Michael Pybus "Peak Human" @ Depart Foundation in Los Angeles

Depart Foundation presents Michael Pybus: Peak Human, its first exhibition of works by the London-based mixed-media artist. A satirical blurring of boundaries and hierarchical relationships, PEAK HUMAN is a playful admixture of high and low. Hijacking the visual language of commercial consumption, Hollywood stargazing, and popular entertainment franchises, Pybus irreverently dissolves the graded divisions between the little known and the branded, the world of design and that of mass consumption, with the rarified vernaculars of fine art. PEAK HUMAN will include a series of large-scale, collage paintings in which Pybus appropriates imagery from iconic sources. Recognizable are references to artworks by the likes of Warhol and Hokusai, Nintendo video game characters, Pokémon, and graphics from commercial design. Pybus creates amalgams of readily familiar brands in a commentary on the indiscriminate power of branding, while also referring to his cooptation of this fame. The freedom with which Pybus borrows objects, images, and references, captures varying forms of desire, whether it be the covetous satisfaction of consuming through retail, aspirational fantasies, or the familiar din of popular culture. Michael Pybus "Peak Human" will be on view until June 3, 2017 at Depart Foundation in Los Angeles. 

Selections from the Permanent Collection: Sterling Ruby "Soft Works" @ The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in Los Angeles

Shown in the United States for the first time, Ruby’s SOFT WORK is a large-scale installation of stuffed fabric sculptures in unsettling biomorphic forms. Appendaged cushions and gaping, fang-filled mouths are manically arranged as sausage link–like drips from the ceiling, coiled heaps across the floor, and slumping, abject forms throughout the space. Using textiles that evoke the colors and motifs of the American flag, the sprawling installation offers up that iconic symbol of national pride as an intensely visceral experience—a political scene filled with performative “bodies” that seem to manifest both theater and playground simultaneously. On view until June 12, 2017 at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Kupper

"Where the Sidewalk Ends" Group Show @ Moran Bondaroff Gallery In Los Angeles

Moran Bondaroff presents Where the Sidewalk Ends, a four-person exhibition associating artworks that are evocative of a desire to create parity and connectedness with the natural world or to locate an intersection therein. Through varied mediums and methods, these four artists – Terence Koh, Dennis Oppenheim, Virginia Overton, and Nick van Woert – approach the tension between ecological connectedness and the progress of civilization. Subsequently, the works included in this exhibition present a range of conditional responses that span from exploration and interaction, to repercussions and impermanence. However, these artists do not endeavor to generate homages to ecology or directly reference an environmentalist agenda, rather, the works visually contend with our origins – a human’s nature. Where the Sidewalk Ends will be on view until May 20, 2017 at Moran Bondaroff in Los Angeles. 

An Interview Of Curator Dylan Brant On His New Show "Heatwave" That Is On View Now At UTA Artist Space →

Dylan Brant, a young curator from New York, is quietly and maturely making a name for himself within the hallowed, oft impenetrable walls of the art world. Sure, his pedigree helps, but he surely has a knack for putting together some of the coolest art shows around. His show Rawhide at Venus Over Manhattan – which was co-curated by Vivian Brodie – was a masculine cowboy romp through post-Modern Americana. Bandana wrapped, and pistol wheeling, the show included artists like Richard Prince and Ed Ruscha, but also queer artists known for their muscle toned homoerotica, like Bob Mizer and Tom Of Finland. And just recently, Brant curated a show called Heatwave, which is open now at the UTA Artist Space in Los Angeles. The exhibition, which includes artists like Dash Snow, Rob Pruitt, Nate Lowman, and Cady Noland, takes a more abstract route in its curatorial expression, but it is probably Brant's most personal. The artists involved are artists that he grew up with or knows personally - or knew personally, like the late Dash Snow. According to Brant, the show really came together after watching an interview of Lux Interior (of the Cramps) who talks about music having an inherently youthful energy - no matter the age of the musician or the audience. We stopped by the gallery to ask Brant a few questions about the show and gained a unique insight into his ambitions as a curator. Click here to read the full interview. 

Rene Ricard "So, Who Left Who?" @ Half Gallery In New York

Rene Ricard, "So, Who Left Who," will be on view until April 26, 2017 at Half Gallery in New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer

Read Our Interview With Tabita Rezaire The Johannesburg-Based Artist And Healer →

Rezaire is in the business of identifying sicknesses we carry within us everywhere we go—our histories, our implicit and explicit prejudices, our language. She is able to see through the veils of the “free, open Internet” to its capitalist underbellies, using the very tools of the Internet to undermine it. Rezaire is calling us out on the spread of colonial viruses—on our computers, in our history books, in our words. click here to read the rest of the interview.

"Concrete Island" Group Exhibition @ Venus Los Angeles

"Welcome to Concrete Island: an overlooked city within a city, an entropical paradise where leisure is lean. Careen off the highway and into the cushion of your airbag to arrive at this bleak no man’s land, where you’ll be marooned in plain sight. No one will hear your cries against the tide of commuter traffic lapping at the shores of our deserted island, nestled between two lanes of howling interstate. This vestigial location is your vacation destination, boasting all the sights and specificities of any cultural petri dish. Come and brave this new world. This here and now – this moment – could last forever." Concrete Island, the first curatorial effort of Aaron Moulton, brings together over thirty mostly LA-based artists who have worked around the theme of JG Ballard's book Concrete Island (1974). Ballard’s tale reinterprets the contemporary city as a savage ecosystem where survival is an avant-garde condition. The protagonist is thrown from his urban reality to be marooned on a desert island in the middle of the city. The character is forced to endure a Robinson Crusoe-esque journey emulating humankind’s will to survive in the face of adversity. Concrete Island will be on view until May 13, 2017 at Venus Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

A Preview Of The 2017 Whitney Biennial @ The Whitney Museum Of American Art In New York

The 2017 Whitney Biennial, the seventy-eighth installment of the longest-running survey of American art, arrives at a time rife with racial tensions, economic inequities, and polarizing politics. Throughout the exhibition, artists challenge us to consider how these realities affect our senses of self and community. The Biennial features sixty-three individuals and collectives whose work takes a wide variety of forms, from painting and installation to activism and video-game design. The 2017 Whitney Biennial will be on view from March 17 to June 11, 2017 at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer

Highlights From "The 14th Factory," A 3-Acre Art Installation by Hong Kong-Based Artist Simon Birch in Los Angeles

The 14th Factory is a monumental, multiple-media art installation that will transform an empty industrial warehouse near downtown Los Angeles into a mythic universe created collaboratively through video, installation, sculpture, sound, paintings, and live performance. The 14th Factory weaves together elements of popular culture–science fiction, punk music, graphic novels, and film–with critical re-examinations of social and historical narratives, especially interconnections between East and West. Conceived by Hong Kong-based British artist Simon Birch, the vision of The 14th Factory is to create a new, independent paradigm for socially-engaged art, a kind of guerilla action where art occupies and re-energizes underutilized or even derelict urban spaces and gifts them back to the community in the form of a transformative experience. Click here to learn more about the project and find visiting times. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

What I Loved: Selected Works from the ‘90s @ Regen Projects In Los Angeles

Regen Projects presents a group exhibition entitled What I Loved: Selected Works from the ‘90s. The 1990s marked a pivotal moment in American history and contemporary art. It was a time of economic recession, the first Gulf War, the Los Angeles riots, 24-hour news, the advent of the Internet and the dot-com bubble, and the fall of Communism. Regen Projects, which opened in 1989, developed alongside and in response to these events and established a roster of artists whose work expressed the zeitgeist of the times. What I Loved takes its name from Siri Hustvedt’s 2003 novel, which looks back at the constellation of relationships and events in the New York art world circa 1975 to 2000 through the eyes of an art historian and critic. Similarly, this exhibition revisits these formative years and brings together a group of artists who came of age during this time, and whose work became part of the critical discourse for addressing issues of race, gender, sexuality, identity politics, globalization, and the AIDS crisis, among others. Artists featured in the exhibition include Matthew Barney, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rachel Harrison, Mike Kelley, Toba Khedoori, Karen Kilimnik, Byron Kim, Liz Larner, Glenn Ligon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Marilyn Minter, Catherine Opie, Raymond Pettibon, Elizabeth Peyton, Jack Pierson, Lari Pittman, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Gary Simmons, Wolfgang Tillmans, Kara Walker, Gillian Wearing, Lawrence Weiner, Sue Williams, and Andrea Zittel. What I Loved: Selected Works from the ‘90s will be on view until April 13, 2017 at Regen Projects in Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

A Sneak Preview Of Kerry James Marshall's 35-Year Retrospective "Mastry" @ MoCA In Los Angeles

MOCA presents a 35-year retrospective of painter Kerry James Marshall, co-organized by the MCA Chicago, MOCA, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art under the leadership of MOCA’s Chief Curator Helen Molesworth. Marshall’s figurative paintings have been joyful in their consistent portrayal of African Americans. The now nearly 600 year history of painting contains remarkably few African American painters and even fewer representations of black people. Marshall, a child of the civil rights era, set out to redress this absence. “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central [Los Angeles] near the Black Panthers headquarters,” Marshall has said, “and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility. You can’t move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it. That determined a lot of where my work was going to go…” Kerry James Marshall "Mastry" will be on view from March 12 to July 3, 2017 at MoCA in Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper