Lorna Simpson Presents "Darkening" @ Hauser & Wirth In New York

Debuting a suite of new large-scale paintings, Lorna Simpson’s Darkening finds the artist returning to and building upon themes and motifs at the center of her practice: explorations focused on the nature of representation, identity, gender, race, and history. For more than 30 years, Simpson’s powerful works have entangled viewers in an equivocal web of meaning, drawing upon techniques of collage through the use of found materials, often culled from the pages of vintage Jet and Ebony magazines. In ‘Darkening,’ Simpson continues to thread dichotomies of figuration and abstraction with vast and enthralling tableaux that subsume spliced photos and fragmented text, abstracted beyond comprehension. Equally arresting and poetic, the paintings engage viewers with layers of paradox, capturing the mystifying allure of an arctic landscape in inky washes of blacks, grays, and startling blues. Darkening will be on view through 26 July at Hauser & Wirth 548 West 22nd Street, New York. photographs courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

Verbal Burlesque With Michael Imperioli, Lydia Lunch, Jerry Stahl & Other Guests @ The Standard Los Angeles

Autre hosted another night of Verbal Burlesque at the Standard Hotel, a literary evening of music and spoken word with Michael Imperioli, Lydia Lunch, Jerry Stahl, Gregg Foreman and Sylvia Black. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

The Outsider Art Fair Presents "The Doors of Perception" @ Frieze New York

The Outsider Art Fair features over forty visionary artists from around the world, including works by Noviadi Angkasapura (b. 1979, Indonesia), Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (1923–2014, Ivory Coast), Henry Darger (1892-1973, USA), Janko Domsic (1915-1983, Croatia/France), Minnie Evans (1892-1987, USA), Guo Fengyi (1942–2010, China), Martín Ramírez (1895-1963, Mexico/USA), Judith Scott (1943-2005, USA), Melvin Way (b. 1954, USA), George Widener (b. 1962, USA), Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930, Switzerland), Anna Zemánkova (1908–1986, Czech Republic), and Unica Zürn (1916-1970, Germany) among many others.

The Doors of Perception focuses on the visionary nature of art commonly known as outsider art, art brut, or self-taught art. The exhibition presents a large constellation of works made by exceptionally gifted artists from five continents, offering a panorama of art created on the margins of society. Whether psychiatric patients, self-taught visionaries, or mediums, each of the artists in the exhibition felt at some point in their life the need to create an artistic language of their own in order to reveal what they understood to be the true nature of things. Often disenfranchised because of their mental condition or social status and without any previous artistic training, many of the artists exhibited here dedicated their lives obsessively to the creation of complex visual representations, often after experiencing a life-changing epiphany. A meeting with a supernatural power—whether an encounter with the divine, spirits of the dead, or extraterrestrial beings—might have triggered this impulse to create. These remarkable events produced strong centrifugal forces that drove the artists from chaos to order, opening for them “doors of perception” to a transcendental reality that, in many cases, helped them survive their otherwise unstable life. The Doors of Perception is on view through May 5 at Frieze, Metropolitan Pavillion 125 W. 18th Street, New York. photographs courtesy of The Outsider Fair


The Meme Is A Virus: Read Our Interview Of Meme Star @JERRYGOGOSIAN →

Misery loves company, and the art scene is full of miserable people. In our vast, virtual memetic culture, @JERRYGOGOSIAN is dissecting the great unregulated art market and its strange ecosystem of fear, lies and egomaniacism. Everyone knows she, or he, is on the inside, but the constant guessing only fuels the fire: Who is @JERRYGOGOSIAN? Click here to read.

Mi Kafchin Presents "Chemtrails" @ Nicodim Gallery In Los Angeles

Born only a few months after the Chernobyl Disaster in 1986, Romanian artist Mi Kafchin was inundated as a young child with fear-driven remedies that would help to cure the invisible but pervasive radioactive toxins that enveloped her region and in effect her being. Trust in aspirational progress or the security of big government would dissipate into that same air. The chemtrails that crisscrossed the sky above represented a direct and constant communication of this reality but banalized into a sublime of the everyday. This toxic cocktail of aluminum, barium and strontium militaristically seeded into our atmosphere successfully keeps society under control… at least, that is, until the EMF from 5G begins to vibrate our delicate bodies. This legacy of trepidation from sources governmental, paranormal and extraterrestrial has festered into a menacing ideological vortex of possibility, one looming large in the work of Mi Kafchin and mapped out here in her second solo exhibition at Nicodim Gallery.  Chemtrails is on view through June 1 at Nicodim 571 South Anderson Street, Los Angeles. photographs by Agathe Pinard

Theaster Gates Presents "The Black Image Corporation" @ Gropius Bau In Berlin

With The Black Image Corporation, Theaster Gates has conceived a participatory exhibition which explores the fundamental legacy of Johnson Publishing Company archives. Featuring more than four million images, they have contributed to shape the aesthetic and cultural languages of African American identity.

Central to the exhibition are the works of two photographers, Moneta Sleet Jr. and Isaac Sutton, who both worked for Johnson Publishing. The publishing company created two landmark publications for black American audiences in the 1940s and ‘50s: the monthly magazine Ebony and its weekly sister outlet Jet, which quickly became two of the major platforms for the representation and discussion of black culture. The magazines covered historic milestones such as the March on Washington in 1963 and the first African-American astronaut, politics, sports and celebrities, as well as the complex realities black Americans faced in the US post-war era. The Black Image Corporation is on view through July 28 at Gropius Bau Niederkirchnerstraße 7 10963, Berlin.

"Art after Stonewall, 1969–1989" @ New York University’s Grey Art Gallery & the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art

Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprisings, Art after Stonewall, 1969–1989 is a long-awaited and groundbreaking survey that features over 200 works of art and related visual materials exploring the impact of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) liberation movement on visual culture. Presented in two parts—at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art—the exhibition features artworks by openly LGBTQ artists such as Vaginal Davis, Louise Fishman, Nan Goldin, Lyle Ashton Harris, Barbara Hammer, Holly Hughes, Greer Lankton, Robert Mapplethorpe, Catherine Opie, Joan Snyder, and Andy Warhol. On view at the Grey Art Gallery from April 24 through July 20, 2019 and at the Leslie-Lohman Museum from April 24 through July 21, 2019, the exhibition is organized by the Columbus Museum of Art. Art after Stonewall, 1969–1989 is on view through July 20 at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. photographs

Nick Waplington Vintage Living Room Prints @ Little Big Man Gallery In Los Angeles

In 1991, Aperture published Nick Waplington’s first book, Living Room, to great critical acclaim. A major exhibition followed at their 23rd Street gallery in New York, and for a number of years the exhibition toured the world. The exhibition prints were then put into storage, and soon thereafter Waplington – having moved on to new projects – asked his gallerist, Holly Solomon, to destroy them. In 2018, Solomon’s son Thomas contacted Waplington with surprising news: the original Living Room exhibition prints had not been destroyed, and were still in his possession. Little Big Man is delighted to present these historically significant vintage works, appearing in an exhibition for the first time since the early 1990s. The exhibition is on view through May 15 at Little Big Man Gallery 1427 EAST 4th Street, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Sarah Wilson's "Self-Careless" @ East Hollywood Fine Art in LA

Self-Careless is the first solo exhibition of painting and sculpture from artist Sarah Wilson. Rendered in a Skittles darkside palette, four paintings whorl the mundanity of quotidian female rituals into psychological and emotional landscapes. Interior states become fleshy, surrealistic figures plaintively playing out the antinomies of self-care, consumption, and isolation. Girls lounge precariously on counters, like a Cézanne apple about to fall. Here, the body is a model for families and institutions without ever losing its sticky corporeality. The sculptures bring the artist’s deft materiality in conversation with her family history, incorporating intimate, personal photographs tucked into amalgamated structures salvaged from her former family home. A giant stuffed denim chair hangs from the ceiling in chains, alternately conveying attitudes of louche display and blank surrender. Some might say they are one and the same. “Self-Careless” will be on view until May 18. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Preston Douglas Presents "Midas Touch" In Houston

Video by Income Taxes

In the tradition of artist-organized exhibitions- from “The Times’ Square Show” to Damien Hirst’s entrepreneurial warehouse shows of early 1990s London, Midas Touch fills a huge vacant jewelry emporium known by the same name with the work of 22 artists, all who define the present state of art in Houston. Not waiting around for official approval or even rejection, artist and curator Preston Douglas reminds us that the artists always know best, that their touch is always a Midas Touch, because their hands are still dirty from the studio, because they care, or because they don't care, because they get tired of waiting, because someone had to do it, because if not now, then when?

Participating artists include Brandon Araujo, Debra Barrera, Hank Bond, Shannon Crider, Grace Deal, Preston Douglas, Heath Flagtvedt, Mark Flood, Dana Frankfort, Gem Hale, Shana Hoehn, Adrian Jimienez, Max Kremer, Paul Kremer, El Franco Lee, Sepp Lemberger, Decarte May, Kate Mulholland, Evelyn Pustka, Heather Rubinstein, Terry Suprean, and Tyler Swanner.

Midas Touch is on view through May 4 on Saturdays from 1-5pm at 6705 Capital Street Houston, TX, with a closing reception from 6-10pm.

Autre Magazine Celebrates Its Spring 2019 Issue at Margot @ Platform in Culver City

Autre magazine celebrated its new issue at Margot at Platform in Culver City. Madre Mezcal provided libations throughout the evening. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Bad Sin Frutas: Read Our Interview of Painter Morgan Mandalay On The Occasion Of His Solo Exhibition @ Klowden Mann in Los Angeles →

Are you staring directly into the mouth of the beast, or are you indeed sitting inside said mouth, observing the surreal landscape below? This is just one of the many visual homonyms that are ever-present in the works of Morgan Mandalay. For his first solo exhibition at Klowden Mann in Los Angeles, the Chicago-based artist has painted worlds that are rife with reference to human figuration, though only vaguely, in the form of phantom hands clutching at tree branches, or humanoid eyeballs peeking through leaves. Bad Sin Frutas tells a story of exile using the memetic power of the Garden of Eden as a template for processing the Mandalay family’s exile from Cuba, and it does so in a time of global refugee crises. Click here to read more.

Wendy White Presents "Racetrack Playa" @ Shulamit Nazarian In Los Angeles

Wendy White’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Racetrack Playa, features new paintings, sculptures, pigment prints, and a site-specific installation. The exhibition takes its name from a three-mile dry lakebed in Death Valley National Park where sliding rocks or “sailing stones” have inscribed mysterious linear imprints on the landscape. Using this scarred landscape as a metaphor for our current times, the works in Racetrack Playa explore power, entitlement, and imperialism via the aesthetics and evolution of American car culture. Racetrack Playa is on view through May 25 at Shulamit Nazarian 616 N La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Joshua Abelow, Fred Escher & Susan Classen Sullivan Present "cut the branch you’re sitting on" @ darkZone In New Jersey

One time, while I stood blankly at the mouth of the crawlspace in my parent’s basement, I encountered a cave cricket. Until that point in my life, I had no idea such a thing existed. Two unfamiliar eyes stared up at me as I gazed down on the bug, confused about what I was seeing. I could see its mandibles slowly flexing, and its antennae wafting in the musty basement air. After its body had been broken by an unanticipated impact, I moved in closer to inspect the insect’s fractured form. The antennae, which once moved with agency, now resembled strands of lost hair. Its distant eyes looked up at me without judgement or forgiveness.

I went upstairs. I began to think about the possibility of other anomalies emerging from the dark corners of the basement. I began to suspect there could be an entire colony of unknown lifeforms existing in the piles of our expired familial memorabilia. After studying the discarded artifacts around them, they might come to understand aspects of a world above the basement. Having consumed the limited resources available to them, the group of interdimentional beings would become physically and emotionally starved. The footsteps from above, while once foreboding, would now spark curiosity; even being interpreted as seismic invitations. The boldest of the subterranean brood would scale the steep stairs to introduce themselves to the world above.

When I came back down an hour later, I discovered a second cricket. It loomed over what was left of the first. To my surprise the second bug had eaten all but the head and a few legs of the first. As if it understood the circumstances and mistakes of its comrade, it quickly bounded out of range into the safety of shadows. cut the branch you’re sitting on opened on April 20 at darkZone, New Jersey. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Highlights From The Printed Matter LA Art Book Fair @ MoCA Geffen

Initiated in 2013, Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair (LAABF) is the companion fair to the NY Art Book Fair. Free and open to the public, the two fairs are among the leading international gatherings for the distribution of artists’ books, celebrating the full breadth of the art publishing community.

Held at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in downtown Los Angeles over three days, the 2019 LA Art Book Fair hosted 390 exhibitors from 31 countries, including a broad range of artists and collectives, small presses, institutions, galleries, antiquarian booksellers, and distributors. The event draws more than 35,000 individuals including book lovers, collectors, artists, and art world professionals each year. With a commitment to diversity and representation, the fair serves as a meeting place for an extended community of publishers and book enthusiasts, as well as a site for dialogue and exchange around all facets of arts publishing. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Charles Ray Presents "Two Ghosts" @ Matthew Marks Gallery In Los Angeles

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Charles Ray’s first work in stone, Two Horses (2019), a relief carved from a single block of Virginia granite. The sculpture is ten feet tall and fourteen feet wide and weighs more than six tons. A smaller work displayed on a pedestal, Mountain Lion Attacking a Dog (2018), is a hypothetical scene from the hills around Ray’s home in Los Angeles. Each animal has been machined from a solid block of aluminum, producing a reflective surface that enhances the work’s finely sculpted details. Two Ghosts is on view through June 22 a Matthew Marks Gallery 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Rick Castro “Fetish King: Seminal Photographs 1986 – 2019” Opening At Tom House In Los Angeles

The artist’s sex positive imagery is darkly erotic, elegant, and at times, sinister. A powerful and imaginative figure that emerged in the Los Angeles underground during the late ’80s, His photographs are characterized by potent and visceral tableaux, tinged with sadomasochism, leather and sexual pleasure. From the artist’s fetishizing of Tony Ward in the ’80s, to capturing moments, places and the people of the underground scene in Los Angeles nightlife in the ’90s and ’00s, he continues his pictorial career and fascination with lust, desire and kink producing elegant portraiture of celebrated artists and the demi-monde. The exhibition will be on view until April 27 by appointment at Tom House in Los Angeles. Read a conversation between Rick Castro and Rick Owens in our Spring 2019 issue. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper.

Valerj Pobega Presents "Kabuki in Berlin" Fall/Winter 2019 collection

Avant-garde fashion designer and artist Valerj Pobega presented her “Kabuki in Berlin” -Fall/Winter 2019 collection with a site-specific performance in collaboration with dancers, acrobats and a music performance by Lawrence Rothman. Dressed in the designer’s hand-painted silk creations from “Kabuki in Berlin” her collection was inspired by the hybrid identities and androgynous stylings as seen in the Liza Minnelli’s turn as Sally Bowles in Cabaret, and the epicene performances of Lindsey Kemp and David Bowie in their 1970 mimed numbers which had hints of Kabuki theatre. photographs by Mekael Dawson

Claudia Parducci Presents 23 Columns @ Ochi Projects In Los Angeles

The central focus of Claudia Parducci’s exhibition consists of twenty-three 16’, hand-knit jute pillars spanning from floor to ceiling. Arranged in a staggered grid measuring approximately 14 feet square, they reference the twenty-three interior columns of the Parthenon that surrounded the monumental statue of Athena. Over the two years Parducci spent knitting these pillars, she considered the gendered aspects of labor, and the symbolic significance of the physical remnants of Western history. Appearing, but failing to be structurally supportive, Parducci’s knit columns, along with related sculptures and drawings, address the dual nature of societies that build, and then ultimately destroy themselves. Through the substitution of a traditionally feminine craft as the means of production, Parducci considers these recurring cycles in history and wonders about the possibilities of a society built from a female perspective. 23 Columns will be on view through April 27 at Ochi Projects 3301 W Washington Blvd, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery