[Review] Kaari Upson's Powerful Posthumous Exhibition At Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles

 

Kaari Upson “Kris’s Dollhouse” 2017-2019 (detail)

 

A pierced clit from beyond the grave—its folds and sensuous creases climb like a corpse flower too shy to bloom. A sheath covers something secret. A Christmas tree, covered in plastic, sutured closed forever by two rings. This sculpture, a detail from Kris’s Dollhouse (2017-19), is one of Upson’s many abstract and mysterious enlargements—part of a grander picture, a paroxysm of materiality, a puzzle piece from the infiniteness of memory. A hazy, drunken recollection of a family home in a dream. Profane, but holy, and nearly archaeological. In her posthumous exhibition, now on view at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles, Upson mines the psychosexual miasma and violent ecological grandeur of the Southern California suburbs and its surrounding environs, always tiptoeing on the edge of danger, which is even more haunting now in her mortal absence (Upson died after a long battle with cancer in 2021). Memory is both the canary and the lantern, guiding her into the carbonized cave of our deepest desires. She looks to Freudian and Lacanian analysis as a mirror and the obtuse chromium coating behind the mirror, which renders glass not as a window to peer through, but our reversed double. Walking through the exhibition is like walking through the ruins and artifacts of an artist rushing through the pangs of mortality like a flash flood. Each work is a notation on an emergency: paintings thick with the impasto of life’s sediments, sculptures tortured by unrecognizability and large-scale drawings become like maps of the artist’s psyche, now frozen in time.

Kaari Upson never, never ever, never in my life, never in all my born days, never in all my life, never is on view through October 8, 2022 at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles

Barbara Kruger Survey Decodes The Powers That Be @ Sprüth Magers In Los Angeles

The work of Barbara Kruger—bold, trenchant and unmistakable—has made an indelible mark not only on contemporary art of the last four decades, but also more broadly on everyday visual culture. She developed her concise, forthright aesthetic in the early 1980s, and since then has deployed it across myriad forms, from small-scale tactile objects to monumental public facades. Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers present this exhibition of new and historical works by Kruger at the Los Angeles gallery timed with her major exhibition, Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You., on view across Wilshire Boulevard at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (March 20–July 17, 2022).

As visitors enter the gallery, they first encounter Kruger's large-scale triptych, Untitled (Never Perfect Enough) (2020). The format of the appropriated image, in tandem with the added text, recalls the practice of phrenology, a nineteenth-century pseudoscience in which the shape and size of people's heads was thought to determine their character and mental abilities—and often used historically to argue for white supremacy and class distinctions. Kruger's triptych updates this urge to divide, categorize and control, situating these long-standing human pursuits squarely in the present while simultaneously picturing the connections between "beauty" and the punishing regimens that accompany it.

A group of twenty collages from the 1980s, related to some of Kruger's early and best-known works, completes the exhibition. The artist refers to these objects as "paste-ups," the term for cut-and-paste mockups used in the field of graphic design, which reflects Kruger's time as an editorial designer for Mademoiselle magazine and her work designing book jackets and picture editing in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Displayed together, Untitled (Never Perfect Enough) and Kruger's collages span the artist's career both temporally and conceptually. They offer compelling insights into her process and practice, and they illustrate the many ways in which her work has infiltrated our understanding of mass media and the power structures that control and manipulate contemporary culture.

Barbara Kruger is on view now through July 16 at Sprüth Magers, 5900 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles.

Cindy Sherman Presents Tapestries @ Sprueth Magers In Los Angeles

 
 

In her latest series on view, Cindy Sherman explores her first non-photographic medium in a career spanning over 40 years: tapestry. Featuring a dozen examples of her new and recent tapestries, the exhibition marks the début of these works as a coherent body of work. In line with Sherman’s long-term photographic investigation into the construction of identity and the nature of representation, the images are based on pictures posted on the artist’s personal Instagram account, which she creates using widely available filters and face-altering apps. Impossible to print in large scale due to the low-resolution nature of the original Instagram images, they are transposed into woven textiles, which in turn resonate with the pixelation of the source material: Pixels, here, translate to the warp and weft of thread.

Tapestries is on view through May 1 @ Sprueth Magers 5900 Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles

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

Frank Stella Presents Recent Work @ Sprüth Magers In Los Angeles

Few artists are as synonymous with the history of 20th and 21st-century American art as Frank Stella. His work across media, from painting to sculpture to printmaking, has continuously broken ground at each stage of his decades-long career, remaining influential and relevant to subsequent generations of contemporary artists. The selection of recent works presented at Sprüth Magers highlight the artist’s ongoing experimentation with spatial representation and includes the début of a new painting series. This is the first solo exhibition of Frank Stella’s painting and sculpture in Los Angeles since 1995. The exhibition is on view through October 26 at Sprüth Magers 5900 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036.