Tom Wesselmann's "Intimate Spaces" Opens @ Gagosian in Los Angeles

A large painting of lips smoking a cigarette. Smoker #8, 1973 © The Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by ARS/VAGA, New York, Photo: Jeffrey Sturges, Courtesy the Estate and Gagosian

Smoker #8, 1973 © The Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by ARS/VAGA, New York, Photo: Jeffrey Sturges, Courtesy the Estate and Gagosian

A defining artist of American Pop Art, Tom Wesselmann produced innovative mixed-media paintings that brought the energy of commercial culture to still lifes, interiors, landscapes, and nudes. The exhibition—Intimate Spaces—concentrates on the artist’s primary subject, the female nude, with key works from Great American Nudes (1961–73) and subsequent series. With a nod to both the great American novel and the American dream, Great American Nudes also refers to Wesselmann’s affinity for the scale of Abstract Expressionist paintings, billboards, and movie screens. Inspired by Henri Matisse’s odalisques, Wesselmann employed a saturated palette, clearly defined contours, and interlocking positive and negative shapes. The paintings are set in domestic interiors and often incorporate collage and assemblage elements, appearing highly contemporary in their provocative discontinuities of style.

Wesselmann’s nudes became icons of the 1960s sexual revolution. Wishing to avoid portraiture, the artist frequently deemphasized facial features, foregrounding both abstraction and overt eroticism. “The figures dealt primarily with their presence,” he wrote (as his pseudonym, Slim Stealingworth). “Personality would interfere with the bluntness of the fact of the nude. When body features were included, they were those important to erotic simplification, like lips and nipples. There was no modeling, no hint at dimension.”

Intimate Spaces is on view through June 16 @ Gagosian 456 North Camden Drive
Beverly Hills

Ben Sakoguchi's Chinatown @ Bel Ami In Los Angeles

Ben Sakoguchi’s combinations of commercial signage, history painting, and Pop Art comment on the American Dream and its fraught entanglement with xenophobia and racism. With acrylic paint on canvas, Sakoguchi reassembles imagery from film posters, newspapers, comics, and internet searches to reveal subtexts of local discrimination, mass media exploitation, and state-sanctioned violence. A Japanese American who spent years of his childhood living in an internment camp during World War II, Sakoguchi comments on a century and a half of prejudice against diasporic Asians. Contending with overlapping histories that contribute to ideas of Asian American identity, Sakoguchi creates an ironic primer on capitalism’s treachery with an audacity that challenges and uplifts.

A publication with essays by Eli Diner (Critic, Curator, and Executive Editor of Cultured magazine), Steven Wong (Curator and the Director of the Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA), and Ana Iwataki (Writer, Curator, and PhD student in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture, University of Southern California, Los Angeles) will be released in PDF and printed form during the course of this exhibition.

Chinatown is on view through April 24 @ Bel Ami 709 N Hill St. #105, Los Angeles

Ben Sakoguchi Chinatown, 2014 Acrylic on canvas, wooden frames (1 of 15 panels) 53 x 91 in (134.6 x 231.1 cm)

Ben Sakoguchi
Chinatown, 2014
Acrylic on canvas, wooden frames (1 of 15 panels) 53 x 91 in (134.6 x 231.1 cm)

Headlines: Recent Drawings By Derek Boshier @ Night Gallery In Los Angeles

Derek Boshier’s practice has taken many forms over the years: he has produced films, paintings, sculptures, album covers as well as theatrical sets, but drawing has remained central the entire time. Magazines and newspaper clippings are the primary source for his “Headline” drawings and the immediacy of the medium has allowed him to react to current events in real time. While the drawings exhibited here are all recent, they are the culmination of decades of dedication to drawing and conviction to understanding the world at large through lines on paper.

Headlines is on view through March 13 by appointment and online viewing room @ Night Gallery 2276 E 16th Street

"AN ALL COLORED CAST" By Hank Willis Thomas @ Kayne Griffin Corcoran In Los Angeles

An All Colored Cast is an exploration of color theory, popular culture, the development of Pop Art, Color Field painting, Minimalism, and the Hollywood film industry. In this new body of work, Thomas examines the portrayals of gender, race, and identity through the lens of film, performance, and color motion pictures.

Using color theory and screen color calibration charts as an aesthetic starting point, Thomas re-examines the language surrounding “color correction” and “white balance” in order to demonstrate the charged language of color, particularly around the time of desegregation and the proliferation of Technicolor in America.

An all Colored Cast is on view throughout March 7, 2020 at Kayne Griffin Corcoran 1201 S La Brea Ave. Los Angeles, CA. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Punch, Curated By Nina Chanel Abney @ Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles

Punch, curated by artist Nina Chanel Abney, features thirty-three artists who examine contemporary culture and society through the lens of figuration. The exhibition focuses on artists primarily from Los Angeles in Abney’s circle who explore connections and disconnections between culture and subculture, figuration and abstraction, and the physical and the digital. The pieces featured in the exhibition contain references to art historical precedents such as Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, as well as street art, while integrating elements of design, graffiti, cartoons, and satire. Using painting, sculpture, and performance as acts of defiance, these artists explore how they can create figurative and abstract representations with visual punch while portraying a society immersed in new media and pop culture.

Punch, Curated by Nina Chanel Abney is on view through August 17 at Jeffrey Deitch Los Angeles 925 North Orange Drive, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch

Tom Wesselmann "A Different Kind of Woman" @ Almine Rech Gallery In Paris

In October 2016, Almine Rech Gallery will host an exhibition of historical artworks by Tom Wesselmann, inspired by the artist’s 1970 exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. Wesselmann’s ‘Bedroom Tit Box’, a key performative work from the Janis exhibition, will be restaged in Paris for the first time. The work will be installed alongside seminal examples of Wesselmann’s post-collage works, making the exhibition at Almine Rech the most significant presentation of the artist’s work in Paris since his 1995 retrospective at the Fondation Cartier, and groundbreaking 1967 exhibition at Ileana Sonnabend Gallery. Tom Wesselmann "A Different Kind of Woman"  will be on view until December 21, 2016 at Almine Rech Gallery in Paris. photographs by Mazzy-Mae Green

Oliver Clegg "Life Is A Gasssss" @ Erin Cluley Gallery In Dallas, Texas

Exploring themes of change and resilience, Life Is a Gasssss will depict 20th century pop icons as an allusion to how the information overload of the 21st century has impacted visual culture. The cross-media selection of works will reflect the breadth of the artist’s practice. Click here to read our interview with the artist. Life Is a Gasssss will be on view until May 7, 2016 at Erin Cluley Gallery, 414 Fabrication Street, Dallas Texas

Richard Phillips Will Be Showing New Paintings At Gagosian Athens in Greece

In his paintings, Richard Phillips engages the complex web of human obsessions to do with sexuality, politics, power, death that are constantly exploited in mainstream media. Subjecting popular images to a range of classical painterly techniques, he estranges their familiarity and thus imbues them with new meaning. Photographic images of politicians are re-cast in neon, while supermodels are represented as academic paintings, as if to augment their status as pop icons. Over and over again throughout his work, the glossy idealism of advertising propaganda is subverted by his underlying resistance to its blatant seduction. Departing from the more photorealistic tendencies of recent years, in his newest works Phillips culls celebrity portraits, retro textbook illustrations, logos, and Op Art motifs to produce compressed images in an electric palette. Richard Phillips at Gagosian Athens will be on view until August 1, 2015, 3 Merlin Street Athens 10671

Bardot by Andy Warhol

brigitte_bardot_andy_warhol_gagosian

Brigitte Bardot was one of the first women to be really modern and treat men like love objects, buying them and discarding them. I like that. --Andy Warhol

Gagosian Gallery London presents an exhibition of Andy Warhol's portraits of Brigitte Bardot. Warhol first met Bardot at the Cannes Film Festival in 1967 when she actively supported his attempt to show Chelsea Girls there after the original planned screening had been cancelled. In 1973, at the height of her fame, she announced her retirement from making films. That same year Warhol received the commission to make her portrait. At the time that he was shifting his focus from filmmaking back to painting and perhaps viewed her coincidental screen exit as the perfect opportunity to commemorate and idolize her in art. On view at the Gagosian Gallery in London until November 12. 

Joy-Art: Ladislav Sutnar

The Czech-American designer Ladislav Sutnar (1897—1976) created many internationally-acclaimed design icons. At the age of 65, he delved into painting. Now on view at Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague, U.S. Venus is the first independent exhibition of Sutnar’s art in forty years and presents his paintings of female nudes never shown before. Sutnar called these works Venus and exhibited them under the label Joy-Art. In this art manifesto, he formulated his concept of art for the 21st century – as vigorous, humanistic and joyful. His geometric figures rendered in contrasting colors reflect American painting of the time, namely Pop Art. U.S. Venus is on view until October 8.