JP Munro's Overworld Captures the Extremity of the Southern California Wilds @ Broadway in New York

 
 

Broadway presents Overworld, a solo show of new paintings by Los Angeles artist JP Munro.

The exhibition comprises two enduring strains of the artist’s practice: exacting plein-air landscapes and altogether fantastical tableaux populated with a pantheon of mythical figures.

The landscapes gather their formidable power from the artist’s almost psychedelic level of observation and commitment not just to surface effect but to transmitting an experiential dimension to the canvas. A viewer immediately senses the endeavor of creating these hard-fought works amidst the beauty and extremity of the Southern California wilds. We feel each craggy outcropping of rock, every bristling shank of cactus,and the dramatic sprawl of a live oak as if in real-time and with a spiritual magnification that is unique to encounters with nature.

The figure-centered works would, at first, seem to sit in uneasy relation to the landscapes, but soon reveal themselves as an apt inversion of the former’s exteriority—fiction in place of hard fact. Picture book royalty, Norse deities, and their attendant lusty concubines inhabit mystical realms and cavort in a matrix of meticulously layered black and brown oil paint. Like a conceptualist take on William Blake, these characters hold our attention as both protagonists of the painting and somehow witnesses to its creation.

As the exhibition shifts between disciplined observation and freestyle world-building, Munro completes an expository circuit of the act of painting itself

Overworld is on view Tuesday–Saturday, 11AM–6PM through July 28th at Broadway, 375 Broadway, New York

Intersect Art and Design Presents Intersect Palm Springs

Intersect Palm Springs, which ran from February 10-13, 2022, brought together a dynamic mix of more than 50 established and emerging contemporary and modern art and design galleries.

The Fair featured two Curated Spaces:

Good Vibrations, organized by Shana Nys Dambrot (Arts Editor, LA Weekly) and Hunter Drohojowska-Philp (Author, Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s), offered an expanded view of geometric abstraction as it has evolved in Southern California from the 1950s to include the properties of light and the emotional and transcendent uses of color. Lorser Feitelson, Karl Benjamin, John Miller, Peter Lodato, Jim Isermann, Patrick Wilson, Dani Tull, Yunhee Min, Knowledge Bennett, and Jen Stark are among the artists to be included in this multi-generational show.

ZZyzx Redux, curated by Bernard Leibov (Director, BoxoPROJECTS), and presented with support from The Art Collective Fine Art Services, was inspired by that remote corner of the Mojave Desert which demonstrates the full cycle of modern Southern Californian desert history: from Indigenous trade route; to gold rush era federal fort; to railroad outpost; to a much hyped health resort; and finally an environmental research station. These cycles have spurred optimism, creative development, and new technologies as well as related aspects of dislocation, exploitation, and environmental damage. The exhibition looks at the sustainability of the current land rush in the local area through artworks both inspired by the attractant qualities of the region (light, space, architecture, nature, lifestyle) and those reminding us where history has taken us before. The exhibition includes work by artists Blake Baxter, Diane Best, Ryan Campbell, Gerald Clarke Jr., Sofia Enriquez, Kim Manfredi, Carlos Ramirez, Cara Romero, Aili Schmeltz, Ryan Schneider, Phillip K. Smith III, and Kim Stringfellow.

 

Tear by Richard Hudson. Presented by Michael Goedhuis at Intersect Palm Springs 2022 Focus on Form: Sculpture Garden

 

Focus on Form: Sculpture Garden provided a spotlight on sculpture at the entry to the Fair, featuring 18 large-scale works by such artists as Stephanie Bachiero (Peter Blake Gallery), Michael DeJong (New Discretions), Andy Dixon (Over the Influence), Tara de la Garza (bG Gallery), Richard Hudson (Michael Goedhuis), Robert Indiana (Galerie Gmurzynska), Dominique Labauvie (Bleu Acier), Robert Raphael (SITUATIONS), Alex Schweder (Edward Cella Art & Architecture), Jesse Small (Nancy Hoffman Gallery), Julian Voss-Andreae (HOHMANN), and Ben Allanoff.

Works from the Fair will be online at Artsy.net, Intersect’s exclusive online marketplace partner, through March 3, 2022.