Adrian Piper's 'Concepts and Intuitions, 1965-2016' Opens @ Hammer Museum in Los Angeles

Adrian Piper: Concepts and Intuitions, 1965-2016 is the most comprehensive West Coast exhibition to date of the work of Adrian Piper (b. 1948, New York). It is also the first West Coast museum presentation of Piper’s works in more than a decade, and her first since receiving the Golden Lion Award for Best Artist at the 56th Venice Biennale of 2015 and Germany’s Käthe Kollwitz Prize in 2018. Organized by The Museum of Modern Art, this expansive retrospective features more than 270 works gathered from public and private collections from around the world, and encompasses a wide range of mediums that Piper has explored for over 50 years: drawing, photography, works on paper, video, multimedia installations, performance, painting, sculpture, and sound. 

Piper’s groundbreaking, transformative work has profoundly shaped the form and content of Conceptual art since the 1960s, exerting an incalculable influence on artists working today. Her investigations into the political, social, and spiritual potential of Conceptual art frequently address gender, race, and xenophobia through incisive humor and wit, and draw on her long-standing involvement with philosophy and yoga.

For this exhibition, the Hammer is partnering with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA) to present Piper’s work What It’s Like, What It Is #3, a large-scale mixed-media installation addressing racial stereotypes. Adrian Piper: Concepts and Intuitions, 1965-2016 in on view through January 6 at Hammer Museum 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles. photographs by Summer Bowie

West Of Modernism: California Graphic Design 1975-1995 @ LACMA

The late 20th century was a transformational period for graphic design. Questioning the increasingly rigid rules of modernism, designers pressed for greater autonomy in their work. At the same time, dizzying advances in technology upended existing design and production processes. Far from the established New York design world, California became a haven for avant-garde designers, a hub of innovation in both discourse and practice.

This installation explores how the intense ideological debates and technological changes were manifest in posters and publications. It features the work of many influential designers including Emigre, Inc., Ed Fella, April Greiman, Rebeca Méndez, Deborah Sussman, and Lorraine Wild. West Of Modernism: California Graphic Design 1975-1995 is on view through April 21, 2019 at LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Ai Weiwei's CAO/Humanity @ UTA Artist Space In Los Angeles

Cao / Humanity is a new exhibition by the acclaimed Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, which is in tandem with two other Los Angeles exhibitions. This marks an exciting milestone for both Ai and the city of Los Angeles, where he is exhibiting for the first time. Having designed the new UTA Artist Space location in Beverly Hills, Ai’s Cao / Humanity offers a one-of-a-kind experience for visitors—an expansive celebration of his artistic practice in a space he himself designed, the only architectural project he’s undertaken in the United States.

Central to the exhibition is a new collective performance project by Ai Weiwei: Humanity. This global campaign is a reaction to the tens of millions displaced by war, famine and climate crises, and gives a personal and group voice in support of the idea that humanity is one. 

Cao presents a wide range of his work, from the iconic middle finger motif wallpapered through the space and the glass sculpture Up Yours(2018), to the massive Iron Tree Trunk (2015), a collection of individual pieces welded together into a deceptively life-like form, weighs nearly two tons. CAO/Humanity is on view through December 1, 2018 at UTA Artist Space 403 Foothill Road, Beverly Hills. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Arturo Oliva Pedroza Releases 'Kissed Face' Book Alongside Exhibition @ Book & Job Gallery In San Francisco.

When asked to picture the streets of Paris, it might be challenging to deviate from images of the crowded boulevards, full of the café-concerts made popular by the end of the nineteenth century, with bodies dancing through the streets to the notes of Joe Dassin’s Les Champs Élysées or Edith Piaf’s La Vie en Rose. Arturo Oliva Pedroza’s Kissed Face offers something else. Instead, Pedroza gives calm, straightforward shots of hangouts in Paris—the romance of dimly lit spaces, of an evening’s early stages of debauchery, and of a slice of pizza.

These photographs emerged from Pedroza’s studies in Paris during 2009 and 2010. While photography itself functions in degrees of stillness—capturing, suspending, and depicting moments for infinite pictorial existence—Pedroza’s photographs have an echo to them. These sounds reverberate in the washed-out backgrounds of Pedroza’s nightly strolls, in the objects once loved, but set aside, and in the fleeting engagements with strangers. There is a softness in each frame that invites a viewer to stay awhile, to share a drag of a cigarette, and to watch the smoke make its way quickly into the sky.

Opening Reception Thursday, October 4th 5-10PM

Closing Reception Saturday, October 20th 5PM

Book & Job Gallery 838 Geary St, San Francisco, CA 94109

Buy the book here

Morgan Mandalay's 'Holy Holy Holy' @ Catbox Contemporary In New York

Holy Holy Holy is an exhibition of new work by Morgan Mandalay. Using the “Book of Tobit” (a Catholic story centering around the exorcising of demons) as a starting point, Mandalay generates a  visual narrative about class, populism, and agency through the lens of 18th century painting. The walls of the gallery are painted a pale pink, meant to reference the Timken Museum of Art, a small museum in San Diego Mandalay used to frequent because of its free entry for the public and prominent collection of Rococo paintings. Here he uses the sentimentality of the setting to help conjure the anarchistic energy latent in painting’s history.

Catbox Contemporary is an appointment-only art gallery housed in the Ridgemont apartment of artist/founder, Philip Hinge. Occupying two catboxes within Hinge’s cat tree, the space allows artists to display full solo exhibitions at miniature scale and sell small works at affordable prices. Holy Holy Holy is on view through October 14, make your appointment now by DMing @CatboxContemporary. photographs courtesy of Catbox Contemporary

Chris Engman's Containment @ Weston Art Gallery In Cincinnati, Ohio

Chris Engman’s Containment (2018) is a site-specific installation created as a part of the FotoFocus Biennial 2018, which starts today. The piece is part of a larger exhibition, titled Chris Engman: Prospect and Refuge at Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery. This is the largest biennial for photography and lens-based art in the country. This edition counts over 400 artists, galleries, museums, and cultural partners across Cincinnati, Dayton and Columbus, Ohio. As part of the Biennial, LA artist, Chris Engman creates a new site-specific installation for the Biennial, accompanied by a selection of his mind-bending photographic constructions of landscapes. Curated by Carissa Barnard, FotoFocus Deputy Director, Containment is on view through November 18 at Weston Art Gallery 650 Walnut Street, Cincinnati, Ohio. photographs by Tony Walsh

Presentation of Yazbukey Fitness Club Spring Summer 2019 During Paris Fashion Week

A lithe group of dancers, acrobats and contortionists graced the stage for the high-voltage presentation of Yazbukey Fitness Club – surrealist designer, Yazbukey’s full-throttle spring/summer 2019 collection. Her latest works inspired by the current obsessions with fit culture, fitspo, and the like are a welcome alternative to the dominating athleisure forces as of late. photographs by Flo Kohl

Opening Of James Herman's 'ISLAND' @ Ibid Gallery In Los Angeles

ISLAND is the second solo exhibition that James Herman has presented with Ibid Gallery. Using sculpture, painting, and printmaking alongside his homesteading practice, Herman’s work straddles alternative off-the-grid building methods with the legacy of Postwar American painting in his psychedelic, referential-laden forms and their social function. Herman’s painted plywood panels and architectural dwellings act as reflectors and spatial activators for his ultimate conceptual practice: a radical domesticity based in sustainability, self-reliance, subsistence, and repetitive labor. ISLAND is on view through October 27 at Ibid Gallery 670 S Anderson Street, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

Opening Of Nino Cais' Don't turn off the light @ Fridman Gallery In New York

Don’t turn off the light is the second solo exhibition at Fridman Gallery for Brazilian artist, Nino Cais. It presents the artist’s take on male and female forms through installation, assemblages, and film. The artist utilizes his unique syntax, juxtaposing the banal and the fetishized, to create dreamlike unions of household objects and found photography. To read our 2014 interview of the artist, click here. Don’t turn off the light opens tonight @ 6pm and is on view through November 3 at Fridman Gallery 287 Spring Street New York. images courtesy of Nino Cais and Fridman Gallery

Rubbish And Dreams @ The Leslie-Lohman Museum Of Gay And Lesbian Art In New York

Rubbish and Dreams: the Genderqueer Performance Art of Stephen Varble, is an exhibition focusing on a performance artist who became iconic in 1970s New York for his disruptive interventions into galleries, public spaces, and financial institutions. Varble would engage in unauthorized and impromptu performance wearing elaborate drag costumes made from street trash, food waste, and stolen objects. His work was decidedly anti-institutional and he disrupted the business of art in the 1970s. For these reasons, he was soon written out of history, and no substantive piece of writing on his practice has been published for 40 years. This exhibition draws on a number of private archives in telling Varble’s story for the first time. RUBBISH AND DREAMS: The Genderqueer Performance Art of Stephen Varble is on view through January 6, 2019 at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, 26 Wooster Street, New York.

Closing Party For 'Water & Power' And After Party For Karon Davis' 'Muddy Water' @ Underground Museum in Los Angeles

The Los Angeles cultural world came out in droves to the Underground Museum September 15 to celebrate the closing of Water & Power and the opening of Muddy Water. Water & Power featured four artworks from the MOCA permanent collection, curated by the late Noah Davis at the Underground Museum. Muddy Water is a solo exhibition by Karon Davis currently on view at Wilding Cran Gallery through November 4. photographs by Lani Trock

Opening Of Melanie Schiff's 'Glass Sabbath' @ Night Gallery In Los Angeles

Glass Sabbath, a solo presentation of new works by Melanie Schiff is the artist’s first exhibition at the gallery. Schiff’s photographs revel in an assertion of the physicality of objects. Isolated from their use value, items are connected by an attention to shape and texture that nods to the tradition of still life painting. Glass Sabbath is on view through October 6th at Night Gallery, 2276 East 16th Street, Los Angeles, CA, 90021. photographs by Lani Trock

Closing Of Nicole Nadeau's 'A Flower By Another Name' @ That That X WNDO In Los Angeles

A sculptural interpretation of a drawing Nicole Nadeau made as a child, A Flower By Another Name is a conversation between present and past. Curated by Kyle DeWoody, the ceramic sculptures are the artist’s 3D interpretations of the drawing. In order to better understand the subconscious messages embedded in the flowers, Nadeau had her twin sister, Coryn Nadeau, a clinical art therapist, psychoanalyze the original drawing using Lowenfeld theory, The Silver Drawing Test of Cognition & Emotion, Kellogg & assessment symbology. Her finding help to inform the dimensional translation.

She suggested that the four flowers were an abstract representation of the four members of Nadeau’s family. Noting we have a capacity for symbolization in art, whereby we unconsciously project transitional objects or the family dyad onto the work. When objects are repeated in the same number sequence as the artist’s family dyad, it is said to reflect that individual’s family. This may be why the flowers are disproportionately large to their surroundings, given the strong feeling attached to them. The flowers are also the only objects in the drawing that exhibit variation, most noticeably in colored – even the rainbow is monochromatic. A Flower By Another Name was presented by That That Gallery from September 20-27 at WNDO 361 Vernon Avenue, Venice 90291. photographs by Oliver Kupper

Opening of Ai Weiwei's 'Zodiac' @ Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles

Jeffrey Deitch has just opened his new Los Angeles gallery with a museum-scale exhibition entitled, Zodiac, by Ai Weiwei. This inaugural exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery Los Angeles, is one of three major exhibitions by the artist concurrently on view in Los Angeles.

The center of the space is filled by one of the artist’s most remarkable works, Stools (2013), comprised of 5,929 wooden stools from the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties and the Republican period, gathered from villages across northern China. Very few of these stools remain in Chinese households today, but they were once a ubiquitous staple of domestic life. Each stool reveals traces of use and evokes the experience of generations of lives. Ai Weiwei admires the stools for their simple design and solid structure, a design language that remained unchanged for thousands of years.

Complementing the stools is a new series of Zodiac works composed from thousands of plastic LEGO bricks. The set of twelve works incorporates imagery from two well-known series by the artist. The twelve LEGO Zodiac animal heads deriving from his sculpture series Circle of Animals / Zodiac Heads (2010) are overlaid onto twelve landscapes and monuments from Ai’s Study of Perspective (1995–2003) series of photographs. He appreciates how LEGO is accessible to everyone, especially young people. His use of LEGO components is a response to the pixelated structure of digital images.

Both the Stools and the Zodiac installations are assembled from accumulated elements, a creative method that Ai has employed in many of his best-known works. His interest in accumulation and collecting relates to his desire to understand how an individual relates to society, to memory, and to objects that evoke a particular time. His use of antique stools and modern LEGO bricks are examples of how his art redefines these elements, subverting their history and nature.

The sculpture Grapes (2017) reassembles the stools into a completely different shape but uses the original structural logic so that it remains true to its original form. It provides a graceful and whimsical counterpoint to the accumulation of the 5,929 stools. Zodiac is on view through January 5, 2019 at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery 925 N Orange Drive, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Kupper

Ai Weiwei's Life Cycle @ Marciano Art Foundation In Los Angeles

Life Cycle is Ai Weiwei’s first major institutional exhibition in Los Angeles and features the new and unseen work Life Cycle (2018) – a sculptural response to the global refugee crisis. The exhibition also presents iconic installations Sunflower Seeds (2010) and Spouts (2015) within the Foundation’s Theater Gallery. On view for the first time in the Black Box, Life Cycle (2018) references the artist’s 2017 monumental sculpture Law of the Journey, Ai’s response to the global refugee crisis, which used inflatable, black PVC rubber to depict the makeshift boats used to reach Europe. In this new iteration, Life Cycle depicts an inflatable boat through the technique used in traditional Chinese kite-making, exchanging the PVC rubber for bamboo. Life Cycle in on view through March 3 2019 at the Marciano Art Foundation 4357 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Threes Company @ Dan Graham 3.0 In Los Angeles

The exhibition, THREES COMPANY, is titled in response to Marnie Weber's chimp sculpture. It is a platform of association to the exhibition of 33 artists and their works. The exhibition includes works from Andrew Arduini, John Baldessari, Devandra Banhart, Tami Demaree, Aryo Toh Djojo, Jason Roberts Dobrin, Jon Elder, John Emison, Jamie Felton, Ryan Fenchel, Matt Fishbeck, Daniel Gibson, Dan Graham, Gibby Haynes, Steven Hull, Allie Ihm, Johanna Jackson, Patrick Jackson, Chris Johanson, Janet Jenkins, Caleb Lyons, T Kelly Mason, Stefan Meier, Robert Moreland, Max Ostrow, Nate Page, Ornella Pacchioni, Taylor Marie, Prendergast, Ariel Rosenberg, Mira Schnedler, Tran Truong, Alex Wallman and Marnie Weber. The exhibition is on view through September 30 at Dan Graham 3.0 670 Anderson Street, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

Backstage @ Pam Hogg's Spring 2019 RTW Runway Show During London Fashion Week

photographs by Flo Kohl

Wolfgang Tillmans @ David Zwirner In New York

How likely is it that only I am right in this matter? is an exhibition of new and recent work by Wolfgang Tillmans. Tillmans here eschews his signature style of floor-to-ceiling installations in favor of a more minimal, linear presentation concise in subject matter as well as scope. Featuring photographs, video and sound, and a spoken-word piece, the show revisits themes explored by the artist throughout his thirty-year career, but also initiates a subtle reevaluation of how to portray a world consistently in flux. How likely is it that only I am right in this matter? is on view through October 20 at David Zwirner 519, 525 & 533 West 19th Street, New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer

Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art @ David Zwirner In New York

Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art provides a unique opportunity to examine affinities in intention and imagery between works executed across a broad span of time. Endless Enigma explores the ways artists have sought to explain their world in terms of an alternate reality, drawn from imagination, the subconscious, poetry, nature, myth, and religion. Works on view range from gothic gargoyles; masterworks from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by Herri met de Bles, Hieronymus Bosch, Piero di Cosimo, and Titian; seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works by Damiano Cappelli, Pietro Novelli, and Salvator Rosa; nineteenth-century works by William Blake, James Ensor, Francisco de Goya, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and James Ward; and works from the twentieth century to the present day by Eileen Agar, Francis Alÿs, Louise Bourgeois, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Leonor Fini, Robert Gober, José Gutiérrez Solana, Sherrie Levine, René Magritte, Roberto Matta, Pablo Picasso, Wallace Putnam, Man Ray, Kay Sage, Yves Tanguy, and Lisa Yuskavage, among others. The exhibition is on view through October 27 at David Zwirner 537 West 20th Street, New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer

Olafur Eliasson 'The Speed Of Your Attention' @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery In Los Angeles

The speed of your attention is the new solo exhibition of Olafur Eliasson, it explores geometry, light, perception, and movement in new works that offer an array of interactive and meditative experiences as the viewer wanders through the galleries. In the entry, the viewer encounters Moving together, a freestanding installation of 54 crystal spheres. Arranged in a grid of six rows and nine columns, the spheres transition from completely transparent—in which the viewer sees her own upside-down reflection—to varying degrees of transparency and black, to solid black, depending on the viewing angle and the viewer’s movements. The speed of your attention is on view through December 22 at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery 1010 North Highland Avenue, Los Angeles. photographs by Summer Bowie