Margie Livingston Presents The Earth Is A Brush @ Luis De Jesus In Los Angeles

For the past four years, Margie Livingston has been dismantling the line between painting and performance. In a hybrid form of Action Painting, performance, and Land Art, she drags constructed paintings across terrain, inscribing the canvases with the ground to what she calls Extreme Landscape Painting or “non-painting painting.”  Inherent in this process is the use of chance procedures and the knowledge that the ideas change and evolve as she gets into the work. The Earth Is A Brush is on view through February 15 at Luis De Jesus 2685 S La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Katherina Olschbaur: Dirty Elements @ The University Art Galleries In Irvine

Olschbaur provides a female perspective to a history of canonized male painters, whose work simultaneously inspires her. Although traces of matriarchal order in Western thought typically appear as a mythological apparition, Olschbaur paints a narrative that subverts our expectations under the normative language of patriarchy. For Olschbaur, art historical tropes are appropriated and used like garments, worn then cast aside in a process that is ever changing and moving within each work. In this way, Dirty Elements investigates the power dynamics of patriarchal order and its violent denial of female sexuality. Referencing a wide spectrum of thought, Olschbaur’s practice takes root in mythology, religious and historical paintings, the subcultures of S/M, and film. Embracing Georges Bataille’s concept of the formless, the paintings explore the dirty elements of our carnal nature. In so doing, they feature provocative and erotically charged scenes that are at times humorous and disturbing. Dirty Elements is on view through March 14 at Contemporary Arts Center Gallery, Irvine, California. photographs courtesy of University Art Galleries, UC Irvine © 2020 by Jeff McLane Studio, Inc.

Jenny Holzer Presents "A Little Knowledge" @ Hauser & Wirth In Gstaad, Switzerland

For more than forty years Jenny Holzer has presented text emblazoned on T-shirts, carved in stone, painted on canvas, scrolling on LED signs, and luminously projected onto buildings and landscapes. Beginning in the 1970s with posters wheat-pasted throughout New York City and continuing through recent light projections, her practice rivals ignorance with humour, and violence with kindness and courage. Holzer’s texts address oppression, gender, sexuality, power, and war, and by presenting them in media more commonly associated with advertising, news reports, and public information, she adeptly provokes reflection and challenges expectations and prejudices. A Little Knowledge is on view at Tarmak 22 in Gstaad-Saanen Airport, on view through 22 January. photographs courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

Tomashi Jackson Presents Forever My Lady @ Night Gallery In Los Angeles

Tomashi Jackson’s multimedia practice places formal and material investigations in dialogue with recent histories of displacement and disenfranchisement. Drawing centrally from Josef Albers’ research on the relativity of color and the unconscious processes by which the brain organizes and reconciles information, Jackson’s work bridges gaps between geometric experimentation and the systematization of injustice, incorporating images hand-painted from photographs and materials chosen for their relevance into formalist compositions. 

Jackson’s latest body of work principally concerns the question of democracy, taking up its conceptual origins in Ancient Greece, with its contingent notion of obligatory civic participation. She compares this history of democracy to the realities of the present-day United States, with particular attention to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, written to prevent discriminatory practices at the state and local levels that prevented Black Americans from exercising their right to vote. Jackson cites the enactment of this law as the true beginning of American democracy, though she points to subsequent public crises – the rise of gerrymandering and the the crack epidemic that began in Los Angeles in the 1980s – to question democracy’s true status in the US today. 

Forever My Lady is on view throughout February 8, 2020 @ Night Gallery 2276 E 16th St. LA. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Highlights From The Fog Art Fair In San Francisco

photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Noah Davis @ David Zwirner In New York

Davis’s body of work encompasses, on the one hand, his lush, sensual, figurative paintings and, on the other, an ambitious institutional project called The Underground Museum, a black-owned-and-operated art space dedicated to the exhibition of museum-quality art in a culturally underserved African American and Latinx neighborhood in Los Angeles. The works on view will highlight both parts of Davis’s oeuvre, featuring more than twenty of his most enduring paintings, as well as models of previous exhibitions curated by Davis at The Underground Museum. The exhibition also includes a “back room,” modeled on the working offices at The Underground Museum, featuring more paintings by Davis, as well as BLKNWS by Davis’s brother Kahlil Joseph; a sculpture by Karon Davis, the artist’s widow; and Shelby George furniture, designed by Davis’s mother Faith Childs-Davis. The exhibition will be on view through February 22 at David Zwirner 525 & 533 West 19th Street, New York. photographs courtesy of David Zwirner

Miyoshi Barosh Presents Love @ Luis De Jesus In Los Angeles

"The work of art created as a labor of love may sound cynical, yet it is made in good faith and contains a deep utopian wish for social change, no matter how naive and nostalgic that dream is."  ~ Miyoshi Barosh

Over the last fifteen years, Miyoshi Barosh made her work with humor and dystopian irony in a style she called "Conceptual Pop."  With an emphasis on cultural blindness toward death, decay, and the disintegration of both utopian social constructs, and ultimately the individual body itself, Barosh saw her work as "a manifestation of competing emotions around cultural conceits and identity politics through a handmade carnivalesque, mischievous confrontation."  Given her untimely death, her message is made even more poignant, if not tragic, because she lived it.  

LOVE was the first large-scale work that Barosh created using repurposed afghans -- those lonely and discarded, hand-made blankets which "in itchy, acrylic coziness embody feelings of dependency, obligation, and guilt." Together with I Keep Going On, these collaged and crocheted pieces play on the notion of a "labor of love." Making afghans is traditionally a women's craft that, according to the artist, refers to both the "ideal of self-less love and to the idea of unconditional love, that is expected of, but not a reality of, family." These pieces are "deliberately imperfect, damaged, and irregular like the human condition, pulled by conflicting desires for independence and dependency, freedom and obligation."

Love will be on view through February 15, 2020 @ Luis De Jesus Los Angeles 2685 S. La Cienega Blvd. LA. Concurrent exhibitions honoring the life and work of the late Los Angeles artist, who died in 2019, will be held at Night Gallery in downtown LA and The Pit in Glendale. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Hybrid Forms: Read Our Interview Of Artist & Storyteller Christopher Myers →

Courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort

How does a country like Vietnam, absent of a black community, develop a rich brass band tradition with roots in the American South? How did the British flag inspire a Ghanaian tradition in textiles that is steeped in magical superstition? What do Aimé Césaire, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Emma Goldman all have in common? To find the answers to any of these questions you’d have to ask none other than the multi-disciplinary, head honcho of hybridity, artist Christopher Myers. His practice is as much about connecting the mythologies of ancient Egypt and Greece with those of Judeo-Christian scripture, as it is about connecting the migrations of syncratic practices across the globe and throughout history. His most recent solo exhibition, Drapetomania, at Fort Gansevoort in Los Angeles primarily features hand-sewn flags depicting a wide array of syncratic allegories that in many ways define the globalized, contemporary psyche. Click here to read more.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya CONDO 2020: Modern Art Hosting Team Gallery In London

The group of Sepuya's work shown at Modern Art is comprised of photographs made between 2016 and 2019. Seen together, the chosen works convey the scope of formal strategies employed by Sepuya. Ranging from close up portraits of interlocking body parts, to studio portraits in which subjects are carefully poised behind and with objects, to photographs of his collages of test prints and archival material of the studio, Sepuya's strategies each speak to the self-reflexivity inherent in his practice and reveal his sensitivity and skill in capturing bodies on camera. Whether at its centre or its edges, the camera and tripod are almost always evident and always implied somewhere in each image, bringing the work firmly back into dialogue with its own technical construction and object-hood, and to Sepuya himself. The exhibition is on view through February 15 at Modern Art 50–58 Vyner Street , London. photographs courtesy of the gallery and the artist

King Dogs Never Grow Old: A Group Show Curated By Brooke Wise @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles

Borrowed from André Breton and Philippe Soupault’s surrealist text Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields), the show’s title alludes to exploring the nonsensical and the dreamlike unconscious. The work on view shares a common dialogue and aims to explore these surrealist notions in a contemporary manner.

Jillian Mayer and Haley Josephs use color and whimsy to address these surrealist concepts. Ginny Casey draws inspiration from classic Walt Disney cartoons and welcomes the spectator with distorted, absurd and disproportioned objects, which play with our restrictions of logic and time. Tom of Finland celebrates sexuality, fantasy, and the body in all areas of human endeavor. Scott Reeder and Matthew Sweesy both use comedy and rhetoric in their paintings. Chris Wolston’s Nalgona chairs are humanized by his addition of wicker body parts. Sam Crow’s tufted wall works skew our sense of reality and attempt to destroy our sense of stability in her usage of geometric shapes and dimension. Rose Nestler’s soft sculptures explore the body as the subconscious mind. Bri Williams uses found objects often with personal associations, to evoke a potent, psychic mood. Minimalist artist Robert Moreland reinvents his canvas into the space between painting and sculpture, while Haley Mellin’s small paintings reinvent mundane objects such as a Warholian banana floating in space. Through comedy, rhetoric, sarcasm and the uncanny, these works all share a common discourse about surrealism, the unexpected and the unconventional.

King Dogs Never Grow Old is on view through February 1st at Diane Rosenstein Gallery 831 N Highland Ave, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Amie Dicke's One-Liner @ Anat Ebgi In Los Angeles

“Some images ask to be folded or covered, others suggest a line. They have their language. And I try to understand how they speak to me.” – Amie Dicke.

The exhibition’s title refers to a striking new technique whereby Dicke uses a continuous, meandering incision to slice into aluminum plates bearing composed fashion portraiture. As she follows her line around the immaculate bodies in works such as ONE-LINER III (Holding the Rodeo Image) and ONE-LINER IV (Listen), the artist maps the touch of her hand and eye around the images, then bends new shapes into the metal. “Nothing is really removed, nothing is lost, just opened,” she notes. By adding space where there was none, and creating work that elides the conventions of two- and three-dimensional forms, Dicke continuously distorts and realigns the possibilities of our visual experience. “They are almost a movie in one still,” she says of these intriguing assemblages.

One-Liner is on view through February 16, 2020 @ Anat Ebgi AE2 Gallery at 2680 S La Cienega Blvd, LA. photographs courtesy of Anat Ebgi

Kirsten Stoltmann and Jennifer Sullivan Presents Female Sensibility @ Five Car Garage In Los Angeles

”Female Sensibility“ is a two person show with LA based artist Kirsten Stoltmann and NY based artist Jennifer Sullivan. The title for the exhibition is inspired by Lynda Benglis’s 1973 video Female Sensibility which simultaneously acknowledges and parodies ideas around being categorized as a woman artist or defined artistically through gender. Stoltmann and Sullivan have continued aspects of this strategy in their own work through fore-fronting not just the female body and gaze, but their own specific bodies, emotional lives, and experiences, in favor of exploring the layers of meaning around self-representation and gender identity. In their work, there is a both a revised valuation of characteristics often assigned as feminine such as emotion, intuition, sensuality, and relationships, as well as a resistance and subversive attitude towards the limiting roles that women are expected to fulfill.

Female Sensibility is on view through March 1, 2020 @ Five Car Garage, Santa Monica, LA. Email info@emmagrayhq.com for address. photographs courtesy of Five Car Garage

Anish Kapoor New Stainless Steel Sculptures at Regen Projects In Los Angeles

Regen Projects presents an exhibition by renowned artist Anish Kapoor. Since the 1980s Kapoor’s ambitious practice has continuously expanded the limits of sculptural form by investigating scale, volume, color, and materiality. With this exhibition, the artist’s sixth solo presentation following his gallery debut in 1992, Kapoor brings together a selection of new mirror works that challenge optical perception and phenomenological experience through experiments in shape and form. On view until February 16, 2020. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Xin Liu's Living/Distance @ Make Room in Los Angeles

“Is breeding a physiological instinct for women? I put my life (time, effort, intelligence) into an inorganic, ruthless mechanical system, and then place my bone and blood (teeth) in the center. It is part of me, my avatar. We will never be alive in the same space, it will break into pieces before returning to Earth. It came to life in the absence of gravity, but I am standing here firmly. I speculate that "humanity" will not break through the interstellar space-time distance in the form of organism. If we acknowledge our limits as biological species, how can human beings face the others, who are created and feared by us?”

— Xin Liu

Living/Distance is on view through Feb 1, 2020 @ MakeRoom 1035 N Broadway, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of Lani Trock

Opening of Archipelago: A Solo Exhibition by Arielle Pytka At Just One Eye in Los Angeles

Archipelago tells a story of an imaginary new world, perhaps here on Earth or in the stars. As a child, Pytka always dreamt of being an adventurer and cartographer in the early days of exploration. At fifteen, she crossed the Atlantic Ocean, crewing on a vintage sailboat and in 2015, she completed another transatlantic crossing, sailing in the Panerai Transat Classique, in which her team came in first place. All of this time at sea fueled her creative inspiration and interest in the discovery of distant new lands and people. The paintings in Archipelago are a reflection of her desires to map unknown places. She subconsciously began painting maps to destinations that do not exist on our globe. Some of these paintings are reminiscent of island chains in South East Asia, where she lived part-time for the last 5 years.

Archipelago is on view at Just One Eye 915 North Sycamore Ave. LA. photographs courtesy of Nina Prommer

Mika Tajima: PSYCHO GRAPHICS @ Kayne Griffin Corcoran In Los Angeles

PSYCHO GRAPHICS connects material transformation to the shape of an uncontainable future that exceeds our current bodily and psychic experience of power. The works on view manifest Tajima’s continued investigation into the production and transmutation of matter, energy, and the human psyche. PSYCHO GRAPHICS is on view through January 11 at Kayne Griffin Corcoran 1201 South La Brea Ave, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of Kayne Griffin Corcoran

Ariane Vielmetter: The Rose Garden @ Ever Gold [Projects] In San Francisco

In new paintings, drawings, and sculptures, Ariane Vielmetter explores representations of the female body in relation to fruits and flowers, and the ways these visual metaphors relate to lived experience. The female body, as a vessel for new life, is a natural structure for this kind of projection, and Vielmetter is particularly interested in the way this kind of imagery relates to the experiences of pregnant women. In a culture overloaded with information about best health practices, and a political climate that is very unpredictable with regards to women’s rights, the pregnant body has become an increasingly political site.The Rose Garden is on view through December 21 at Ever Gold [Projects] 1275 Minnesota Street #105, San Francisco. photographs courtesy of Ever Gold [Projects]

Marc Horowitz: The Qualitative Validation Principle @ Ever Gold [Projects] In San Francisco

The paintings and drawings on view extend the forensic system Horowitz began developing after visiting the Roman ruins in Milreu, Portugal, which inspired him to restage previously abandoned works using archeological motifs. TQVP is at times a painterly Rorschach test that asks the viewer to inhabit decisions made by the artist to expose the detritus of his own jokes, but it also seems like something or someone decided to go off script along the way. Or, that an off-color joke, though aborted, continues to make appearances, to refer to a glyph or key which would unlock deeper meanings if it were available. Alas, some mysteries remain precisely within the surface on which they were inscribed, alluding to and denying their secret in the same gesture. The Qualitative Validation Principle is on view through December 21 at Ever Gold [Projects] 1275 Minnesota Street Suite 105, San Francisco. photographs courtesy of Ever Gold [Projects]

Mieke Marple: Bad Feminist @ Ever Gold [Projects] In San Francisco

Bad Feminist reflects on the ancient Greek myth of Medusa in the era of #MeToo. Taking its title from Roxane Gay’s book Bad Feminist: Essays (2014), in which the author describes a sexual assault she experienced as a child, Marple reflects on historical depictions of women and rape in light of today’s changing understanding of the power dynamics at play within society at large. Bad Feminist is on view through January 18 at Ever Gold [Projects] 1275 Minnesota Street Suite 105, San Francisco. photographs courtesy of Ever Gold [Projects]