Marianne Vitale's First Solo Show On the West Coast @ Venus Over Los Angeles

Venus Over Los Angeles presents an exhibition of new sculptures by Marianne Vitale, marking the artist’s first solo show on the West Coast. Vitale’s sculptures incorporate infrastructure staples (such as steel rail supports for an entire transport system and wooden beams for the base of a building’s framework) and interact with the gallery. The first space holds Thought Field (2016), composed of 90 unaltered factory-length sections of used steel railroad track, circa the 1920’s, with a combined weight of over 60 tons. In the second gallery space, for her new series Beam Work, the artist displays six towering stacks of eleven-foot long white pine squared timbers that have been hand-painted, bashed and pummeled to loosely recall urban traffic barricades. The exhibition will be on view until February 27, 2016 at Venus Over Los Angeles, 601 South Anderson Street. 

Adel Abdessemed "From Here to Eternity" @ Venus Over Los Angeles

Venus Over Los Angeles presents From Here to Eternity, an exhibition of new work by Adel Abdessemed. The exhibition is his first major show in Los Angeles and features a series of nearly 100 black stone drawings on paper and military tarpaulin. Adel Abdessemed’s new series is named for the famous 1953 film best known for the scene in which Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr kiss passionately on the beach as waves crash over them. As a child in Algeria, Abdessemed viewed such western films under the edit and strict censorship of the Algerian government, who cut out any scene that portrayed physical contact between the sexes. Abdessemed is known for embracing themes of history, religion, and politics in his artworks. Though perhaps best known for his video, sculptural, and conceptual art, Abdessemed has chosen to distinguish his Los Angeles debut show by exclusively exhibiting drawings on paper and military tarpaulin. From Here to Eternity will be on view until December 20th, 2015 at Venus Over Los Angeles, 601 South Anderson Street, Los Angeles, CA

Dan McCarthy's Psychedelic Ceramic Sculptures On View Now @ Venus Over Los Angeles

Venus Over Los Angeles presents a new, exciting batch of ceramic sculptures and paintings by Dan McCarthy. The Facepots are the largest the artist has created to date, some weighing in at over 75 pounds. Also on view is a series of new paintings--lightning bolts, clouds, and rainbows paired with Haiku-style speech bubbles that illustrate the artist's California upbringing. On view until November 1 2015 at Venus Over Los Angeles, 601 South Anderson Street, Los Angeles.

Katherine Bernhardt: Fruit Salad @ Venus Over Los Angeles

Venus Over Los Angeles presents, Katherine Bernhardt: Fruit Salad, a large mural covering the exterior walls of the L.A. gallery; a public iteration of her signature wildly colorful still life patterned paintings. Fruit Salad will serve both as Katherine Bernhardt’s first foray into executing a public mural, and as a prelude to her upcoming solo exhibition at Venus Over Manhattan in September. Katherine Bernhardt’s recent series of paintings offer vibrant portraits of objects that exemplify the casually quotidian in acrylic and spray paint. She covers her canvases with a painterly hodgepodge of commodity items such as fruit, cigarettes, junk food, and objects of New York’s day-to-day that float against richly colored, striking backgrounds that themselves seem to push forward and demand the viewer’s attention. The patterns emerge without source material, purely from the artist’s thoughts and imagination, and driven by her experiences. With this in mind, the pieces become part of a larger portrait of the artist herself to be pieced together by the viewer. The often times random assortment of objects relate to one another in a way that is presumably deeply personal to Bernhardt herself. In fine Los Angeles fashion, the exhibition will be on view indefinitely. photographs by Sara Clarken 

Dan Colen 'Viscera' Opening at Venus Over Los Angeles

Venus Over Los Angeles presents Viscera, an exhibition of three new bodies of work by Dan Colen in the gallery's incredible new location in Downtown L.A.'s arts district. Each element in Viscera elicits questions about the behavior of physical forms as they come into contact with metaphysical experience. An exhibition highlight, "Canopics" is a series of sculptures cast from the negative space formed by roadside guardrails mangled in automobile accidents. The series title refers to basins used in ancient Egyptian burial ceremonies to contain the viscera, or vital organs, of the dead. As with Colen’s "Miracle" series, "Rainbow Paintings" are based on stills from Fantasia (1940), which the artist sees as Disney’s most abstract film, whose vignettes “address the many guises of creation itself.” There is also a unique sound element Psychics (Interstellar Medium?, which is comprised of a series of recorded psychic readings, documented over a ten-month period beginning in the summer of 2014. Viscera will be on view until June 27th, 2015 at Venus Over Los Angeles, 601 South Anderson Street, Los Angeles, CA.