Static: New Paintings By Vanessa Prager @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery In Los Angeles

Vanessa Prager’s recently completed series of oil paintings, Static, continues her exploration of sculptural impasto techniques and revisits 19th-century post-Impressionism in the 21st century. Prager’s new paintings pack a sensory and emotional impact, redefining perception in a high-def world. Her impasto pieces resist the quick take and allow us to discover the hidden treasure of the work itself; in these paintings, more is more. In this time of pandemic, when screens dominate as a means to work, play, connect and exist, Prager is the analog compass directing us back to the tangible. With big, heavy, drippy canvases and what can only be referred to as extreme painting, Prager rejects artificial crispness and reminds us how an abstract work can help us locate feelings so precisely.

Static is on view through April 10 @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery 831 N Highland Avenue, Los Angeles

David Hicks Presents Inaugural Solo Exhibition @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery In Los Angeles

Seed, David Hick’s exhibition of ceramics and drawings represents the artist’s first solo show with Diane Rosenstein Gallery. This body of work is closely connected to the landscape surrounding Hicks’ studio and home in Central San Joaquin Valley, a largely agricultural area in California. The artist writes,

While not tethered to a focused realism of nature’s shapes and natural development, my approach is more a loose conversation with natural form; one that addresses my interpretations of growth, irregularity and the movements of nature.

David Hicks’ multifaceted terracotta works ‘grow’ up and around the space in which they are installed. Dionysian ‘Offerings’ take the artist’s maximalist approach to an extreme, depicting heaping plates of vegetal forms—some rising four feet high off the floor—doused in thick glazes, often captured in mid-drip. Plant-like forms also appear as small talismanic objects the artist calls ‘Clippings’. In places, the forms appear more bodily, like heads or organs, offering a reminder that we, too, are a part of the landscape.

Seed is on view by appointment through February 13 @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery 831 N Highland Avenue

King Dogs Never Grow Old: A Group Show Curated By Brooke Wise @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles

Borrowed from André Breton and Philippe Soupault’s surrealist text Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields), the show’s title alludes to exploring the nonsensical and the dreamlike unconscious. The work on view shares a common dialogue and aims to explore these surrealist notions in a contemporary manner.

Jillian Mayer and Haley Josephs use color and whimsy to address these surrealist concepts. Ginny Casey draws inspiration from classic Walt Disney cartoons and welcomes the spectator with distorted, absurd and disproportioned objects, which play with our restrictions of logic and time. Tom of Finland celebrates sexuality, fantasy, and the body in all areas of human endeavor. Scott Reeder and Matthew Sweesy both use comedy and rhetoric in their paintings. Chris Wolston’s Nalgona chairs are humanized by his addition of wicker body parts. Sam Crow’s tufted wall works skew our sense of reality and attempt to destroy our sense of stability in her usage of geometric shapes and dimension. Rose Nestler’s soft sculptures explore the body as the subconscious mind. Bri Williams uses found objects often with personal associations, to evoke a potent, psychic mood. Minimalist artist Robert Moreland reinvents his canvas into the space between painting and sculpture, while Haley Mellin’s small paintings reinvent mundane objects such as a Warholian banana floating in space. Through comedy, rhetoric, sarcasm and the uncanny, these works all share a common discourse about surrealism, the unexpected and the unconventional.

King Dogs Never Grow Old is on view through February 1st at Diane Rosenstein Gallery 831 N Highland Ave, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery