Diane Kotila's Boy Kings @ Deboer Gallery In Los Angeles

In Diane Kotila’s Boy Kings each painting depicts Pharaoh Tutankhamun, often referred to as the ‘boy king,’ and images of the young Egyptian water boy Hussein Abdel Raasoul who is tied to the discovery of Tutankhaman’s tomb. Writing about her approach, Kotila has described her painting as “an exploration of historically and culturally familiar portraiture.” A research heavy examination similar to the excavation of tombs; dirty and messy with moments of clarity and discovery.

Boy Kings is on view through April 17 @ Deboer Gallery 3311 E. Pico Blvd. Los Angeles

Our World Two: An Online Group Show @ Steve Turner

In its second iteration of Our World, Steve Turner presents an online group exhibition which features new works by seven artists (Patrick Bayly, Siro Cugusi, Jingze Du, Jon Key, Gabby Rosenberg, David Shrobe, and Shirley Villavicencio Pizango) who come from various parts of the world and who have coalesced to become part of the gallery’s world. While the artists work in a broad range of media, styles and concepts, all make deeply personal work that is a consequence of their biography, geography, identity and mentality. Their world is our world and we are delighted to present this in early March, when the art world previously gathered for the Armory Show in New York. With no travel, no art fairs and no opening receptions, we want to demonstrate that life goes on, art goes on and community goes on.

Our World Two is available to view online through April 14 @ Steve Turner Gallery

 
 

Skunk Grove: Lucy Bull's Inaugural Solo Exhibition @ David Kordansky Gallery In Los Angeles

 
 

The gestures that animate the works in Lucy Bull’s Skunk Grove gravitate toward several overlapping categories. They include daubed, gauzy veils; illusionistic swirls and stratifications; and networks of scratched marks that give way to underlying areas of paint. But even these are mere generalizations, as any attempt to fix Bull’s abstract language within the constraints of descriptive analysis falls short. In this respect, the paintings seem to depict the process of grasping for solid interpretive ground while simultaneously acknowledging that there are times when the ground must fall away. Between these extremes, worlds are created and destroyed; thoughts give way to feelings, and vice versa; and life’s constant fluctuations are given symbolic expression as passages between discrete sections of a composition give way to those that surround and engulf it. Every element of the picture communicates—sometimes harmoniously, sometimes sharply—as part of an immersive, atmospheric whole.

Skunk Grove is on view through April 1 @ David Kordansky 5130 W. Edgewood Pl. Los Angeles

Read Our Interview Of Jason Stein On The Art Of The Auction At Bonhams →

LOT 275 MOTOROLA 50XC Radio 1940 marbleized green and butterscotch catalin height 6 1/2in (16.5cm); width 9 1/2in (24cm); depth 6 1/2in (16.5cm) US$ 5,000 - US$ 7,000 £ 3,600 - £ 5,100 € 4,200 - € 5,900

LOT 275
MOTOROLA
50XC Radio
1940
marbleized green and butterscotch catalin
height 6 1/2in (16.5cm); width 9 1/2in (24cm); depth 6 1/2in (16.5cm)
US$ 5,000 - US$ 7,000
£ 3,600 - £ 5,100
€ 4,200 - € 5,900

Jason Stein, Director of Modern Decorative Art and Design at Bonhams, grew up in the world of astrology and birth charts in Los Angeles’ growing New Age scene. His mother was a co-founder of The Aquarius Group, and his father was a department store manager. This amalgam wound up being a perfect formula for his work in the secondary market, first as an intern at Sotheby’s and finally at Bonhams where he is immersed in a universe of rare and beautiful objects that span movements, thoughts, trends, and design history. Ahead of this week’s Modern Design | Art auction, which has a focus on rare Bakelite radios and Mexican surrealist artists, like Leonora Carrington, we spoke to Stein about his fascinating role as design guru at Bonhams, avoiding fakes, and the return of maximalism. Click here to read more.

Meriem Bennani's Guided Tour of a Spill @ François Ghebaly In Los Angeles

Meriem Bennani’s Guided Tour of a Spill acts as an interlude between her groundbreaking Party on the CAPS (2018), her pseudo-documentary set in the Moroccan quarter of the CAPS, and a narrative sequel set to debut later this year at the Renaissance Society and Nottingham Contemporary. The exhibition consists of the titular multi-channel video projected and displayed on sculptural, kinetic screens alongside new drawings of scenes from the world of the CAPS. One screen, broadcasting what could be an A.I.-generated children’s video, is topped by helicoptering ropes that slap the gallery walls. Inspired by the compilation structure and synesthetic drive of Disney’s Fantasia (1940), Guided Tour of a Spill centers less on overt narrative and more on the visceral and sensorial pleasure of music, dance, athletics and humor. Throughout the exhibition, Bennani playfully blends humor and critique, weaving an expanded allegory for how media circulates through channels of digital and geopolitical power, both online and in the real spaces we inhabit.

Guided Tour of a Spill is on view by appointment through May 1 @ François Ghebaly 2245 E. Washington Blvd., Los Angeles

 
 

Traces On The Surfaces Of The World Group Show @ GAVLAK Los Angeles

Traces on the Surfaces of the World brings together six international artists whose works stage the anxious encounters between human bodies and inanimate objects that define a world reformed by an all-encompassing fear of contagion. In “Human Traces on the Surfaces of the World,” Judith Butler parallels the invisible passage of a virus from bodies to objects to other bodies, to the similarly invisible machinations of socio-political paradigms that dictate who must assume the risk of contact, and by extension which lives are expendable. Artists and theorists have for decades romanticized the notion of dissolving the distance between art objects and those who experience them: this exhibition probes the dimensions of a reality in which this longed-for contact has become especially fraught. Exhibiting artists include Cristine Brache, Henry Chapman, Alex Chitty, Gisela Colón, Amalie Jakobsen, and Dean Sameshima.

Traces on the Surfaces of the World is on view through April 24 @ Gavlak 1700 South Santa Fe Avenue, Suite 440 Los Angeles

 
 

Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life @ MoMA PS1 In New York

From the very outset of her career in the 1950s, Niki de Saint Phalle (American and French, 1930‒2002) defied artistic conventions, creating works that were overtly feminist, performative, collaborative, and monumental. Her first major US exhibition, Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life features over 200 works that highlight Saint Phalle’s interdisciplinary approach and engagement with pressing social issues. Innovation was key to Saint Phalle’s process: from beginning to end, she envisioned new ways of inhabiting the world.

Saint Phalle also engaged with the politics of social space in her work. Addressing subjects that ranged from women’s rights to climate change and HIV/AIDS awareness, she was often at the vanguard in addressing pressing issues of her time. In particular, her work to destigmatize HIV/AIDS is highlighted through works related to her illustrated book AIDS: You Can’t Catch It Holding Hands (1986).

Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life is on view through September 6 @ MoMA PS1 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens

 
 

Karon Davis: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished @ Jeffrey Deitch In New York

When Karon Davis has not seen a specific image of Black history in art history, she tries to create it herself. For her first solo exhibition in New York, No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, the viewers are witness to one of the most unjust trials in American history. The work celebrates the defiance of Bobby Seale in the face of injustice. Bobby Seale, bound and gagged in a Chicago courtroom, is one of the most searing images in American history. There were no photographs of this shocking episode during the trial of the Chicago 8 in October 1969, only artists’ sketches. This has made the image even more resonant as we conflate the sketches and subsequent actors’ portrayals in our visual memory. The image of Bobby Seale, physically restrained but defiant, refusing to submit to the judge, has haunted Davis for many years. It became especially provocative during the past year’s incidents of police violence.

A powerful sculptural tableau of a bound and gagged Bobby Seale in front of Judge Julius Hoffman and the Chicago jury confronts visitors to the exhibition. Displayed in front of the courtroom are fifty sculpted bags of groceries, juxtaposing the Black Panthers’ free food program for the Black community in Oakland, California, with the repression of the judicial system.

Davis’s title for the exhibition is a reference to the government’s violent prosecution of the Black Panthers and its distortion of the public’s understanding of the Panthers’ contributions to their community.

Karon Davis: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished is on view through April 24 @ Jeffrey Deitch 18 Wooster Street, New York

Watch Niki de Saint Phalle Fire Away At Her Work With A Rifle

Niki de St Phalle débute sa carrière artistique, encouragée par le peintre Hugh Weiss. 'Les tirs', performances durant lesquelles des spectateurs sont invité...


Niki de Saint Phalle began her artistic career, encouraged by the painter Hugh Weiss. “Les Tirs“, meaning “the shots” were the performances that made her famous, during which spectators were invited to shoot with rifles at pockets of paint, thus splashing plaster assemblages. These works placed her firmly in the circle of 'new realists', playing the role of mediator between the French and American avant-garde.

Post Impalpable Rites: Theodoulos Polyviou & Dakis Panayiotou @ Künstlerhaus Bethanien In Berlin

In landscape architecture, “Desire Lines” are the imprints of illicit paths that emerge when predetermined patterns of movement are not adhered to and spaces are accessed contrary to their planning. Planned lines start from conventional navigation methods that become inscribed in everyday life over time through repetitions of norms and rituals. To deviate from these lines is to become disoriented.

With Post Impalpable Rites, Theo & Daki celebrate a divorce from the virtual reality that populates our private and public spaces. Visitors currently experience and develop “Desire Lines” mainly digitally, with body extensions such as their smartphones. In the window front of Künstlerhaus Bethanien, the artists transform an architecture that was once constructed virtually but is now brought into the exhibition space in real terms. The structure represents the already built part of a building, a future space and at the same time the outline of a ruin from the past.

In response to the invitation of the Cypriot Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021, Theo & Daki developed a site-specific virtual structure that is here partially brought into the physical space at Künstlerhaus Bethanien. The Biennale is entitled “How will we live together?” As one possible perspective, the artists engage in intentional mutations, new paths until the state of disorientation and being lost can become a state of meditation.

Lines are both created by being followed and followed by being created.
-Sarah Ahmed

Post Impalpable Rites was curated by Carola Uehlken and is on view through March 21 @ Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Kottbusser Straße 10, 10999 Berlin

 
 

Henry Taylor's Inaugural Solo Exhibition @ Hauser & Wirth Somerset

Henry Taylor culls his cultural landscape at a vigorous pace, creating a language entirely his own from archival and immediate imagery, disparate material and memory. Through a process he describes as ‘hunting and gathering,’ Taylor transports us into imagined realities that interrogate the breadth of the human condition, social movements and political structures.

For his inaugural exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, the American artist has taken over all five galleries in Somerset to present a major body of sculptural work and paintings, evolving in unison across the spaces. Throughout his four-decade long career, Taylor has consistently and simultaneously both embraced and rejected the tenets of traditional painting as well as any formal label. He has amassed a staggering body of highly personal work rooted in the people and communities closest to him, often manifested alongside poignant historical or pop-cultural references. In preparation for the exhibition, Taylor extended and unraveled his studio practice within the galleries at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, followed by an artist residency at Hauser & Wirth Somerset this winter - energetically building, stacking and affixing a vast array of collected objects together to create a holistic record of his everyday routine and the materials that define them. With a guiding sense of human connection, Taylor layers reoccurring visual cues associated with his own personal experiences and broader cultural references that lead us through a multifaceted narrative in sculpture and painting.

Although his subjects are wildly diverse - family members, peers and acquaintances - Taylor’s ability to seek out the truest sense of a person and their sociocultural framework is evident throughout. This sharp focus has shifted inwards during the UK’s national lockdown with two new self-portraits. The first, a head and shoulder profile, depicts a regal-looking Taylor as Henry V and is a play on the artist’s childhood nickname of Henry VIII, since he is the youngest of eight children. The second is a full body image of Taylor in Somerset adorning pinstripe pyjamas and flanked by sheep, placing him firmly in his new rural environment.

Henry Taylor is available to view online now through June 6 and for will be open for in-person viewing by appointment starting April 13 @ Hauser & Wirth Somerset Durslade Farm, Dropping Lane Bruton, Somerset BA10 0NL

 
 
 

Garden Group Show Features More Than 100 Female & Non-Binary Artists @ Ladies' Room In Los Angeles

GARDEN is an exhibition of more than 100 female and non-binary artists and artist teams whose work was made while in quarantine. Understanding that gardens are metaphorical utopias and sites of resilience, but principally serve as bodily nourishment, GARDEN underscores mutual aid in a moment of institutional atrophy, financial insecurity, and  cultural drought. As part of the exhibition’s commitment to the Los Angeles community, LADIES’ ROOM will donate 15%  of all sales to benefit LA Food Policy Council, Ron Finley Project, and Summaeverythang Community Center.  

The exhibition also considers art production amidst global turmoil by highlighting the linkages between gender, ecological processes, economics, labor, and power obscured by colonial histories. Beyond the narrow assumption that certain gender identities hold an innate closeness with “nature” due to some biological predisposition, this exhibition challenges us to see gender not an isolating construct, but as an expansive and illuminating guide in the realm of environmental mediations.

Participating artists include: Aili Schmeltz • Alex Heilbron • Ali Prosch • Alison Blickle • Allison Peck • Alison Ragguette • Anja Salonen • Anna Elise Johnson • Annabel Osberg • Annie Hodgin • Ari Salka • Ariel Dill • Ashley Garrett • Beth Fiedorek • Betsy Lin Seder • Bettina Hubby • Brittany Mojo • Carey Coleman • Carolyn Castaño • Carrie Cook • Cathy Akers • Cheyann Washington • Christine Frerichs • Christine Nguyen • Dafna Maimon • Dana Greiner • Delia Brown • Devon Oder • Ekta Aggarwal • Elisa Johns • Esther Ruiz • Farrah Karapetian • Felice Grodin & Linda Chamorro • Geneva Jacuzzi • Hadley Holliday • Heather Rosenman • Isis Aquarian (The Source Family Archives) • Janet Levy • Jaqueline Cedar • Jenna Ransom • Jessica Simmons • JOJO ABOT • Julie Bowland • Julie Lequin • Julika Lackner • Karen Constine • Karen Kuo • Karley Sullivan • Kate Harding • Kelsey Shwetz • Kristin Leachman • Krysten Cunningham • Laurie Nye • Lesley Wamsley • Lily Wilkins • Linnéa Spransy • Lisa Ohlweiler • Lisa Oxley • Livy Porter • Lydia Maria Pfeffer • Mabel Moore • Madam X • Madeleine Hines • Malisa Humphrey • Margarete Hahner • Margie Schnibbe • Mary Anna Pomonis • Maya Mackrandilal • Meghann McCrory • Meike Legler • Molly Duggan • Molly Larkey • Monica Nouwens • Nancy Evans • Nasim Hantehzadeh • Nora Shields • People’s Pottery Project • Rachel Kessler • Rachel Roske • Rachelle Rojany • Rema Ghuloum • Renée Fox • Richelle Gribble • Roberta Gentry • Roni Shneior • Rose Wharton • Samantha Fields • Sarah Alice Moran • Shahla Friberg • Siri Kaur • Sohani Holland • Soo Kim • Sophia Allison • Sophie Lee • Stephanie Rose Guerrero • Still Life Ceramics • Summer Cooper • Sunja Park • Tanya Brodsky • Titia Estes • Tova Mozard • Trina Turturici • Xinrui Chen • Zoe Koke

GARDEN is on view through April 30 @ Ladies' Room Bendix Building, 1206 Maple Avenue #502B, Los Angeles

 
 

Kate Mosher Hall's Without a body, without Bill @ Hannah Hoffman Gallery In Los Angeles

The look is the strangest lie God gifted us. Pointed gawks back and forth, stuck in stare, with lovers, unknowable animals and the rest of the world’s stuff. The (modern) animal is said to be locked in an interminable cycle of disappearance. Phantasmal creatures that slip in and out of view, only illuminated as symbols and pictures. To know them is to see them. To see them is to try on a battered old human conceit: the animal was the first metaphor. It’s dreadful, a thing that should never have been possible, for sight to possess such procedural power. And yet, here we are, like moths to a bulb in the twilight of our go, amid a scene that holds an audience and a stage, a spotlight and the darkness that surrounds it. In solidarity—together, beside, a cabaret of sights unseen. 

- Nicole-Antonia Spagnola

Without a body, without Bill is on view through April 10 @ Hannah Hoffman 2504 W 7th Street, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles

AFK: A 3D Gallery Group Show Inspired By Glitch Feminism For Coaxial Media Arts Festival In Los Angeles

Coaxial Arts is celebrating their sixth anniversary with a full month of programming. After receiving a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to produce a media arts festival and book, they have lined up a knockout list of performances, artist lectures, drive-in screenings, and a book release covering every residency at Coaxial. Film stills and installation views above are from AFK, a 3D group show, curated by Casey Kauffman that takes inspiration from Legacy Russell’s triumphant manifesto, Glitch Feminism. Featured artists include: Johnny Forever Nawracaj, Gretchen Andrew, Rudy Falagán, Margot Padilla, Panteha Abareshi, Sydney Shavers, Paulson Lee, and Lanéya Billingsley.

Petra Cortright's Predator Swamping @ 1301PE In Los Angeles

In order to maintain survival, some species hatch all at once. Floods of nascent turtles, crabs, or fish will overwhelm their predator by sheer volume. This oversaturation ensures that the breed will live on. For Predator Swamping, Petra Cortright exhibits a new body of work, made during the precarious months of 2020, in which she exercises a similar survival instinct.

For her third exhibition with 1301PE and her first since the birth of her son, Cortright continues to create paintings in Photoshop and prints them on Belgian linen. The paintings incorporate images of the High Desert, Bolivia, and Patagonia sourced from the internet which function as a base layer upon which she builds expanded landscapes. For the first time in her career Cortright has also created paintings in black and white. The stripping away of color reveals an overwhelming desolation that could bear a strong resemblance to 2020, while for some including Cortright, a homebody at heart, the imagery evokes doomsday bliss.

Predator Swamping is on view through March 27 @ 1301PE 6150 Wilshire Boulevard

Read Our Interview Of Painter Anna Weyant On The Occasion Of Her Loose Screw Exhibition @ Blum & Poe In Los Angeles →

AWE4.jpg

Falling, living, laughing, touching—the still, subdued, painterly fantasies of Anna Weyant sway to and fro from the warmly resplendent hues of the Dutch Masters, to the madness of Otto Dix, to the gold of an Instagram selfie’s golden hour. The work, much of it created under the shadow of a global pandemic, are prime moments of a zeitgeist suddenly hollowed by the screeching halt of life as we know it: backgrounds are blackened out, clouds obscure, and curtains drape with muted uncertainties. Everything is vague and everything is a warm oblivion, like the sand of an hourglass exploded and the grains took the shape of a world that resembled its former self. But time doesn’t stop on a dime, it lurches, chugs forward with ghostlike animation even when your foot is on the break, which is what makes Weyant’s paintings so exciting—brushstroke by brushstroke, they are full of that potential energy. In the following interview, Bill Powers and Anna Weyant discuss her upcoming show at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles. Click here to read more.

Keith Duncan's Bayou Classic Online Exhibition @ Fort Gansevoort

Bayou Classic is an online exhibition featuring new drawings and paintings in which the artist pays tribute to a grand New Orleans tradition inextricably linked to the wider sweep of Black cultural heritage in America: established in 1974, the Bayou Classic is an annual football game between two of Louisiana’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Southern University and Grambling State University. The highlight of this event is the Battle of the Bands, a resplendent halftime show in which the marching bands of the two schools compete to deliver the most sensational performance. For Duncan, the pageantry and ceremonial elements that are hallmarks of the HBCU band performances are contemporary analogs for African American traditions. The drum majors and musicians depicted in his work in brilliant, vibrating hues, are “symbols of African warriors dancing in front of the king or the queen, like a pageantry of ceremonious splendor.” The artist further explains, “I saw them in that light and it’s part of our heritage beyond New Orleans.” Indeed, thousands of supporters of the Bayou Classic travel from across the nation to participate in the various festivities that unfold around the event; a multi-generational audience of students, alumni, and relatives gathers for this moment, paralleling an all-encompassing family reunion. For many, “the Classic” is an essential tradition that helps to preserve the mission of the HBCUs, which were established to nourish the talent and brilliance of African American people in a mutually supportive environment.

Keith Duncan: Bayou Classic is on view online through April 17 @ Fort Gansevoort

New Paintings By Brittney Leeanne Williams @ Alexander Berggruen in New York

 
 

The Arch Is A Portal Is A Belly Is A Back marks Brittney Leeanne Williams’ first solo exhibition with Alexander Berggruen. The new paintings and works on paper by Brittney Leeanne Williams take influence from desertscapes in Victorville, a city northeast of Los Angeles where Williams spent part of her childhood. Williams transforms these Southern Californian landscapes into “emotional landscapes: representations of psychological states, memories, and emotional ties.”

The red of many of Williams’s figures might connote a rawness, a tenderness, and an emotional vulnerability. As Legacy Russell wrote: “A break, tear, rupture, or cut in skin opens a portal and a passageway. Here, too, is both a world and a wound.” (1) Williams’s female forms serve as conduits to viewing a dimension of Williams’s spirit. In her own words: “Her back becomes the keystone. She holds up what is above, fastening herself to what’s below, to make room so that something or someone may pass through.”
(1) Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, London, New York, 2020, pp. 83-84, 101

The Arch Is a Portal Is a Belly Is a Back is on view through April 14 @ Alexander Berggruen 1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3, New York

Cindy Sherman Presents Tapestries @ Sprueth Magers In Los Angeles

 
 

In her latest series on view, Cindy Sherman explores her first non-photographic medium in a career spanning over 40 years: tapestry. Featuring a dozen examples of her new and recent tapestries, the exhibition marks the début of these works as a coherent body of work. In line with Sherman’s long-term photographic investigation into the construction of identity and the nature of representation, the images are based on pictures posted on the artist’s personal Instagram account, which she creates using widely available filters and face-altering apps. Impossible to print in large scale due to the low-resolution nature of the original Instagram images, they are transposed into woven textiles, which in turn resonate with the pixelation of the source material: Pixels, here, translate to the warp and weft of thread.

Tapestries is on view through May 1 @ Sprueth Magers 5900 Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles