Love Letter to L.A.: New Works By Beverly Fishman @ GAVLAK Gallery In Los Angeles

Love Letter to L.A. is GAVLAK gallery’s first solo presentation of new work by Beverly Fishman. The exhibition’s declaration of affection signals a pivot to the personal in Fishman’s new body of work, for which she has developed a distinctive color palette for objects that occupy a liminal position between two and three dimensions, subtly acknowledging a debt to styles with California roots, including the Light and Space and Finish Fetish movements. The enticing and deceptive optical effects the new works produce also expand upon Fishman’s long-standing investigations of how physical and mental states with no fixed visual forms of their own—namely, pain and wellness—are articulated in the marketing of pharmaceutical conglomerates to an increasingly medicated general public.

Love Letter to L.A. will be on view through June 5 at GAVLAK Los Angeles.

Global Fax Festival: A New Performance Film By David Hammons In Collaboration With Monday Evening Concerts

‘Global Fax Festival’ a new performanceby David Hammons dedicated to Butch Morris in collaboration with Monday Evening Concerts and pianist Myra Melford Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, 10 May 2021 Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Elon Schoenholz Photography © 2021

‘Global Fax Festival’ a new performance by David Hammons dedicated to Butch Morris in collaboration with Monday Evening Concerts and pianist Myra Melford
Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, 10 May 2021
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Elon Schoenholz Photography © 2021

Hauser & Wirth’s digital art magazine Ursula presents ‘Global Fax Festival’ – a new performance film by David Hammons dedicated to composer/conductor Lawrence D. ‘Butch’ Morris and created in collaboration with Los Angeles’ venerated Monday Evening Concerts and virtuoso pianist Myra Melford.

The film documents Hammons’ first-ever restaging of his noted 2000 project ‘Global Fax Festival’ here conducted in the gallery’s outdoor courtyard in early May 2021. After more than a year of isolation during the pandemic, Hammons conceived this event as a gesture toward the reawakening of Los Angeles, set within the space that two years ago hosted the largest survey of his work ever organized.

The new ‘Global Fax Festival’ performance film features a solo improvisational piano performance by Myra Melford. A former Butch Morris collaborator, Melford plays in dialogue with projected footage of Morris, who passed away in 2013, performing Conductions®, his trademarked technique that merges conducting and improvisation.

Virtually Cool: Otis College Annual Fashion Show Features Designs Inspired By The Work Of Noah Davis

This Saturday, May 8, Otis College will be holding their annual fashion show for the classes of 2020 and 2021, broadcasting digitally in lieu of an in-person event. In support of their first-generation population, which comprises roughly 30% of the student body, the public will be invited at no cost for the first time and encouraged to contribute financially during the program. These students worked under the mentorship of industry heavyweights like Ruth Carter, David Meister, Jonathan Simkhai and B. Akerlund in addition to many other prominent costume and fashion designers who work with Universal, Vince and ALC.

Virtually Cool also features a collaboration with designers Arthur Thammavong and Deborah Sabet from Vince, who tasked students to make a line of clothing based off of the late American artist Noah Davis' paintings.

RSVP now to attend.

Repeat: Sculptures By Janet Levy, Choreography By Diane Gemsch @ SWB Experimenthaus In Zurich

As we navigate our lives in these times of a pandemic, the question about home and living becomes even more pronounced. Janet Levy questions what is home and what is the significance of home, collecting objects from her surroundings to create a site-specific sculptural installation. In kind, Diane Gemsch creates an emotional response by physically bringing this action to movement while engaging with the house and sculpture installation.

Repeat is on view by appointment through May @ SWB Experimenthaus Neubühl, Westbühlstrasse 59, 8038 Zurich-Wollishofen. photographs by Rudolf Moser

 


Ben Sakoguchi's Chinatown @ Bel Ami In Los Angeles

Ben Sakoguchi’s combinations of commercial signage, history painting, and Pop Art comment on the American Dream and its fraught entanglement with xenophobia and racism. With acrylic paint on canvas, Sakoguchi reassembles imagery from film posters, newspapers, comics, and internet searches to reveal subtexts of local discrimination, mass media exploitation, and state-sanctioned violence. A Japanese American who spent years of his childhood living in an internment camp during World War II, Sakoguchi comments on a century and a half of prejudice against diasporic Asians. Contending with overlapping histories that contribute to ideas of Asian American identity, Sakoguchi creates an ironic primer on capitalism’s treachery with an audacity that challenges and uplifts.

A publication with essays by Eli Diner (Critic, Curator, and Executive Editor of Cultured magazine), Steven Wong (Curator and the Director of the Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA), and Ana Iwataki (Writer, Curator, and PhD student in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture, University of Southern California, Los Angeles) will be released in PDF and printed form during the course of this exhibition.

Chinatown is on view through April 24 @ Bel Ami 709 N Hill St. #105, Los Angeles

Ben Sakoguchi Chinatown, 2014 Acrylic on canvas, wooden frames (1 of 15 panels) 53 x 91 in (134.6 x 231.1 cm)

Ben Sakoguchi
Chinatown, 2014
Acrylic on canvas, wooden frames (1 of 15 panels) 53 x 91 in (134.6 x 231.1 cm)

Randolpho Lamonier Presents My Kind Of Dirty @ Fort Gansevoort

 
 

My Kind Of Dirty is Brazilian artist Randolpho Lamonier’s first exhibition with Fort Gansevoort. This online presentation brings together recent textile works in which Lamonier responds to his upbringing in Contagem, an industrial city in southeastern Brazil, drawing  upon observations of hardship and inequality to create powerful expressions in vivid colors, word  combinations, and raw images. The artist locates his inspiration in an environment where joy grows  proportionally to misfortune and likens his work to diaristic entries. Rendered in deceptively humble handwork and fabrics, the scintillating psychedelic landscapes on view in My Kind Of Dirty celebrate “the  exuberance of life that resists against the necropolitical agenda guided by the current Brazilian government,” the artist has said. In this way, Lamonier’s approach to representation acts as personal revolution, whereby the aura of possibility defines his blueprint for the future. 

My Kind Of Dirty is available for online viewing through May 15

an exit from this room and others like it: New Paintings & Ceramics By Hana Ward @ Ochi Projects In Los Angeles

Hana Ward’s newest oil paintings and ceramic works offer a visual narrative for what the artist describes as “a liberation in the mind.” With so much time spent trapped in divergent states this past year, reading and reflecting, watching the news – vacillating between feelings of hopelessness and anticipation – Ward found herself thinking about the experience of transformation, of coming into one’s power – specifically about how this experience might unfold for Black women.

Taken individually and as a whole, Ward’s most recent paintings and ceramic works invite viewers to create more loving space within themselves, allowing for the potential to thrive during an otherwise unforgiving and isolating time. Each portrait relays a deeply personal inner metamorphosis that also manifests outwardly, through an individual’s outlook and approach to life, and even possibly, optimistically, as a society at large.

an exit from this room and others like it is on view through May 8 @ Ochi Projects 3301 W Washington Blvd. Los Angeles

 
 

A Strange Encounter: New Paintings & Watercolors By Harold Ancart @ C L E A R I N G, Beverly Hills

A Strange Encounter is on view through May 8 @ C L E A R I N G, Beverly Hills. DM the Gallery for appointments


Matthew Lutz-Kinoy: Window To The Clouds @ Salon Berlin, Museum Frieder Burda

Presented at Salon Berlin, the Berlin-based project and exhibition space of the internationally renowned Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Window to The Clouds is Paris-based artist Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s first institutional solo presentation in Germany. Mirroring Salon Berlin’s engagement for diverse potentialities in contemporary artistic creation, Lutz-Kinoy embraces the full dimensionality of the exhibition space as he conceives an immersive and sensorial environment for visitors that sheds light on his deeply spatial approach to painting, rooted in the body and performance. Comprised of recent paintings, ceramics and a site-specific sculpture, the exhibition imagines a series of contemporary landscapes as painterly reflections that look at — and through — various architectures, historical paintings and current events. These environments act as stages for worlds of shared experience, human presence and touch. 

Window to The Clouds is on view through June 5 @ Salon Berlin Auguststr. 11–13, 10117 Berlin

 
 

Watch L.A. Dance Project’s David Adrian Freeland Jr. Perform ‘It Could’ve Been Me...It Could Be Me'

LADP Still 5.jpg

After a year of dormancy brought on by the pandemic, Hauser & Wirth’s dynamic, multi-use space in Downtown Los Angeles was revived with a special collaborative performance featuring L.A. Dance Project's David Adrian Freeland Jr. His powerful choreographic work, ‘It Could’ve Been Me...It Could Be Me,’ was performed throughout the gallery’s outdoor spaces and within ‘The Great American Fact,’ Amy Sherald’s first West Coast exhibition. The performance, captured by Trevor Tweeten, can be viewed here. Debuting online as part of Ursula Magazine, the performance was created during the uprisings against police brutality and the killings of unarmed Black Americans.

Choreography & performance: David Adrian
Videography: Trevor Tweeten
Music: Joel Thompson’s ‘Seven Last Words of the Unarmed’. 
Audio recording by Michigan State University Men’s Glee Club, 2016. Conducted by Eugene Rogers

Watch Ron Athey In Conversation With Hans Ulrich Obrist For Autre's Spring 21 Issue

Let's begin with the beginning...discover the electrifying, sacrificial practice of Ron Athey. Presenting a short film by Mat+Kat to accompany artist Ron Athey's cover story and 8,000+ word interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist for Autre's Spring 21 Doppelgänger issue. Obrist explore's Athey's 40-year boundary destroying oeuvre, the trance of performing, thinking in the live image, and the archetype of ritual. Read the full interview in Autre's Spring 21 issue—preorder is available now (each preorder will receive a free full digital edition immediately after checkout). Athey's retrospective, Queer Communion, curated by Amelia Jones, is on view until April 4th at Participant New York. And will travel to ICA LA Summer 2021. Directed by Mat+Kat Cinematography by Austin Kearns. Makeup by Laramie. Styling Aleksandra Koj and Kristina Koelle. Production by Kendall Thompson

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