James Mountford Presents "Last Common Ancestor" @ NOH/WAVE In Los Angeles

The form known as Iast common ancestor is the most recent population of organisms from which all organisms now living on Earth have a common descendant. Born 3.5 billion years ago in a primordial soup or a deep sea vent, this tentative existence bore life to us all. 355 of your very own genes projected over the enormity of a billion years. How simple or complex could this life have been, how many iterations, dead ends and spectacular transformations has this tiny candle of life undergone to lead us to our current body?

Occupying a liminal space between the real and the imaginary Mountford’s latest body of work explores evolutionary theories of origins, creation, and mortality through photography, time sensitive sculpture, video and live performance.

Last Common Ancestor is on view through March 17 at NOH/WAVE 420 East Third Street, Los Angeles.

VIP Opening of Philip Colbert's Hunt Paintings at Saatchi Gallery Los Angeles Presented By Unit London

Saatchi Gallery announce British artist Philip Colbert's Hunt Paintings, presented by Unit London, and part of the Frieze Los Angeles VIP program. This is the London-based pop artist's first solo show in America, and Saatchi Gallery's first temporary gallery in LA. A multimedia collaboration titled "Year of the Lobster" between Colbert and renowned auctioneer Simon de Pury will premiere. Presented as a satirical pop song crossed with an art auction, the video stars Colbert's alter ego, Lobster. The saturation and layering is consistent with Colbert's large paintings and reflects the advanced excesses of art, capitalism & technology and serves as an honest reflection of today's society. The VIP opening was sponsored by Absolut Elyx single estate handcrafted Vodka. photographs by David Crotty /PMC

Chris Engman "Refraction" @ Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

Refraction features Containment, a site-specific work originally commissioned for the FotoFocus Biennial 2018 in Cincinnati, Ohio, as well as new photographs from the Prospect and Refuge and Ink on Paper series. These various photographic projects range from architectural to sculptural to two-dimensional, each acknowledging strategies of seeing. Refraction explores the relationship between illusion and reality by exposing the deceit inherent in photographic image-making while engaging in philosophical and material play around slips in translation.

Chris Engman "Refraction" will be on view until March 23, 2019 at Luis De Jesus Gallery.

Highlights From The 10 Anniversary of Art Los Angeles Contemporary At The Barker Hangar

Art Los Angeles Contemporary is the International Contemporary Art fair of the West Coast. The tenth edition of the fair will feature top established and emerging galleries from around the world, with a strong focus on Los Angeles galleries. Participants will present some of the most dynamic recent works from their roster of represented artists, offering an informed view on contemporary art making. photographs by Autre Magazine

Highlights From The Debut Of Spring/Break Art Show In Los Angeles

SPRING/BREAK Art Show is an internationally recognized exhibition platform using underused, atypical and historic New York City exhibition spaces to activate and challenge the traditional cultural landscape of the art market, typically but not exclusively during Armory Arts Week. During Frieze Week in Los Angeles, Spring/Break brought their innovative approach to Southern California for the first time. photographs by Autre Magazine

Highlights From The First Frieze Los Angeles At Paramount Studios In Hollywood

The inaugural edition of Frieze Los Angeles brought together 70 of the most significant and forward-thinking contemporary galleries from across the city and around the world, alongside a curated program of talks, site-specific artists’ projects and film. photographs by Autre Magazine

Highlights From The Inaugural Felix Art Fair at The Roosevelt Hotel In Los Angeles

Felix is an art fair that doesn't feel like an art fair. More experimental, more communal, more enjoyable. Guests will have intimate, direct access to galleries and their artists, artworks at a wide range of price points, and, of course, the pool.

"Metropolitan Sets" by Mattia Biagi Presented by 1st Dibs at The BADD House in Los Angeles

Metropolitan Sets is a collection of featured pieces from Mattia Biagi, a series of sculptural furniture that expresses his personal investigation of dichotomies: life and death, nature and civilization, preservation and transformation. Shop the collection here. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Read Our Interview Of Dean Valentine and Mills Moràn On The Occasion Of Felix Art Fair In Los Angeles →

For anyone who’s seen Velvet Buzzsaw, there were a number of glaring inaccuracies about the look and feel of an art fair, most notably is probably the fact that they’re usually filled with hundreds of slack-jawed visitors under harsh halogen lights who look like they just stepped off a Southwest flight…or a parade float, depending on which day you go. This scene is depicted far more accurately in Mark Flood’s Art Fair Fever, a biting, feature-length parody about the dark misgivings of the art world’s collectors and dealers. Click here to read more.

Doug Aitken "Don't Forget To Breathe" Presented By Regen Projects During Frieze Los Angeles

Los Angeles is a perpetually changing landscape in a state of constant reinvention. Don’t Forget to Breathe, a new installation by Doug Aitken, meditates on the rapidly changing face of technology framed within a relic of our modern past. The atmosphere of the desolate storefront presents a possibility that a chapter of capitalism has completed its life cycle and we are entering the next era where the screen world mirrors the physical one. This new era is increasingly dematerialized, where human connection is evaporating and quickly being replaced by digital life. The open architecture of this empty retail store surrounds the installation of three isolated figures. The absence of commercial logos, goods and consumers renders the store haunting and minimal, a memorial to time past. The building is transformed into an architectural purgatory in sharp contrast to a new era where communication moves at the speed of light and technology’s very presence is dematerialized. Don’t Forget To Breathe will be on view until February 17, 6775 Santa Monica Boulevard

Judy Chicago's "Atmospheres" @ Nina Johnson in Miami

The pyrotechnic Atmospheres series began in 1968, when Chicago lined an unsuspecting Pasadena Street with billowing fog machines, an action that was meant to radically feminize an urban space, cloud its use value, and soften its hard man-made edges. The series evolved over the next decade as a protest against the male-dominated art scene of the 1970s. Chicago played with the inherent density of smoke as a way to disrupt what the eye can see, as well as to soften and inject beauty into the landscape. On display at Nina Johnson will be a series of twelve photographs documenting these delicate and beautiful performances, along with one related video work. Atmospheres will be on view @ Nina Johnson 6315 NW 2nd Ave Miami, Florida 33150 until March 2. photographs provided by Nina Johnson

Hervé Guibert @ Callicoon Fine Arts In New York

Callicoon Fine Arts presents an exhibition of photographs by Hervé Guibert (1955–1991). The exhibition includes 15 vintage silver gelatin prints created between 1976 and 1988, many of which have never been seen in the United States. Bodies, specifically the male nude and Guibert’s own self-portraits, are the focus of this exhibition. These images refrain from truth-telling, even if their apparent innocence or romanticism suggests otherwise. Sleeping, laying, bathing, bending bodies often have the recognizable features of their faces obscured. Light always finds the body, but not necessarily the likeness of Guibert’s subjects. His lens offers us fragments and perceptions to navigate. In these images, bodies are the texture of Guibert’s fictional narrative, swept up in the entanglement of the self and other. Rather than offer a version of the truth, he suggests a distance innate to observation and to photography. Hervé Guibert will be on view through February 10, 2019 at Callicoon Fine Arts 49 Delancey Street New York, NY. photographs provided by Callicoon Fine Arts

Second Edition of NOMAD In St.Moritz - February 2019

NOMAD aims to rethink how work is presented to create an event that is bespoke, intimate and provides a radically new context. Following the sparkling success of the first-ever showcase for collectable design and contemporary art in the Swiss region of Engadine, held last February 2018 in St. Moritz, NOMAD is proud to reveal programmatic details of its second edition in the Swiss Alps.

NOMAD St. Moritz will be held at Chesa Planta, Mulins 2, 7503 Samedan, Switzerland from February 7-11. photos courtesy of NOMAD

Cristine Brache & Brad Phillips Open "Epithalamium" @ Anat Ebgi In Los Angeles

Taking its name from the epithalamium, a poem written for a bride, Cristine Brache and Brad Phillips, wife and husband artists, examine the potential of marriage, allowing their lived experience to speak to larger narratives of bodily trauma and mortality, while alluding to the intimate qualities of a unique partnership. Pain has exterior indicators we can all recognize, chiefly via language. Yet language is often insufficient to adequately articulate, or empathize with, another’s suffering. Brache and Phillips transmit these difficult and impossible positions inside the language-based programs of culture, allowing for moments of vulnerability. The exhibition is on view through March 9th at AE2 2680 S La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Kupper

Photo L.A. @ Barker Hangar In Santa Monica, California

Photo L.A. brings the best of the photography with a collaborative platform that links dealers and collectors with a gamut of galleries from around the globe. Internationally recognized, yet abundantly accessible, Photo L.A. cultivates connections between industry elite and up-and-coming talent alike. The longest running international photographic art fair on the West Coast, Photo L.A. has been in operation for nearly three decades. Photo L.A. received a new home in the historic Barker Hangar this year which hosted a roster of 50-65 local and international galleries and dealers, individual artists, collectives, leading not-for-profits, museums, art schools, and global booksellers. Photo L.A. ran from Jan 31 - Feb 3, 2019 at Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, CA. photographs by Oliver Kupper

L + A.S.T.R.A.L.O.R.A.C.L.E.S Presents ∞000999777555333111222444666888000∞ @ Five Car Garage In Los Angeles

∞000999777555333111222444666888000∞ is a collective gathering organized by L which marks the third incarnation of L + A.S.T.R.A.L.O.R.A.C.L.E.S – an open source community dedicated to the full frequency alignment of astral and terrestrial body. Founded in 2016 by Naomi Larbi, Grace Mcgrade and L, the group has historically worked with individuals through psychic readings, rituals, spell-work, and healing. The first incarnation commenced at CAPITAL in San Francisco, and the second at Sandwhich Gallery in Bucharest in 2018. Astral Oracles is on view through February 22 at Five Car Garage

Walter De Maria Presents "Idea To Action To Object" @ Gagosian In London

Idea to Action to Object is an exhibition of over forty works on paper and several related sculptures by the late Walter De Maria. The drawings, sourced from the Estate of Walter De Maria, are on view for the first time, revealing various unrealized projects and philosophical explorations, and suggesting a tender humanity behind De Maria’s geometric precision. In De Maria’s wide-ranging oeuvre, objects emerge from a transitional zone between idea and action. Like sounds coming from an instrument, shapes appear, overlap, and repeat in infinite permutations—drawing attention to the limits of gallery spaces, prioritizing bodily awareness, and examining the relationship between the relative and the absolute. Idea to Action to Object is on view through March 9 at Gagosian 20 Grosvenor Hill, London. photographs courtesy of Gagosian

Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE's "TOWARDS AN END TO BIOLOGICAL PERCEPTION" @ Marlborough Contemporary In New York

Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE is a legendary, avant-garde visionary, having spent literally a half-century interrogating the malleability of identity. This exhibition in particular is centered around he/r “shoe horn” sculptures, objects that illustrate the countless and conflicting signals towards both established mores and alternative practices. Neither the associations with propriety and control (aristocracy and bound feet), nor activities that are marginal to society (bondage) dominate. The wearer’s comfort or discomfort, the degrees of control and self-expression, all remain in the balance. What is incomprehensible and impressive is her/ his commitment to a radically simple project.

TOWARDS AN END TO BIOLOGICAL PERCEPTION will be on view at Marlborough Contemporary 545 West 25th Street through February 16. photographs by Adam Lehrer

"God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin" @ David Zwirner In New York

David Zwirner will present a group exhibition curated by Hilton Als, which will feature works by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Alvin Baltrop, Beauford Delaney, Marlene Dumas, Ja'Tovia Gary, Glenn Ligon, Alice Neel, Cameron Rowland, Kara Walker, and James Welling, among other artists.

Troubled times get the tyrants and prophets they deserve. During our current epoch, the revival of interest in author James Baldwin (1924–1987), the subject of God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin, has been particularly intense. This is in part due, of course, to his ability to analyze and articulate how power abuses through cunning and force and why, in the end, it’s up to the people to topple kingdoms. As a galvanizing humanitarian force, Baldwin is now being claimed as a kind of oracle. But by claiming him as such, much gets erased about the great artist in the process, specifically his sexuality and aestheticism, both of which informed his politics.

God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin will be on view at David Zwirner 525 & 533 West 19th Street New York through February 16. photographs by Adam Lehrer

Beatrice Gibson Presents "Crone Music" @ Camden Arts Center In London

Crone Music presents two new, interconnected films by British artist Beatrice Gibson, alongside an expanded events programme in Gallery 3 featuring the artists, poets, musicians and wider community with whom the films have been made. Borrowing its title from American composer Pauline Oliveros’ 1990 album of the same name, the exhibition seeks out an explicitly feminist lineage through which to recast the syncretic, collective and participatory nature of Gibson’s practice. Crone Music is on view through March 31 at Camden Arts Center Arkwright Road, London. photographs courtesy of Camden Arts Center