Desert Painters of Australia Part II @ Gagosian Beverly Hills

Gagosian presents a sequel to the critically acclaimed Desert Painters of Australia, again drawing from the distinguished collection of Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield. This is the first time that the work of Indigenous Australian artists are being shown in Los Angeles since Icons of the Desert at UCLA’s Fowler Museum in 2009.

Evolving out of ancestral rituals of mark making practiced for many thousands of years, such as tree carving, body painting, and sand drawing, painting on canvas is a fairly recent phenomenon for remotely based Indigenous Australians, linked to the forced displacement in the late 1960s of communities such as the Pintupi, Luritja, Warlpiri, and Arrernte peoples to the Papunya settlement in the Northern Territory. This social upheaval inadvertently created a resilient hub of artistic production: out of communal work on canvas, wall, and ground emerged the movement now referred to as Western Desert painting.

Desert Painters of Australia Part II is on view through September 6 at Gagosian 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90210. photographs courtesy of Gagosian

Group Show "I Don’t Like Fiction, I Like History" @ Gagosian Gallery In Los Angeles

I Don’t Like Fiction, I Like History, with works by Thomas Demand, Andreas Gursky, Duane Hanson, Sharon Lockhart, and Jeff Wall opens at Gagosian Gallery. Using the pictorial languages of realism and illusion, the participating artists turn fragments of everyday life into legible narratives. Duane Hanson’s ensemble of construction workers at rest, Lunchbreak (1989), and a figure modeled after his own child in a quiet moment, Child with Puzzle(1978), are installed with photographic works that both reflect and complicate ideas of recorded reality and subjective, constructed composition. On view through September 28th at Gagosian Gallery 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills.

Legendary William Eggleston at the Gagosian Beverly Hills

Photographer, and legend in his own right, Brad Elterman caught some magical moments of the opening of the legendary William Eggleston exhibition opening of his classic Los Alamos series at the Gagosian Beverly Hills in Los Angeles on view now through November 10, 2012. 

Openings: JAMES FRANCO / GUS VAN SANT "Unfinished"

my_own_private_idaho_phoenix_franco_gus_van_sant

"Unfinished" features two films, Endless Idaho and My Own Private River, which are collaborations between Gus Van Sant and James Franco. After casting Franco in the award-winning film Milk (2008), Van Sant showed him the dailies and other footage that he had shot many years before for My Own Private Idaho (1991), which starred River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves as street hustlers in Portland, Oregon. Much of this material did not make it into the final cut, and so Franco decided to fashion it into two new films, riffing off the original title. The opening is February 26th at the Gagosian in Beverly Hills and runs till April 9. www.gagosian.com