude Drawing. While the artist’s assemblage pieces are primarily constructed from vintage images, her work reflects the current zeitgeist. Blending the banal with the ordinary, von harington creates a fantasyland where dolls and hunks across America embrace their freakishness.

Buyer Beware is on view through July 7 at Rude Drawing 1676 Redesdale Avenue Los Angeles, CA. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

New Museum Presents "Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel" The First American Survey Of The Artist's Oeuvre

Over the past thirty years, Lucas has created a distinctive and provocative body of work that subverts traditional notions of gender, sexuality, and identity. Since the late 1980s, she has transformed found objects and everyday materials such as cigarettes, vegetables, and stockings into disorienting, confrontational tableaux that boldly challenge social norms. The human body and anthropomorphic forms recur throughout Lucas’s works, often appearing erotic, humorous, fragmented, or reconfigured into fantastical anatomies of desire.

Initially associated with a group known as the Young British Artists (YBAs), who began exhibiting together in London in the late 1980s, Lucas is now one of the UK’s most influential artists. This presentation, which takes place across the three main floors of the New Museum, brings together more than 150 works in photography, sculpture, and installation to reveal the breadth and ingenuity of her practice. The exhibition addresses the ways in which Lucas’s works engage with crucial debates about gender and power, along with the legacy of Surrealism—from her clever transformations of everyday objects to her exploration of sexual ambiguity and the tension between the familiar and the absurd.

“Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel” features some of Lucas’s most important projects, including early sculptures from the 1990s that substitute domestic furniture for body parts and enlarged spreads from tabloid newspapers from the same period, which reflect objectified representations of the female body. Alongside the photographic self-portraits that Lucas has produced throughout her career, the exhibition features biomorphic sculptures including her stuffed-stocking Bunnies (1997–ongoing) and NUDS (2009–ongoing), the Penetralia series (2008–ongoing), and selections from her installations at the Freud Museum in London (2000) and the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2015). These works, which complicate inscribed codes of sexual and social normativity, have never before been shown together in the US. Lucas has also created new sculptural works for the exhibition, including This Jaguar’s Going to Heaven (2018), a severed 2003 Jaguar X-Type—the car’s back half burned and its front half collaged with cigarettes—and VOX POP DORIS (2018), a pair of eleven-foot-tall thigh-high platform boots cast in concrete.

Au Naturel is on view through January 20, 2019 at the New Museum 235 Bowery New York, 10002. photographs by Adam Lehrer

Dennis Koch Solo Exhibition @ Luis de Jesus in Los Angeles

Beyond the Funny Farm! Crypto-K, Cutouts, Cut-ups, Copies, Mirrors, Membranes, and Temporal Algorithms marks Dennis Koch's third solo exhibition with Luis de Jesus. In this exhibition, Koch creates a mind-map of relationships that find, build, and amplify meaning in the form of sculptures and drawings. Wooden newsstand-like sculptures display 100 vintage copies of LIFE magazine, each carved page by page to reveal interior images. Known as the first all-photographic American news magazine, LIFE revitalized itself during the 1960s in response to the popularity of television media. Koch's interest in LIFE as a cultural artifact stems from a time-parallel between contemporary political upheaval and the equally tumultuous events of the 1960s. The exhibition is on view through July 28 at Luis de Jesus 2685 S La Cienega Blvd. Los Angeles. photographs by Summer Bowie

John Stezaker "The Truth of Masks" at Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago

"The Truth of Masks" marks the latest exhibition of new collages by English artist John Stezaker, the largest U.S. exhibition of his work to date. For the past forty years, Stezaker has searched meticulously through vast archives of antique travel postcards, Hollywood film stills, and anonymous photographs to create collages that are sharp, poignant, and surreal. Through the reappropriation, alteration, and repurposing of these forgotten worlds, Stezaker creates new ones. Both minimal and complex, the collages are “transmissions of a Mass Age dream world.” "Truth of Masks" is on view until January 30th at Richard Gray Gallery, 875 N Michigan Ave #3800, Chicago. Text and photographs by Keely Shinners. 

Lure of Images: John Strezaker

Mask

John Strezaker 'Mask XXXV' 2007

British artist John Stezaker is fascinated by the lure of images. Taking classic movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations, Stezaker makes collages to give old images a new meaning. By adjusting, inverting and slicing separate pictures together to create unique new works of art, Stezaker explores the subversive force of found images. Stezaker’s famous Mask series fuses the profiles of glamorous sitters with caves, hamlets, or waterfalls, making for images of eerie beauty. This first major exhibition of John Stezaker offers a chance to see work by an artist whose subject is the power in the act of looking itself. With over 90 works from the 1970s to today, the artist reveals the subversive force of images, reflecting on how visual language can create new meaning. John Stezaker is organized by the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Mudam, Luxembourg - on view till March 18, 2011.