GOOD TASTE, A Group Exhibition Curated by Paige Silveria @ The Arts District Of DTLA

GOOD TASTE is a collaborative project, curated by Paige Silveria, presenting an intimate take on the current state of arts and culture in our society. It blends various disciplines of contemporary art into the format of a group exhibition. GOOD TASTE simultaneously exists in the mainstream yet provokes and predicts the mainstream. Artists featured include Philip Ashley, Soft Baroque, Lisa Boalt, Ganna Bogdan, Erik Brunetti, Cali Thornhill DeWitt, DRx, Erik Foss, Taj François, Lukas Gansterer, Joe Garvey, Jan Gatewood, Julian Klincewicz, Alex Knost, Stephen McClintock, Jason Nocito, Hassan Rahim, Shay Semple, B. Thom Stevenson, Nick Stewart, Devin Troy Strother, Peter Sutherland and Stephen Zerbe. GOOD TASTE was on view from August 22-28 at 801 Mateo Street in The Arts District of DTLA.

Sweet Harmony: Rave | Today Group Show @ Saatchi Gallery London

Sweet Harmony features multimedia room installations and audio-visual works by some of the rave movements' most prolific and authentic visual commentators. The acid house revolution is charted through typographic accounts, photo stories, live music events, talks and panel discussions by the movements' architects and influencers. By reliving the revolution through the voices and lenses of those who experienced it, the exhibition portrays the new world that emerged from the club scene of the 80s and 90s. Participating artists include Mattko, Ewen Spencer, Dave Swindells, Chelsea Louise Berlin, Seana Gavin, Project Zoltar, Carsten Nicolai, Lost Souls Of Saturn, Jeremy Deller, Minnie Griffith and Max Mcgarvie, Weirdcore, Adrian Fisk, Cleo Campert, Colin Nightingale and Stephen Dobbie, Liam Young, Cyril de Commarque, Aida Bruyère, Anna-Lena Krause, Matthew Wilkinson, Molly Macindoe, Mustafa Hulusi, Immo Klink, Shaun Bloodworth and Toby Mott.

Sweet Harmony is on view through September 14 @ Saatchi Gallery Duke of York's HQ, King's Road, London. all images courtesy of the gallery

The Sun Hung Low or A Question Loomed: A Solo Exhibition By Morgan Mandalay @ Everybody In Chicago

A snake made of bottle caps wraps around itself on the floor. Trees grow, overgrow, burn, and grow again. And some kind of mouse created a hole in our newly-built drywall (this may or may not be related to the snake).

It’s hard to tell if the sun is rising or setting. You might come to a conclusion based on the time of day, the temperature outside, your political views, or something else. Whatever the case, you’re looking at some paintings and not the sun itself. This is probably a good thing.

The Sun Hung Low or A Question Loomed is on view through September 1 @ Everybody 1722 N Western Avenue, Chicago. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Pacing Around My Desire: Read Our Interview Of Carmen Winant On Her New Book Published By Printed Matter →

Honey Lee Cottrell Papers, #7822. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library

In her new book titled Notes on Fundamental Joy; seeking the elimination of oppression through the social and political transformation of the patriarchy that otherwise threatens to bury us, Carmen Winant offers a poignant question: Does hope have an aesthetic? If it does, you may find it within the pages of this provocative book. Click here to read more.

Group Show "Charrette" Opens @ Maple St. Construct In Los Angeles

‘Charrette’ is a group show of large scale sculptures, where the artists confront materiality, space, collage, light, time, discomfort, and the unknown as a way to bring difference together as one interdependent exhibit of work. The exhibition features works from artists Shagha Ariannia, Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack, Thomas Linder, Mike Nesbit andJenny Rask. Charrette is on view at 3626 west Jefferson blvd, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

Dreamin' Of A... @ Charlie James In Los Angeles

Dreamin’ of a… is a group exhibition conceived by Los Angeles-based art historian and curator Sagi Refael featuring work by Adar Aviam, Mara De Luca, Rafa Esparza, Robert Ginder, Renée Lotenero, John Knuth, Marisa Mandler, David O’Brien, Rotem Reshef, Glen Wilson, Nathan Zeidman and Barak Zemer.

The show is a tribute to the landscape of Los Angeles, as seen and experienced by walking its streets and taking its public transportation. The show closely examines the tensions between the glamorous cinematic and televised images of the “City of Angels” and the grittier realities of life in the city. Dreamin’ of a… takes its title from John Knuth’s piece from 2018, a mylar sewn landscape composed on a cardboard sign the artist bought from a homeless person. The piece expresses LA as microcosm of the American Dream and suggests the outlet of creativity and imagination as a means of socio-economic advancement. The artworks gathered for the show vary widely in media and operate together as a form of “Gesamtkunstwerk”, aiming to synthesize from many perspectives an idea of the identity of Los Angeles. Emphasizing the city’s fragmented and evolving nature, its continuous becoming and collapsing, Dreamin’ of a… examines the act of dreaming in LA and its linkage to branding and image-making, contemplating drives to self-measure and climb socially against the broader canvas of time, landscape, and community. Dreamin’ of a is on view through August 31 at Charlie James Gallery 969 Chung King Road, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

Dane Johnson Presents "House Party 2" @ Charlie James Gallery In Los Angeles

House Party 2 follows up Dane Johnson’s House Party exhibition from 2017, wherein in the course of a few short days he activated the whole of a condemned house in Silver Lake with floor-to-ceiling interlocking figurative installations made from wood and painted in bold primary colors. House Party 2 will expand on the first show, presenting a series of paintings and sculptures depicting various forms of human interaction, connected by functional pieces which change the viewer’s relationship to the work. The emotional temperature of the figures and their interplay remains warm, their intersections supportive and loving, and essentially chaste. Bodies stretch out in mutual support, hold hands, share ledges, and walk in unison. Sculptural paintings are pieced together to create stages, platforms, ledges, and curtains that frame the actions of the figures: walking, talking, embracing, kissing. The scenes depicted in the works are amplified and connected by an array of functional pieces installed within the gallery space. Benches, stairs, and platforms lead the viewer to rest, climb, and stand while regarding the work, sometimes mirroring the poses in nearby pieces. House Party 2, read against the backdrop of contemporary social tension and general unease, and seasoned with the simplicity of its figuration, operates like a primer on the foundational postures of human kindness and cooperation. House Party 2 is on view through August 31 at Charlie James Gallery 969 Chung King Road, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

Judith Supine Presents "MANLBDRO: The Cowboy Series" @ Muddguts in New York

Throughout the Cowboy series, Judith Supine uses one of the most iconic and impactful brand images of the past century: Marlboro Man advertisements from the 1960s and 1970s that symbolize a heroic desire for adventures to the unknown, valor and daring independence. Supine breaks the barrier of gender norms and social constructs by twisting the archetypal narrative and cultural context of the connotations likely associated with the cowboy and interjects his own personal associations with gender and sexuality. Re-writing the age-old narrative to include one where balance, nurture, environment and intimacy are at the forefront of inclusivity. 

MANLBDRO: The Cowboy Series is on view through August, Saturday-Sunday 12pm-8pm or by appointment at Muddguts 427 Graham Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211. photographs by Brian Karlsson

Desert Painters of Australia Part II @ Gagosian Beverly Hills

Gagosian presents a sequel to the critically acclaimed Desert Painters of Australia, again drawing from the distinguished collection of Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield. This is the first time that the work of Indigenous Australian artists are being shown in Los Angeles since Icons of the Desert at UCLA’s Fowler Museum in 2009.

Evolving out of ancestral rituals of mark making practiced for many thousands of years, such as tree carving, body painting, and sand drawing, painting on canvas is a fairly recent phenomenon for remotely based Indigenous Australians, linked to the forced displacement in the late 1960s of communities such as the Pintupi, Luritja, Warlpiri, and Arrernte peoples to the Papunya settlement in the Northern Territory. This social upheaval inadvertently created a resilient hub of artistic production: out of communal work on canvas, wall, and ground emerged the movement now referred to as Western Desert painting.

Desert Painters of Australia Part II is on view through September 6 at Gagosian 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90210. photographs courtesy of Gagosian

Devil In The Flesh, When Op Art Electrified The Film World @ MAMAC In Nice, France

In the early 1960s, kinetic art established itself in Europe with a double principle: destabilising perception and democratising art. Optical illusion paintings, reliefs with light and motion, and disorientating environments shake perception. Christened “Op Art” in 1964, this avant-garde art was met with resoundingly popularity and success, so much so that it was commandeered in entirely new ways. While the advertising agencies, designers and major fashion house seized its intoxicating shapes, cinema gave Op Art an unexpected angle. An art of movement and of light, it was both a predecessor, able to sublimate its visual games, and a follower, which seeks to plunder it through its desire for modernity. From dramas to thrillers, filmmakers and decorators drew a language and themes from it, producing a whole range of “re-uses” in the scenery and the plot – scenes of hoaxes and dread, sadistic characters or zany improvisers, but also extreme experiences: scenes of hallucination, psychosis.

Exhibition immersed the visitor in this passionate story between two arts, punctuated by mockery and misunderstanding, reciprocal sublimation, pop or baroque manifestations as well as collaborations and plagiarism. Through nearly 30 films, 150 works and documents, it explored the origin and the taboos of this predatory fascination, and considers what cinema revealed to Op Art of its own nature. In such, it released the spirit of a decade ruffled by modernity, thirsting for emancipation and haunted by the ghosts of the war. This era, full of contradictions, created a completely new aesthetic culminating in the fruitful friction between the visual arts and the cinema. Devil in the flesh, When Op Art electrified the film world is on view through September 29 at MAMAC 1 Place Yves Klein, Nice. photographs courtesy of MAMAC

Lizzi Bougatsos + Kim Gordon x Penny Slinger @ Blum & Poe In Los Angeles

Lizzi Bougatsos and Kim Gordon perform sonic improvisation to the projections of artist Penny Slinger's early experimental silent films from 1969. After returning from a Gang Gang Dance Japan tour last winter, Bougatsos found herself emerged in the films of Jane Arden, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Penny Slinger, part of an experimental feminist film series curated by Alison Gingeras and Nicoletta Beyer at the Anthology Film Archives. She began writing text while watching the Slinger films in the theater, and thereafter asked her friend Kim Gordon to perform a sonic reaction. The two artists improvised to the films teetering on the elemental, surreal, metaphysical, and distinctly feminine raw poetry of the sublime unconscious -- an almost Artaudian parallel for the unconscious leadings of the nature of improvisation in art and life, shared in the three practices of Bougatsos, Gordon, and Slinger. photographs by Julia Nicoletti

Pre-Order Autre's Eighth Issue Featuring The Pope Of Trash Himself, John Waters →

"I did masturbate to Elvis the first time. But I didn’t know what it was. It was like a new thing for me." – John Waters.

Introducing Autre’s 8th issue – a little late for Summer, but timely nonetheless – featuring the inimitable Pope Of Trash himself, JOHN WATERS, in conversation with LA-based artist and musician SETH BOGART. At 10 pages, 3,500 words and portraits by Bennet Perez on the beach in Provincetown, it’s the filthiest and most entertaining interview we have ever published. Click here to pre-order.

Concept 005: Read Our Interview Of Union Los Angeles Founder Chris Gibbs & Nordstrom Men's Sam Lobban On Their Recent Collaboration →

Founded in 1989, Union’s history first started in New York’s Soho with the gracious ambition of giving a space to young, local designers on their way to recognition. The Los Angeles shop followed a few years later and strived to maintain the same principle born thirty years ago: embracing the creativity of fresh designers within the city while being inspired by trends coming from Japan and the UK. Union Los Angeles has now become one of LA’s prime destinations for men's contemporary fashion and streetwear. Earlier this month, Chris Gibbs, who used to work at the original NYC shop and is now the owner and operator behind Union LA, announced Union’s first ever collaboration with a national retailer: Nordstrom. Click here to read more.

Group Show : A Cloth Over a Birdcage @ Chateau Shatto In Los Angeles

In 1974, American poet John Ashbery composed a long form ekphrastic lyric occasioned by the painting, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, by the minor late Renaissance master, Parmigianino. The original circular composition was meticulously rendered in 1524 on a convex panel whose diameter measured no more than 24.4cm, or just shy of ten inches. With its extravagantly curved perspectives, this remains a virtuosic feat of the medium made more so by being performed on such a tightly delimited stage.  

It was for this reason that Ashbery found therein not an enigma but a pearl – a concise distillation of the plight of the artist whose hand is distorted by the world even as he, in turn, seeks to distort it by capturing its reflection. It is a chiasmic conundrum with the inward pull of a compact atomic core.

In its totality, Ashbery’s words would come to encompass a surface-area that far exceeds Parmigianino’s diminutive masterwork. Through that medallion-like portal he enters into expansive ruminations that span questions of memory, pathos and empathy all the while outlining a sweetly abbreviated ontology. As he writes:

But it is life englobed.
One would like to stick one’s hand
Out of the globe, but its dimension,
What carries it, will not allow it.

The artists in Château Shatto’s forthcoming exhibition share Ashbery and Parmiagianino’s affinity for revelations in miniature guises. Their output ranges from the modestly scaled to the truly petite and they embrace this limitation for their own idiosyncratic reasons. Some uncover respite from the heroic demands of the monumental; others an opportunity to work through ideas and impulses to be articulated later in a distended tableau. Some find purpose in offering peeks of private inner worlds or are galvanized by the economy of restrained abstraction; while others still harness the gravitational pull of locket-size images which are almost devotional in their allure.  Whatever their instinct, they craft ‘superficial but visible cores’ that propose an entirely different type of viewing. Arresting in their potency, these works demand an embodied and sustained perusal that, at its best, draws the viewer in slowly and deliberately not unlike thread through a needle’s eye. A Cloth Over a Birdcage is on view through September 7 at Chateau Shatto 1206 S. Maple Ave, Suite 1030, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Takuro Tamayama & Tiger Tateishi @ Nonaka-Hill In Los Angeles

At the gallery entrance, Takuro Tamayama’s monochrome yellow new video “Dance”, 2019 is played on a small monitor. A red curtain leads to Tamayama’s transformation of the gallery’s largest space into a colored light saturated immersive experience, entitled “Eclipse Dance”, 2019. A cluster of tables forms a new plateau and divides the atmosphere’s light, red above and blue below. A rotating marble form, evocative of a human, is positioned in relation to another form, evocative of a celestial body. In the adjacent spaces, visitors encounter Tamayama’s Eclipse, a new large-scale video projection, with sound composed by the artist. In a third space, Tamayama’s spinning sculpture and clustered confronts Tateishi’s Rotating Fuji (1991), and a fourth room, painted yellow, displays Tateishi’s prints dating from 1973-1981.

The exhibition is on view through August 31 720 N. Highland Ave., Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of Nonaka-Hill

Judith Supine: Manlbdro: The Cowboy Series @ Muddguts in New York

 
 

Judith Supine’s latest solo show at Muddguts called, Manlbdro: The Cowboy Series features all new works by the artist. Throughout the Cowboy series, Supine uses iconic Marlboro Man advertisements from the 1960s and 1970s that symbolize a heroic desire for adventures of the unknown, valor, and daring independence. Supine breaks the barrier of gender norms and social constructs by twisting the archetypal narrative and cultural context of the cowboy figure, and interjects his own personal associations with gender and sexuality. Re-writing the age-old narrative to include one where balance, nurture, environment and intimacy are at the forefront of inclusivity, the Cowboy series is a continuation of the artists pursuit of placing art between the worlds of abstraction and representation.

Judith Supine: Manlbdro: The Cowboy Series is on view through August 25 at Muddguts 247 Graham Avenue Brooklyn, NY. photographs courtesy of the artist and Muddguts

Twenty Five Years: A Group Exhibition @ Peter Blake Gallery in Laguna Beach

The Peter Blake Gallery in Laguna Beach, California commemorates its twenty-fifth year with an exhibition of historic and recent West Coast Abstraction. Since 1993, Blake’s faithfulness to his creative vision has allowed him to champion West Coast Minimalist works from the sixties through today. Now the longest-running gallery exhibiting West Coast Minimalism to date, Peter has been a champion for the artists assembled into this category for the past twenty-five years. As these artists’ esteemed works have come under the spotlight on the global stage, the gallery’s anniversary offers a fitting occasion to revisit these historic works in a local setting. The exhibition brings together a presentation of works by Lita Albuquerque, Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Ron Cooper, Mary Corse, Tony Delap, Laddie John Dill, Joe Goode, James Hayward, Scot Heywood, Craig Kauffman, John McCracken, John M. Miller, Marcia Hafif, Ron Nagle, Helen Pashgian, Hadi Tabatabai, and De Wain Valentine to celebrate the gallery’s milestone anniversary.

“Twenty Five Years” is on view through August at Peter Blake Gallery 435 Ocean Avenue Laguna Beach, CA. photographs courtesy of the artists and Peter Blake Gallery

Margot Bergman: Family Album @ Anton Kern Gallery in New York

For the artist’s second solo exhibition with Anton Kern Gallery, Margot Bergman presents Family Album, which includes her most recent paintings and photographs. Bergman has sustained an active painting practice in Chicago since the 1950s and honed a peerless style of figuration. For the last 15 years her subject matter has focused on individual faces of imagined people, predominantly women. Her style is characterized by active expressionistic brush work, unconcerned with symmetry, realistic proportions, and traditional notions of femininity. The artist can adeptly shift styles within a single composition, juxtaposing photorealistic eyes and lips, with a scribbly green hair-do, and a thin wash of color for the complexion. Accompanying Bergman’s paintings are theatrical and lively photographs that bear an uncanny resemblance to her painted works. Together Bergman’s paintings and photographs create a manufactured family album that memorializes the environment in which they were created and their palpable relationship with the artist.

Family Album is on view through August 16 at Anton Kern Gallery 16 East 55th Street New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the artist and Anton Kern Gallery

André Butzer @ Metro Pictures in New York

A exhibition of nine large, vibrant new paintings by artist André Butzer is now on view at Metro Pictures. Butzer’s latest paintings employ vivid color and his signature figures bringing to mind motifs and approaches that predate the stark abstraction and distinctive brushwork of his N-Bilder, begun in 2010. However, Butzer asserts that everything he does is unified by an exploration of color and that this new series is a natural continuation of his work. This exhibition continues Butzer’s longstanding investigation into the medium of painting, while pushing the limits of his oeuvre, and furthers the ideas explored throughout his career from art history to consumer culture.

André Butzer is on view through August 9 at Metro Pictures 519 West 24th Street New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York