Emily Ferguson Puts Her Spin on Andersen's Red Shoes @ Half Gallery In Los Angeles

top: Cecile Tulkens
skirt: Mugler couture


photography by Maddy Rotman
styling by Grace Dougherty
hair and makeup by Lilly Pollan


Figures swathed in ribbons as though wrapped in a breeze or a melody, Emily Ferguson borrows from music, cinema, art history and her own biography for this latest exhibition in Los Angeles. The title track of the show is a heavily chiarascuro-ed underpainting capturing an adolescent moment of exuberance, a feeling echoed in “Dancer” albeit a more specified form of activation. The painter had recently rewatched the 1948 movie Red Shoes based on the Hans Christian Andersen story and decided to put her pirouette on this ballet narrative. In real life, Emily considers herself more of a tomboy and likes that her femininity finds a release in these compositions. “Adorned” explores this tension with a young woman sporting a decidedly butch flight cap in the style of Amelia Earhart, but specked with tiny colorful bows, a direct reference to the artists late grandmother who was a seamstress. Perhaps the North Star of the exhibition is a self-portrait done in the style of Alice Neel’s famous nude: a repose of empowerment and vulnerability. 

 
 

dress: Norma Kamali
tights: Falke
shoes: St. John

Linda Stojak Paints Memories Like Ghosts In It's ok to do nothing @ Lowell Ryan Projects In Los Angeles

 
 

Linda Stojak’s It’s ok to do nothing is a series of solitary female figures painted in an ambiguous space between identity and anonymity. While personal in nature, these works allow for a range of interpretation and emotional response. Stojak’s works conjure a feeling of remembrance and the uncertainty that can come when time has passed—layers of memory that shift with a perspective that only age and time can bring. They are enigmatic renderings of women, lushly executed and textured by the build up of paint—methodical applications with the palette knife, layers of washes, and considered brushstrokes. A kind of burnishing effect emerges that creates a luminous glow in the surfaces. Each painting provides a journey for the viewer, but within the realm of this expressionist figurative painter there is also the emergence of a portrait—unfinished, evolving and transforming. Stojak’s figures are often incomplete in nature. The eyes, or often the whole face, smudged or blurred creating a feeling of recalling the memory of a loved one, while the shape of the hair, the color of lipstick or gesture of the body remain—a floating image or “stillness” as Stojak says. “These paintings deal with moments in time where you cannot move forward and you cannot move backward.” The figures read less as individuals, but instead as timeless memories that hover on the canvas like ghosts.

It’s ok to do nothing is on view through May 7 @ Lowell Ryan Projects 4619 W. Washington Boulevard.

Read Our Interview Of Painter Anna Weyant On The Occasion Of Her Loose Screw Exhibition @ Blum & Poe In Los Angeles →

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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.

New Paintings By Brittney Leeanne Williams @ Alexander Berggruen in New York

 
 

The Arch Is A Portal Is A Belly Is A Back marks Brittney Leeanne Williams’ first solo exhibition with Alexander Berggruen. The new paintings and works on paper by Brittney Leeanne Williams take influence from desertscapes in Victorville, a city northeast of Los Angeles where Williams spent part of her childhood. Williams transforms these Southern Californian landscapes into “emotional landscapes: representations of psychological states, memories, and emotional ties.”

The red of many of Williams’s figures might connote a rawness, a tenderness, and an emotional vulnerability. As Legacy Russell wrote: “A break, tear, rupture, or cut in skin opens a portal and a passageway. Here, too, is both a world and a wound.” (1) Williams’s female forms serve as conduits to viewing a dimension of Williams’s spirit. In her own words: “Her back becomes the keystone. She holds up what is above, fastening herself to what’s below, to make room so that something or someone may pass through.”
(1) Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, London, New York, 2020, pp. 83-84, 101

The Arch Is a Portal Is a Belly Is a Back is on view through April 14 @ Alexander Berggruen 1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3, New York

Hugh Steers: Strange State Of Being @ Alexander Gray Associates In New York

Strange State of Being is an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Hugh Steers (1962–1995). A figurative painter, the artist was diagnosed with HIV in 1987, ultimately succumbing to AIDS-related complications in 1995 at the age of 32. The gallery’s show takes its title from a 1994 quote by the artist, “There seems to be a buzz. … I’m in such a strange state of being, and nothing’s ever going to be the same.” Reflective of his state, Steers’s compositions, enigmatic scenes of sickness and tenderness, unflinchingly bear witness to the true cost of the AIDS epidemic while speaking to our present health crisis and political fragility.

the majority of Steers’s compositions articulate his inner fears and desires as he made art under the specter of the virus. Highlighting the influence of the Western canon on his practice, a series of images, including Girl in Blue and Red (1987), feature an imp-like child whose eerie presence recalls that of the creature from Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781). In Gold Box (1988), Steers presents this being blinding a man as a snake slithers from an open box. Referencing the myth of Pandora, who released sickness into the world, this menacing painting—created one year after the artist tested positive for HIV—expresses his despair at the diagnosis. Similarly ominous, additional canvases from this period also contain snakes, as well as harbingers of death like crows.

Despite these portents, while indelibly shaped by the AIDS crisis, Steers’s work always rises above its grim realities. As the writer Justin Spring suggests, at the core of the artist’s oeuvre is “… a lingering desire for something transcendent.” Searching for transcendence in the midst of the epidemic, Steers’s paintings gain new resonance in 2021. Their imagery, limned by what the artist once described as the “soft glow of brutality,” anticipates the isolation, loss, and uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Strange State of Being is on view through April 3 @ Alexander Gray Associates 510 West 26 Street, New York

Bernhard Buhmann's 'My Automatic Me' @ Nino Mier Gallery In Los Angeles

Informed by a background in sociology, Vienna-based painter Bernhard Buhmann’s hard-edged, abstracted works speak to larger issues concerning the figure in a modern-day environment and therefore, humanity, as it engages with a society that is technologically advancing at an accelerated rate. The exhibition title, My Automatic Me, suggests themes which belong to today’s world of cyborgian post-humanism, digital avatars, virtual reality and artificial intelligence but with a sense of friendliness that is either uncanny or intimate - or both. As the world advances, forcing our animal behaviors to evolve towards Buhmann’s Automatic Me, the artist examines what it means to be human in this newfangled, spectacular landscape.

Buhmann’s whole body of work eventually fits together to form an integrated aesthetic matrix, capturing performative remnants of a sociological body, the crux of human condition disguised as a computer game, even attempts to calculate consciousness – each work a colorful, geometric portrait of our quickly evolving selves. My Automatic Me is on view through November 17 @ Nino Mier Gallery Two, 7313 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles.

Madeleine Pfull's Inaugural Solo Exhibition @ Nino Mier Gallery In Los Angeles

Australian artist Madeleine Pfull’s inaugural exhibition at Nino Mier Gallery illustrates a stylized narrative of a complex suburban universe inspired by her youth. Littered with images and subjects that are familial, humorous and peculiar, the paintings center around the lives of these richly imagined characters. The subjects she paints exude a specific type, mostly middle-class women, likely from the 1980s. Her women wear big-box store clothing, live in homely domestic interiors, but with an earnestness and sense of pride that makes them all more intellectually interesting. Pfull explains that ‘they appear as the quotidian details of middle-class suburbs. They can appear fed up or bored but it is more of a sense of importance and stoicism.

The subjects could be one of many mothers, aunts and neighbors, with their familiar awkward sweaters, botched perms, floral aprons and old-fashioned curtains. Most of the works grow richly from these known phenotypes, and the artist enjoys when the viewer enhances the character’s narrative by implying extended storylines. Pfull explains further that her work articulates her fascination with taste and expressing one’s social status and personal pride through material things. For the women she portrays, she asserts that the ones who try the hardest to appear superior are the ones most uncomfortable with their lack of taste. This duality to their identity, of inferiority and superiority, is exaggerated through the medium of painting, where, like the current embracing of retro culture and fashion, time adds prestige to kitsch. Madeleine Pfull’s eponymous solo exhibition is on view through November 17th at Nino Mier Gallery 7313 Santa Monica Blvd.

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer 'The Chiefest Of Ten Thousand' @ Nino Mier Gallery In Los Angeles

Over the course of her career Celeste Dupuy-Spencer has set out to create paintings interrogating the American experience, a subject that she began to believe could not be addressed without attending to the question of religion. The resulting body of work gathered for her exhibition The Chiefest of Ten Thousand offers a depiction of our moment through a series of portraits, religious scenes, and landscapes. Taken together these works present a view that is conflicted, terror-filled, absurd, and marked by a powerful tenderness. This show exposes dark palimpsests of our culture as well as warmth, pleasure, and humor.

This body of work is a record of the deeply felt task of trying to be, and be good, in the contradictions of this moment. The polyvocality the artist brings to each painting, through their images and gestures, make them purposefully hard to grasp, refusing to cohere even as they have a razor sharp affective import. They picture a self that cannot be reconciled as a manifestation of a society that refuses reconciliation. Dupuy-Spencer suggests that there are real and profound ways to save ourselves—finding grace in the mire is an unending and complicated process, but love and community might be an ongoing redemption. The Chiefest of Ten Thousand is on view through November 3 @ Nino Mier Gallery 7313 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles. text by Diana Nawi


Soul Of A Nation: Art In the Age Of Black Power Opens @ Brooklyn Museum

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power shines light on a broad spectrum of Black artistic practice from 1963 to 1983, one of the most politically, socially, and aesthetically revolutionary periods in American history. Black artists across the country worked in communities, in collectives, and individually to create a range of art responsive to the moment-including figurative and abstract painting, prints, and photography; assemblage and sculpture; and performance. The exhibition is on view from September 14 through February 3 at Brooklyn Museum 200 Eastern Parkway Brooklyn, New York

ART REVIEW: Jonny Negron @ Chateau Shatto Gallery in Los Angeles

 
 

From afar, Jonny Negron’s paintings at Chateau Shatto are not unlike tastefully illustrated advertisements for some unnamed tropical paradise. Look closer at these picturesque scenes, though, and it becomes clear that “Small Map of Heaven” documents waters engulfed with trash, beachgoers undergoing trauma, and a faded pink bathroom as a site for tears.

The Puerto Rican born, Brooklyn-based artist references the delayed response to the destruction in Hurricane Maria’s wake. An abundance of flora envelops the gouache paintings. Although beautiful, these omnipresent plants swarm and tighten their grip on whatever is in their way, suggesting nature’s revanchist desires in an era of climate change.

Negron, who has a background in comic book illustration, cites Japanese woodblock prints, or ukiyo-e, as inspiration. In Generator, a submerged spectre faces a Champion generator on the ocean floor, peering at the one device, now useless, that could have saved it’s flesh and bones. Hints of the 18th-century artist Maruyama Okyo’s woodblock prints of yurei (ghosts) come to mind.

Like the apprehensive face in Paul Gauguin’s gouache painting Breton Girl By the Sea, the windswept shore and balmy night in Bonus reminds us that often no setting, no matter how idyllic, can brighten whatever internal issue eats at us. The cartoonishly-chiseled man, eyes focused nowhere, sits on the beach in a daze.

A man weeps in a cloying bathroom in To Live and Die in LA, grasping the same plants that have been present in the other waterlogged paintings as puddles of water sparkle on the tile floor. Los Angeles, too, experiences destruction--albeit from fires due to forest encroachment and rampant home-building.

Water is always present throughout “Small Map of Heaven”--although it can offer relief from the debris and destruction on land, it is also the source of such peril.

“Small Map of Heaven” runs from July 14th - September 1st, 2018 at Chateau Shatto (1206 S. Maple Ave, Suite 1030, Los Angeles, CA, 90015)

Liam Casey is a freelance writer, researcher and DJ from Los Angeles. In addition to being a contributor for Berlin Art Link, he also has a background in housing and urban planning, co-developing a think-tank on Los Angeles’ housing crisis. He is also a co-organizer and resident of the queer collective Bubbles.

Jansson Stegner Paintings @ Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles

Nino Mier Gallery is currently presenting Jansson Stegner's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. This new series of oil paintings that ascribe male and female figures with exaggeratedly rendered physiques explores the inversion of gender roles within myriad aspects of authority, dominance, submission and beauty. Jansson Stegner Paintings will on view until March 3 at Nino Mier Gallery 7313 Santa Monica Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90046.