Hollywood's Greatest Hits: John Waters Solo Exhibition @ Sprueth Magers In Los Angeles

 
 

Hollywood’s Greatest Hits marks John Waters’ first solo exhibition with Sprueth Magers. Featuring a selection of works, most of which have never been seen before in LA, the series sheds light on the artist’s decades-long, wide-ranging art practice, and in particular, his humorous and irreverent takes on the movie industry. The over 30 works on view encompass videos, photographs, sculptures and installations that skewer film tropes and culture while also offering cutting, but loving, critiques of mass media, celebrity and insider art-world knowledge.

In the early 1990s, Waters began shooting photographs straight from his television screen. The results were grainy, arty-looking images that he pieced together into evocative photomontages, creating storyboard-like sequences read from left to right. These playful acts of appropriation and juxtaposition, which transform favorite or forgotten films into what Waters calls his "little movies," create condensed stories or testimonies that offer narratives the original directors never intended.

Hollywood’s Greatest Hits is on view through May 1 @ Sprueth Magers 5900 Wilshire Boulevard 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.