Presented by The Broad Stage and Sotheby's Institute Of Art, Artist Talk: LA Legends is the first of a series of talks with influential California-based artists, established to explore the living legacy of Los Angeles' arts scene. Art legends and postwar trailblazers set the stage for L.A.'s vibrant contemporary art scene and continue to define L.A.'s cultural landscape today. photography Oliver Maxwell Kupper
White Cube presents an exhibition by Anselm Kiefer featuring new, large-scale installation, sculpture and painting. Titled ‘Walhalla’, the exhibition refers to the mythical place in Norse mythology, a paradise for those slain in battle, as well as to the Walhalla neo-classical monument, built by Ludwig I King of Bavaria in 1842 to honour heroic figures in German history. The exhibition focuses on the major new installation Walhalla in the central corridor space, from which the other works thematically depart. Featuring a long, narrow room lined with oxidised lead, rows of fold-up steel beds are set close together and draped with dark grey crumpled lead sheets and covers. At the far end of the room, a black and white photograph mounted on lead depicts a lone figure walking away into a bleak, wintery landscape. The whole installation is dark, sombre and sparsely lit by a series of bare light bulbs, suggesting an institutional dormitory, military sleeping quarters or battlefield hospital. This sense of morbid claustrophobia is countered nonetheless by the offer of rest, of a break in the journey; a place perhaps of transformation. Anselm Kiefer "Walhalla" will be on view until February 12, 2017 at White Cube in London. photographs by Mazzy-Mae Green
Venus Los Angeles presents Cutaways, an exhibition of new work by Holton Rower. The show, comprised of sculptures and wall-based works, will be on view from January 14th through February 24th, 2017. Cutaways marks Rower’s debut exhibition in Los Angeles. Rower’s work has long been concerned with notions of accumulation and sequencing. With this most recent body of work, he begins his process by designing a rigorous order and color scheme for the paint, which he applies layer upon layer onto a base. After the paint has built up considerable mass, Rower carves networks of intuitively placed marks into the material. These violent cuts reveal the nearly geological strata of his layered paint, which create intricate optical patterns that impart perceptibly changing frequencies to the viewer. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper
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David Zwirner presents the gallery’s first exhibition of the collaborative work of Aline Kominsky-Crumb and R. Crumb in its 525 West 19th Street location. Both pioneers of underground and alternative comics, Kominsky-Crumb and Crumb have created a groundbreaking portrait of their shared lives and creative collaborations over the past four decades. In their ongoing “Aline & Bob” comics, the two artists have rendered their innermost thoughts, fears, and fantasies alongside the day-to-day realities of family life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, each in their own distinctive style. The exhibition, a version of which was previously on view at the Cartoonmuseum Basel, will present an extensive selection of collaborative ink drawings from throughout the run of “Aline & Bob,” as well as solo works by both artists in a variety of media. Robert Crumb And Aline Kominsky-Crumb "Drawn Together" will be on view until February 18, 2017 at David Zwirner Gallery in New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer
Captured within and around Los Angeles, Sandy Kim’s series is a reflection of her creative and non-binary photographic practice. Produced entirely without digital intervention, her work embraces the messy imperfection, the ‘mistake' and the aberration. Born in Monterey, California, Kim’s childhood and adolescence was marked by constant movement up and down the West Coast, and upon graduation Kim continued her itinerant movement to New York and back. Analog Brain, while collected in a single region, reflects the restless diaristic representation of Kim’s life, community and environments. Comprised of portraits, landscapes and illuminated end frames of 35mm film, her imagery’s diversity is connected by an analog intuition missing in an all-connected digital society. On display is an in-situ recreation of Kim’s studio, whereby visitors are encouraged to explore Kim’s archives. Her desktop is on display, completely unlocked, and further drawing connection to Kim’s imagery and its diaristic impulse to expose her internal ambition and aspirations. Sandy Kim "Analog Brain" will be on view until February 11, 2017 at Little Big Man Gallery in Los Angeles. photographs by Mike Krim
Gagosian presents “The Ridge,” an exhibition of sculpture and paintings on canvas by Thomas Houseago. This is his first exhibition with the gallery in his hometown of Los Angeles. The title of the exhibition derives from Houseago's childhood memory of a rocky pass in Leeds, England, known locally as "The Ridge," where a manmade stone wall runs along the upper edge of a steep natural stone ridge. With the stone wall of the adjacent estate, this creates a narrow footpath or ginnel, blocking the drop beyond the ridge and the sightlines within the pass. Houseago's recollection of this place is as much about a sense of peril and rite of passage as the actual physical experience. Thomas Houseago "The Ridge" will be on view until February 16, 2017 @ Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper
Jack Smith was an American filmmaker, actor, and pioneer of underground cinema. He is generally acclaimed as a founding father of American performance art, and has been critically recognized as a master photographer, though his photographic works are rare and remain largely unknown. Smith's works and ephemera will be on view for one more week for a special exhibition, curated by Leo Fitzpatrick, held at Marlborough Chelsea's Reading Room in New York.
In military parlance, the terms asymmetrical and symmetrical are employed to refer to political provocations and diplomatic démarches, escalation and tension, and power dynamics of the highest order. Not specific to war, these terms also refer more generally to a set of relations that define our connections to power. On the eve of Y2K, Russian-born Olia Lialina—who is among the best-known participants in the 1990s net.art scene—first met American artist Cory Arcangel. Ever since, the artists have been deep in dialogue about the social and cultural impact of the Internet’s historical shift from a tool for military communication to an “information superhighway” promising open and equal exchange, and, finally, the increasingly asymmetric “content delivery system” we experience today. In this first collaboration, Arcangel and Lialina present complex bodies of work that arose through their continuing conversation. Cory Arcangel and Olia Lialina "Asymmetrical Response" will be on view until February 18, 2017 at The Kitchen NYC. photographs by Adam Lehrer
CES Gallery presents Bright Resolutions, a group exhibition featuring works by Tanya Brodsky, Jonathan Chapline, and Megan Stroech. Our senses are saturated, near collapse, overloaded. Endless media consumption is more exhausting than liberating, but if you lower your screen brightness your battery can last longer. Resolution is the act of breaking down complexity into constitutive parts, as in infinite Rs, Gs, and Bs, but to have resolve is to be determined and resolving is diplomatic. We like hi-res, which we associate with the professional, the incorporated, authenticity, truth, but we feed on and stream with lower resolutions, the type that clogged digital arteries can handle, fuzzy copies of copies. Through down-rezzed re-production new entities are formed, abstracted from originals; new contexts created, meanings recoded, resolutions shifted. "Bright Resolutions" will be on view until January 22, 2017 at CES Gallery in Los Angeles. photographs by CES Gallery
Blum & Poe presents Build Therefore Your Own World, an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Sam Durant. The title is excerpted from a Ralph Waldo Emerson essay. Durant continues his excavation of marginalized American histories, unearthing counter storylines to the historical canon. In this exhibition he proposes a hybridized cross-pollination between the iconic nineteenth century transcendentalists like Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott, with African writers such as Phillis Wheatley and Lucy Terry Prince, along with abolitionists like Frederick Douglass. Further developing his theses from a recent three-month long public art project in Concord, MA entitled The Meeting House, Durant transforms relics from this politically loaded site of American history into a prescient presentation of culturally charged artworks. Sam Durant "Build Therefore Your Own World" will be on view until February 18, 2017 @ Blum and Poe Gallery in Los Angeles.
During January and February the George Adams Gallery, New York will present an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Peter Saul at CB1-G in Los Angeles. The exhibition will feature 20 works made between 1957 and 1967 covering his development as an artist from the late 1950s through his transition from Pop in the early 1960’s to a politically engaged, topical artist whose works tackled the most pressing issues of the day in the later half of the decade. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper
For her Los Angeles gallery debut, artist Tallulah Willis presents a suite of new line drawings featuring charming and peculiar creatures that defy taxonomy and present a timely commentary on millennial ennui. Tallulah Willis "Please Be Gentle" will be on view until March 6 at Eric Buterbaugh gallery in Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper
photograph by Adarsha Benjamin
The Eli and Edythe Broad Stage in Santa Monica and Sotheby's Institute Of Art will present Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, and Ed Ruscha on stage in Artists Talk: LA Legends - A Conversation With California Art Icons, on January 18, 2017, the first of a series of talks with influential California-based artists, established to explore the living legacy of Los Angeles' vibrant contemporary arts scene. Click here to purchase tickets. photograph by Oliver Maxwell Kupper
Lubricants & Literature is the first solo exhibition at Tenderpixel of represented artist Richard Healy. Including a series of new sculptures and a video installation accompanied by a limited edition publication, the show explores a moment of true magic in the tension between stasis and transformation. Lubricants and Literature will be on view until December 31 at Tenderpixel in London.
