by Peter Frank

Post-minimalist Keith Sonnier, who passed in 2020, was too prominent a figure to fall into the shadows, as have so many of his contemporaries. But given his striking originality, restless inventiveness and impact upon a broad range of peers and younger artists, Sonnier’s star should have shone even more brightly than it has since the ’70s. This exhibition seeks in its own modest, intimate way to rectify that oversight—not by accruing and displaying a mini-survey of Sonnier’s own work, but by signaling the influence he has had specifically on younger artists. What the show’s title, “Live In Your Head,” proffers is not so much the power of his own work but the artist’s enduring mark on subsequent art in three dimensions.

This might make it sound as if painterly values were foreign to Sonnier’s practice. Just the opposite is true: He treated his shapes and materials as marks and amplified their coloristic presence until the elaborate structures he built could be looked at as drawings and paintings in space. There’s nothing like neon to juice such a tendency, and Sonnier is perhaps best known as the wild man of American neon art. Neon was a fairly prevalent device in the art of Sonnier’s era and just before, but artists like Chryssa, Stephen Antonakos and Martial Raysse engaged neon in a highly decorous, and formally rigid, extension of Pop Art. Sonnier, by contrast, echoed the medium’s expansive pioneer, Lucio Fontana, in filling headspace as well as exhibition space with erratic glowing elaboration. (Did Sonnier know Fontana’s early neon work when starting out himself? Probably not, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find otherwise.) His close-at-home model was, of course, Dan Flavin. But Sonnier’s approach from the outset was, if anything, a gentle rebuke to Flavin’s purity even as it was a warm embrace of his palette.

The three works in “Live In Your Head,” from diverse points in his career, do not sate a Sonnier jones, but in context they do demonstrate his appeal to younger artists in the show such as Jessica Stockholder and Ann Veronica Janssens, whether or not they use neon in their work. Go wide, Sonnier encourages his fellow artists, and don’t be self-conscious about what you use and how you use it. Let it fly. Art is shape. Art is stuff. Art is light—yes, at one and the same time. Sonnier had an almost magical way of animating his pieces, and the supporting cast here, reflecting his genius, has found its way to a similar vitality. Right now is a good time for sculpture, and, as the show reveals, Keith Sonnier is one reason why. The other laudable artists here include Nabilah Nordin, Madeline Hollander, Kennedy Yanko, Terence Koh, Maya Stovall, and, for some reason, Sonnier’s co-generationist Mary Heilmann, represented by a tiny little darkly golden canvas—peculiar, endearing, and so out of place that it’s perfectly in place.

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by Stephanie Sporn

Parrasch Heijnen and Franklin Parrasch

New York’s Franklin Parrasch and Los Angeles’s Parrasch Heijnen galleries have jointly curated one of the fair’s most important and eye-opening presentations: the first-ever tribute exhibition to Brockman Gallery, America’s first major contemporary gallery run by and for Black artists and artists of colour. The gallery’s co-founders, LA-based brothers Alonzo Davis and Dale Brockman Davis, assisted in the curation, which showcases their own works alongside artists including David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Betye Saar, John Outterbridge. The diversity of media on view, which ranges from found tree fragments to neon lights, have an instant visual impact, which will hopefully inspire today’s curators and scholars to delve more deeply into these artists, still largely undersung.

Operating between 1967-1990, the gallery was established after the summer of 1966 when the Davises ventured across the United States via their Volkswagen Beetle to discover artists that would challenge the “overwhelmingly western, white art history education they received at university,” as the tribute materials describe. The gallery’s contribution of providing a platform for critical and commercial exposure undoubtedly paved the way for overlooked minority artists, while also uplifting the wider Leimert Park neighbourhood, where it operated, with concerts, film festivals, and community events.

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by Maxmilíano Durón

“Brockman Days: 1967–1990” at Parrasch Heijnen and Franklin Parrasch

One wall of this booth is dedicated to the important work of the Brockman Gallery, the first Black-owned, artist-run space in Los Angeles. Founded by brothers Alonzo Davis and Dale Brockman Davis in 1967 and located in the historically Black neighborhood of Leimert Park, the gallery was instrumental in giving early support to Black and Latinx artists at a time when they would likely be ignored by white-owned galleries. Among the artists included in the booth are Romare Bearden, David Hammons, Suzanne Jackson, Maren Hassinger, Noah Purifoy, Mildred Howard, Samella Lewis, Frank Romero, Linda Vallejo, and Charles White, the brothers’ one-time professor at Otis College.

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by Joe Bradley

Sylvia Snowden’s paintings come on strong. Standing before one of these extraordinary pictures, one is immediately struck by their intensity—the roiling impasto of the surface and the pyrotechnics of the artist’s vivid palette. This formal bravado serves as a flashbang; when the smoke has cleared, the viewer is left with a stillness that is disarming.

Born into a tight-knit family in North Carolina and raised in Louisiana and Washington, DC, Snowden’s artistic inclinations were encouraged by her parents from an early age—she credits her mother as the greatest influence on her aesthetic sensibilities. In the early to mid-1960s, Snowden attended Howard University, which was at the time led by the art historian and artist James Amos Porter alongside artists like Lois Mailou Jones, David Clyde Driskell, and James Lesesne Wells. Under their tutelage, Snowden developed the style of painting she describes as her “natural mode”—structural abstract expressionism. To this day, Snowden’s style remains recognizably hers; she paints the body in all its vulnerability, with a tenderness and understanding that is deeply humane. Working in large series, Snowden pulls her subject matter from those around her—including her family, children, neighbors—and paints to “get into the whole guts of a person... without the packaging.”

This fall, Snowden will exhibit a series dedicated entirely to her daughter, Shell Snowden Butler, at Franklin Parrasch Gallery in New York City. Snowden and I spoke over the phone earlier this summer between her longtime home in Washington, DC, and my own in New YoRead more hererk City. We talked about her upbringing, her painting practice, and the long game of the artist’s life.

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by John Brooks

In W.G. Sebald’s 2001 novel Austerlitz, the character Great-Uncle Alphonso is described as a naturalist who “spent most of his time out of doors” painting watercolors. “When he was thus engaged,” the depiction continues, “he generally wore glasses with gray silk tissue instead of lenses in the frames, so that the landscape appeared through a fine veil that muted its colors, and the weight of the world dissolved before your eyes.” Alphonso came to mind while at parrasch heijnen taking in Ellen Siebers’ dream song, the Hudson, NY-based artist’s first solo exhibition at the Boyle Heights gallery. Just as Alphonso’s deliberate veiling provided, paradoxically, a way of seeing and perceiving with greater clarity, Siebers’ gauzy perspective—evident in the fourteen paintings that comprise the show—offers a glimpse into a formless, evanescent realm laden with emotion, meaning, and the quiet, romantic wonder of experience.

We live in a loud world, surrounded by the fizzle and clamor of the seemingly endless noises endemic to twenty-first century life. By its nature, the cloistered white space of a gallery—especially in rooms as splendid as those at parrasch heijnen—separates itself from the din beyond its walls, becoming a sanctuary where we might find respite and contemplation when in the presence of the right work. Siebers’ sublime paintings more than oblige. Denoted by a blithe, surprising and subtly saturated interplay of color and mark making, the works are small in scale yet occupy more visual space than their dimensions might suggest. Reminiscent of a Whistler nocturne, Late June projects deep blues outward, yet its abyssal depths beckon like a portal or a lacuna. Oblong jewel-toned blocks, stacked around Blue Sleep’s reclining figure, seem to stretch to infinity in all directions. Skillfully imbued with undeniable feeling, each painting commands attention, reminding us that despite having no physicality, feeling fills us, guides us, destroys us, revives us.

Muddling the boundaries between figuration and abstraction, Siebers renders the what and where of her environs indiscernibly. There is only ambience, only aura. The viewer doesn’t suffer from this opacity; in fact, we benefit from it. Her diaphanous color and lyrical brushstrokes evoke—or perhaps conjure—a specific evening, or the complicated dynamics of a love affair, or even what seem like whole lives. The smoldering golden green and umber atmosphere of the Turneresque Double Red Sun poignantly records the drifting smoke from this past summer’s Canadian wildfires, unavoidably visible from the artist’s upstate home. Streamside’s margins are curtained in mostly rosy washes; the center houses a narrow vignette—a compositional device Siebers commonly uses— in which the vague shape of a small figure stands amidst what we can assume, given the painting’s title, is the greenery of a waterside grove. A scumbled mass of white and sky blue dots spills out below the figure; presumably these marks represent dappling light on the water’s surface, but because Siebers’ paintings lack narrative clarity, we aren’t quite certain. This doesn’t matter. Marks like these perfectly demonstrate the mysterious alchemy of painting; they are why paintings continue to be made and why we want to look at them.

Often, it seems like everything and everyone is trying very hard to entertain us. Entertainment has its joys, but they’re often fleeting. What seems to last, what burrows into the psyche, is that which bewilders, that which enthralls, as Siebers’ work does. Gentle and melancholic, the paintings in dream song are not just poems, they are haiku: spare, sensile, devastating. They are just whispers, but even whispers can carry across great distances under the right conditions.

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by Annabel Keenan

Nearby are Howard Sandoval’s soot drawings and sculptures on handmade paper embedded with bear grass stalks and seeds. The artist’s choice of bear grass, a material used in Native American basket weaving, speaks to her heritage. Scorching select parts, she references the Indigenous practice of using controlled burns to prevent forest fires. Ancestral knowledge and environmentalism are also at the core of Caycedo’s work, which pays homage to community leaders and Native elders, often female, who care for the natural world. She also depicts medicinal traditions of the Mohican people native to the land the Clark now occupies.

Howard Sandoval’s scorched works recall the wildfires that spread annually and with increasing devastation across the West Coast. When she created these pieces, the idea of a smoky, amber sky would have been considered a West Coast problem, but as smoke from the recent Canadian wildfires filled the Northeastern US, the issue took on local significance. While the artist could never have known her work would do so, she illustrates how an environmental concern new to one community can have a deep history in another.

Howard Sandoval’s pieces mark a timely link to the past, present, and — most likely as the effects of climate change worsen — future of Northeastern skies. Hamilton’s alligator sculptures outside the window represent another potential timeline. Biting their own tails in an ouroboros symbol of the infinite cycle of destruction and rebirth, the alligators are installed on platforms as if sitting in the dense woods. Native to Hamilton’s home of Florida, the animals are out of place in New England, but as water temperatures increase in the South and the Northern climate becomes balmier, perhaps there could be a future where they inhabit the forests. Pointing to the legacy of racialized imagery of alligators, Hamilton draws a parallel between their climate migration and Black communities that have historically endured the effects of environmental crises.

This relationship between marginalized communities and nature is an undercurrent throughout the show. The unknown and silenced repercussions of human behavior, from capitalism and colonization to environmental destruction, are brought to the fore, as are the beings who cultivate and care for the natural world. As the climate shifts and visitors’ relationships with nature change, their understanding of the interrelation of all organisms, including those overlooked, can — and should — evolve.

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by Laura Smith

Colour pulsates, thumps and skids across the surfaces of the eight paintings featured in Sylvia Snowden’s new exhibition M Street on White at Edel Assanti, London. The eight twisted and distorted figures she presents are composed of turbulent, unruly, yet self-assured and dextrous brushstrokes. Snowden’s quick, heavy and vigorous gestures push and pull her paint into networks of almost recognition; her figures buckle, bend, swell and wilt in paint so thick that it almost becomes sculptural, with swathes of deep reds, verdant greens and moody blues as deep as a lip, a finger, or an eyelid.

Snowden was born in 1942 in Raleigh, North Carolina to academic, politicised parents who cultivated her artistic ideas from a young age – gifting her a set of watercolour paints when she was just four years old. She spent her childhood in the Deep South before moving to Washington DC when she was 13 years old. Snowden’s mother; Jessie Burns Snowden, had an abiding interest in art and was, as the artist remembers: ‘always dressed in wonderfully colourful clothes’ in ‘a colourful and beautiful home’ that made her ‘appreciate being surrounded by beauty’. As well as laying the foundations for Snowden’s profound understanding of colour and aesthetics, she also recalls how encouraging her parents were of her decision to be an artist: ‘Without my parents, I wouldn’t be a painter.’ They travelled to every exhibition opening she had, they bought her paint supplies, and supported her both financially and emotionally. From 1960 to 1965 Snowden undertook undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Fine Art at Howard University. Significantly, her artistic training coincided with a pivotal moment in Black American political history and the ongoing civil rights struggle, and she became deeply invested in these contentions. In 1964 she also studied for a summer at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where she experienced a radical pedagogy that encouraged abstract experimentation.

In the late 1970s, following a divorce but with her artistic career blossoming, Snowden needed to find a home that was big enough to house a studio, as well as being affordable and habitable for her and her two children. She describes walking around the then run-down Shaw area of Washington DC with her young son and finding the house on M Street that she still lives in today. Snowden was only ever concerned with two things – her children and her painting – and this house, though semi-dilapidated (she has lovingly renovated it over the years) allowed her to look after these dual concerns under one roof. (Though she remembers fondly when, sometime later, the same son asked her: ‘Ma – are we gonna ever live in a normal house?’) The house, and importantly the street, became enduring sources of inspiration. It was here that she created her M Street series, portraying the resilience of her neighbours, an inner city, lower-income community of ‘proud young girls, worn-out women, and jobless men who formed the daily parade outside her window’. Each work in the M Street series – typically paintings of lone figures with misshapen bodies, outsized extremities and vibrant clashes of colour – is named after someone who Snowden knew from the neighbourhood.

These powerful paintings condense the psychological essence of her subjects: their triumphs, torment, joy and pain are described in thick impasto. However, outside of her titular use of the place and person’s names, Snowden removes all narrative. These are not traditional portraits of her subjects – rather, through abstraction and improvisation, she seeks to create a psychological human connection between herself, her subject and her viewers: ‘I see things in other people that are reflected in me.’

The emotional intensity of her paintings is deliberate and purposeful. Her unruly distortions, extraordinary chromatic decisions and spatial disorientation mean that limbs are atrophied or swollen, woefully enlarged or cripplingly slight. Her figures are not recognisable as representations of the individuals for whom they are named. Instead, Snowden’s cacophonies of colour and bending bodies convey the psychological states of her subjects. A very particular tension is also deftly composed between Snowden’s figures and the constraints of her canvases, almost as though they are trying to push or twist their way out of their frames, to burst free of their painterly prisons. In this series specifically, Snowden leaves her backgrounds blank, white (hence the title of this exhibition), refusing ornamentation or any hint towards the personality or life story of her subjects.

The bare background also means that the painted figure is able to communicate with the viewer without interference. Her figures are almost always solitary, in isolation – but they are not lonely. They are rebelliously active, communicative and unrestrained. They do not turn their back or hide away from their viewer, almost offering us a theatrical monologue that we are invited to connect with. Snowden’s ultimate endeavour is to show humanness and to demonstrate a universality shared by all people. She seeks to find the most immediate and uninterrupted means through which a viewer can find this connection and see themselves in the work, recognising fundamentally that we are all made the same and we all have the same vocabulary of emotions.

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Layered with Personal Meaning and Symbolism

by Victoria L Valentine

Alonzo Davis: The Blanket Series is on view at Parrasch Heijnen gallery in Los Angeles. The artist spoke about the series during oral history interviews with UCLA.

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had such a powerful presence, his image, voice, and actions are recognized the world over. Thinking about the civil rights legend who preached nonviolence in his quest for racial justice and human rights, Alonzo Davis made “King’s Peace Cloth” (1985), a woven abstract canvas painted in muted mauve and iridescent gold tones of acrylic. The painting speaks to serenity and protection and features the artist’s signature symbol–an arrow pointing up and to the left, indicating his outlook and his politics.

“King’s Peace Cloth was created in 1985, 22 years after the March on Washington where I stood among the thousands of people who walked, flew or drove to Washington DC to hear Martin Luther King Jr. and 17 years after his death. After much reflection on his impact nationally and internationally I was inspired to make art in his honor,” Davis said on his website. “Symbolically I see King’s Peace Cloth as both a shroud and blanket as spirit catcher.”

“Alonzo Davis: The Blanket Series” is the artist’s first solo show at Parrasch Heijnen in Los Angeles. Davis is presenting expressive works composed of woven strips of painted paper and canvas, including “King’s Peace Cloth.”

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by Shana Nys Dambrot

Alonzo Davis’ paintings are breathtaking in their materiality. Using saturated, refractive palettes, and woven paper and canvas to form a layered topography, the works assert their physicality as much, if not more than the imagery. Abstract—but with elements of pictographic language, landscape and quilting to which the title “Blanket Series” refers—Davis’ works are engaged with their 20th-century milieu, the art history that preceded it and, intriguingly, with the current discourse surrounding abstraction.

Davis is in lively conversation with such art historical figures as Robert Rauschenberg, Paul Klee, Carlos Almaraz, Howard Hodgkin and Joe Ray; but his work also has much to contribute to the present moment. We are in a period in which abstraction has been increasingly cultivating its power of storytelling through expanding its material and gestural fields into more dimensional, personal and even spiritual territory. This includes an understanding of traditional craft as a deep cultural expression, with voices from Gee’s Bend to Sanford Biggers taking up quilting as a practice and a metaphor—which is exactly what Davis is up to in these affecting and unforgettable paintings.

Each brushstroke is articulated as a stitch, and layered such that the foundation remains visible even under coats of assertive color and thick pigment. Compositions are built in sections, square or shard-like, overlapping and woven in wide strips, or sewn in like patchwork. But, because of the generosity of the paint-handling, despite fragmentation, each stiffened unframed work occupies its wall space with the singularity of a modern painting and the gravitas of a regal tapestry. Celebration with Melon (1986) displays a skirt of fringe that enhances the textile effect, but the glow of its pink-forward personality forces a conversation on paint. Copper Flash (1989) also explores such possibilities, buried in a deep pink field of granite split by a lightning strike, perhaps being held together by gold at its broken seam like kintsugi.

Flotation Reflection (1996) presents like an elaborate picture window looking out across the sea to the horizon. Its receding pictorial depths are a sweet spatial bend that is echoed elsewhere in the exhibition. It finds a curious counterpart in Twilight (1986) whose massive central window is a celestial glitter bomb with a small arrow pointing skyward. The arrow is a recurring motif, of the kind most heavily expressed in the urban musicality of Crescent Moon Over Memphis (1993), the most scenic of the works, and the most literal as to hiding a story in its codes.

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by Suzanne Hudson

“Alexis Smith: The American Way” is the Los Angeles artist’s first retrospective in three decades, comprising early artist books made in the 1970s, room-size installations from the 1980s, and more recent mixed-media collages that extend into the 2010s. A proper, well-structured presentation of some fifty works, it nevertheless maintains a sense of intimacy, like a love letter from the show’s curator, Anthony Graham. Smith is everywhere and nowhere here; her variously mediated presence is rendered structural to the work and its staging, beginning with the first gallery’s spotlighting of Your Name Here, 1975/2016, a royal-blue cinema-style director’s chair emblazoned with ALEXIS SMITH. As the story goes, she was born Patti Anne Smith in 1949 and changed her name when she was seventeen and a student at the University of California, Irvine. Identity, both given and made, individual and yoked to collective myth—which is often stupefyingly vulgar and cruel—subtends the rest. The pieces in the first room alone offer a chronology-spanning overview of the artist’s career and include the exhibition’s namesake, The American Way, 1980, a collage in five sheets that mines the use of newspaper clippings and the stream-of-consciousness expression of John Dos Passos’s trilogy of novels, U.S.A. (1930–36). Like its source, Smith’s rejoinder makes a point about the brutalities of capitalism and the flexibility its contingencies require. One bit, running beside a small picture of an alarm clock, reads: TO DO TO MAKE THERE ARE MORE LIVES THAN WALKING DESPERATE THE STREETS HURRY UNDERDOG DO MAKE.

Smith is elsewhere attuned to the malleability central to American narratives via their foundational symbols, protagonists, and plots, which turn on notions of reinvention rather than on those of becoming (even if they are one and the same). Smith has been known to invoke Greek myths (as in the collage Orpheus: 3 Movies, 1974), and her attunement to metamorphosis likewise finds Ovidian complement. Yet the artist is consistent in her attention to the instantiations of these themes in the contexts of a louche postwar California culture and its recapitulation in novels and films. Golden State and Hello Hollywood, both 1980, specify this conceptual geography. The former, a large-scale installation, takes text from Raymond Chandler’s 1949 novel The Little Sister—in which the narrator describes driving into the San Fernando Valley—and features wall-emblazoned ads, as though they’re being seen from a passing car. This work was first shown at LA’s Rosamund Felsen Gallery with Hello Hollywood and other Chandler-related pieces, brought back together here for the first time. Hello Hollywood, too, nods to motorists: Silhouettes of palm trees hawking Burma-Shave shrink, receding in a perspectival play that touches upon illusionistic painting as much as travel on the proverbial open road.

More recent works admit Smith’s abiding interest in clichés of Western promise. She slices into these banalities through wry assemblages that speak more directly to contemporary life and recuperative nostalgia. Degree of Difficulty, 2002, for one, skewers images of female celebrity and sexual objectification. A large photograph of Britney Spears—her smiling mouth visible as her eyes and nose are obscured by an impenetrable blue square—shows her wearing a crop top and low-rise jeans (a period-appropriate thong peeks out from the waistband), while her left hand clutches a unsubtly phallic Pepsi bottle, pointed at her crotch. This element anchors the composition, which also features a picture of Shirley MacLaine on the cover of Modern Maturity (her face split open by a black diamond) and another smaller intercession of a calling card for a sex worker. Nearby, the epic Red Carpet, 2001, recalls the Hollywood reference of Your Name Here. It, too, is predicated upon the possibility of subjective interpolation in a space devoid of human presence, but framed as though it could hold it. Red Carpet—a massive hallway rug that scales up a humble serape pattern and leads to a trompe l’oeil painting of an apocalyptic sky—first premiered as a site-specific installation at SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico. A companion text for the work reads HEAVEN FOR WEATHER. HELL FOR COMPANY, the epithet a fitting one for an artist whose body of work acknowledges the desire for escape—from self as much as surroundings—as perfect pretending.

by Jonathan Griffin

In his first solo show in Los Angeles since 1984, at Parrasch Heijnen, the artist shows paper and canvas works that draw from global influences

If you had dipped even a toe in the Black art world of 1970s and ’80s Los Angeles, you would have known the Brockman Gallery. Opened in 1967 by artist brothers Alonzo and Dale Davis, it occupied a storefront in Leimert Park, a middle-class enclave in South Los Angeles, and showed mainly Black artists. (Non-profit Art + Practice now runs its public programmes in the space.) Canonical figures exhibited there, including David Hammons, Senga Nengudi, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy and Betye Saar, making the Brockman Gallery easily as important – and arguably more interesting – than the world-famous Ferus Gallery, even though it remains little known outside its community. In 1987 Alonzo Davis stepped away from the gallery – and from Los Angeles – to concentrate on his art practice. Given his contribution to the city, it’s shocking that this is his first solo exhibition in LA since 1984. ‘Alonzo Davis: Blanket Series’ at Parrasch Heijnen is an eye-opener for those like me, who knew more about Davis’s work in support of other artists than as an artist himself. Gratifyingly, it’s also proof that despite his long work as a gallerist, he wasn’t – still isn’t – interested in following in anyone else’s footsteps. His global influences run wider and deeper than that.

The wall-based works in the exhibition were all made between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s. Evading categorization either as paintings, collages or sculptures, they were made by weaving strips of painted paper or canvas. As the works became larger – as with the tasselled and roughly painted Celebration with Melon (1986) – so too did the width of the strips. Despite the series’s name, none approaches the usefulness of a blanket, though they recall quilts. With one exception, they are all loosely woven – sometimes the white wall peeks through – and unfixed at their edges. Comfort, here, is spiritual, not physical.

One of the earliest pieces, King’s Peace Cloth (1985), was made in tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whom Davis heard deliver his ‘I have a dream’ speech in 1963. Its title suggests a shroud, a symbolic covering for the body after death. Gleaming with subtly modulated washes of gold acrylic paint, it is nevertheless a poor object: at their edges, the canvas strips fray, and, pinned by its top corners, the square panel sags and wrinkles, like an animal skin hung up to dry. Compare this piece with Black X (1992), in which the canvas strips are sewn and hemmed at their edges. Metal eyelets are punched into its corners. It has the kind of butch surety one might expect from a camping tarp, and feels sewn-up expressively as well as literally. Its solidity serves to highlight the (seeming) ephemerality that helps other works here take flight.

As someone who spent much of his early life pricing and selling systemically undervalued art works (and failing to sell them, by many accounts), Davis must be highly sensitive to the vagaries of value. Historically, works on paper are less prized than paintings on canvas, not because of their relative aesthetic merits, but because of the greater longevity of the canvas itself. Davis’s woven pieces allude in their form and sometimes in their patterns to objects that, despite their material fragility, are spiritually and culturally powerful: quilts from the American South, Native American blankets, rugs, ceremonial garments and so on. In doing so, he challenges the connections between materiality and value that underpin much Euro-American fine art.

Most successful are the pieces in which Davis celebrates material frivolity. The works shimmer with fistfuls of glitter, pearlescent paint, spatters of blues, reds, pinks and purples, and jazzily patterned borders. It’s thrilling, and humbling, to watch Davis finding gravity and substance in such unlikely places.

‘Alonzo Davis: The Blanket Series’ is on view at Parrasch Heijnen, Los Angeles, until 17 December.

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by Christopher Knight

LA JOLLA — When Alexis Smith began to make art as the 1970s launched, two taboos apparently proved irresistible. Judging from the persuasive evidence in a marvelous, long-overdue retrospective of the Los Angeles artist’s exceptional career, she went straight for them.

One prohibition was against embedding literary qualities in art. Writing was writing, art was art, and never the twain should meet.

Tensions were running high between the inescapable incursions of messy mass media, pushing its way into every facet of modern life, and a worn formalist conviction that every artistic medium should be pure and vibrant unto itself. In this crabbed and narrow view of things, the prime offender was the Pop art typified by Andy Warhol, whose 1970 retrospective caused a hubbub at the organizing Pasadena Museum of Art.

The other restriction, not unrelated to the first, was a second-class status reserved for some artistic media. Painting and sculpture held firm at the top of the heap. Then there was the rest.

Somewhere below art’s pinnacle could be found ceramics, graphic art, weaving, photography, collage and more. Painters and sculptors had the capacity to be the great artists, the thinking went, while everybody else was irretrievably stuck being everybody else.

Smith, with a curious mind and an acute design skill, began to make literary collages — two taboos in one. Her wicked sense of humor helped ease a viewer into the maelstrom. Sheets of paper typed with excerpts from Jorge Luis Borges, John Dos Passos or Walt Whitman and punctuated with attached pictures, decals and objects were boxed in plexiglass, like disassembled books of cheeky poetry. Salvaged thrift-shop paintings, posters and photographs sporting collage elements and screen-printed text were set in elaborate picture frames, their design integral to the art rather than as a decorative support for it.

Finally, collages that were fully environmental began to spill across entire walls, fill whole rooms or even spread around outdoor sites in the landscape. Immersive installation in the early 1980s put the artist at the forefront of a major, now commonplace development in the art of the last four decades. Illness forced Smith, 73, to cease making work about six years ago, but the engrossing retrospective underscores her pivotal importance.

The stage is set in the earliest work among the 51 gathered for “Alexis Smith: The American Way,” deftly organized by curator Anthony Graham at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, where the show is on view through Jan. 29. From 1971, the year after she graduated from art school at UC Irvine — Robert Irwin and Vija Celmins were two mentors — “Colorado” is an altered school yearbook held in a handmade wooden binder.

Shown on a pedestal, the book is open to a page displaying 56 anonymous head shots laid out in seven neat rows. The facing page, mostly blank, features a small, stenciled figure of a woman, arms and legs akimbo and repeated several times, as if falling through the empty sheet’s void.

Like that mystery woman in free fall, all those nameless, unidentified, neatly scrubbed and often goofy-looking graduates are about to be cast out into the unknown — just as Smith herself was as she left school. The work’s veiled autobiographical dimension is given a twist by the artist’s own name: Born Patti Anne Smith, she chose at age 17 to assume the moniker of an accomplished if not quite superstar Hollywood actor. Alexis Smith’s ultra-common last name classified her as a kind of Everywoman.

The show biz bona fides firmly located modern experience within the dizzying hall of mirrors that is the mass-media madhouse. Another 1971 collage, not in the show (but once owned by the actor), shows gritty determination: A clipped publicity still of the aspiring star is tucked in an envelope marked “Ma-chees-ma,” a feminized phonetic appropriation of the Spanish word for aggressive masculine pride.

The exhibition’s first gallery features a tantalizing face-off between a sculpture and a collage. Both are simply fabricated from commonplace objects.

The sculpture is an ordinary canvas folding chair, the stereotypical kind that directors or actors might find on a soundstage with their name emblazoned across the back in script. It’s a reserved perch from which the labor of creating art — and a public identity — takes shape.

On the wall opposite hangs a machine-printed “painting” of wild horses galloping in an unfettered stampede, kicking up a cloud of dust that captures light and bathes the Western scene in a golden glow. On it is affixed the famous album cover for the record “Set Free,” designed with a photograph of a crouching Patti Smith, the feral punk rocker with whom the artist happened to share a birth name and whose breakout song and album were titled “Horses.”

In works like these, Patti Alexis Smith — the artist, not the actor or the singer — creates cultural wormholes of uncanny effect. Her mordant social commentary is lodged between the glamorous fizz of Warhol and the tatty thrift store aesthetic of Mike Kelley. Slip-sliding collisions of image and text in works by artists like Edward Ruscha and John Baldessari provide a tart context.

All these artists were keen on undoing the stifling prescriptions of modern art, high or low, entrenched within a mass media environment dependent on the choking proliferation of stereotypes and cliches. For Smith, second wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s provided crucial fuel, with sexual politics a recurrent theme.

Those politics are almost always embedded within Smith’s sharp sense of absurdity, salted with the specter of eventual injury and loss.

The “Colorado” yearbook also includes a period cheesecake photograph that looks like the other Alexis Smith, her bullet-breasted two-piece bathing suit ambiguously greeted with the stenciled word “guffaw.” In a wall-size mural, “Isadora,” painted on cheap, disposable corrugated-cardboard, dancer Isadora Duncan’s liberated choreography leads to vanguard artistic celebrity and ultimate strangulation, the long scarf wrapped around her neck fatally caught in the axle of a car.

Car culture, as leaden an L.A. cliché as exists, turns up often. The two thematic collage-posters in “Blue Denim,” each advertising drive-in movies warning of the dangerous pleasures of teenage lust, are slyly linked together by a set of automotive jumper cables. Stand back, as electrocution competes with the spark of rebirth.

In “The 20th Century,” a B-movie poster is screen-printed with the legend, “I’ve died so often, made love so much — I’ve lost track of what’s real.” Haven’t we all?

The exhibition presents half a dozen trenchant installations, including “Red Carpet,” a 2001 commissioned work for New Mexico’s SITE Santa Fe. Taking the original location into account, the gaily serape-striped rug is patterned after a tourist souvenir, and it leads to a nearly abstract wall mural of flaming red-orange hues that signals either a glorious sunset or a wildfire’s deadly inferno. Stenciled onto the adjacent wall next to an incongruously glowing sconce is eternity’s conundrum: “Heaven for weather, hell for company.”

Unfortunately, one can no longer walk out and loll about on the Hollywood carpet, as was possible in Santa Fe. But La Jolla is a good place for the retrospective, because two monumental Smith masterpieces are permanently installed nearby at UC San Diego. They’re worth the short detour from the museum.

“Snake Path” is a 560-foot-long, 10-foot-wide outdoor footpath shaped like the biblical coiled serpent. It slithers its way uphill through an Edenic garden, dotted with apple and pomegranate trees, to the university library, repository of human knowledge. The snake’s flagstone surface is gently rounded, not flat, so care is needed on the climb. A quote from Milton’s “Paradise Lost” extolling self-reliance is encountered along the way, carved into a big, tombstone-like granite book. Think, the ensemble urges — and do so at your peril.

The 1992 installation was inspired by a monumental 1987 Smith mural, “Same Old Paradise,” a temporary commission she executed for the lobby at what is now the Brooklyn Museum. (The elaborate project was assisted by Meg Belichick, Rich Sedivy and Lucia Vinograd.) The magnificent painting, 22 feet high, 66 feet wide and featuring eight large-scale framed collages lined up along the lower right edge, was itself inspired by “On the Road,” Jack Kerouac’s counterculture novel of broken dreams and epic loss.

At the left, a two-lane blacktop highway morphs into an exquisite serpent, winding its way through verdant Eden — a gorgeously idealized California landscape worthy of a classic orange crate label. At the right, beneath an enormous trio of impossibly radiant oranges reminiscent of the lucky fruits that might come up in the windows of a Las Vegas slot machine, collages excerpt fragmented bits of Kerouac’s writing.

“Same Old Paradise” was shown in Los Angeles in 1992, a brilliant addendum to the traveling midcareer survey of the artist’s work from the Whitney Museum, which came to the Museum of Contemporary Art. After, Smith’s tour de force was rolled up and put in storage, where it languished for 30 years. Happily, its installation on an auditorium wall at UCSD’s new Sixth College campus was completed last year.

Like Smith’s namesake, her art exudes a period flavor. Rummaging through artifacts of the recent past, it is heavy on motifs from the 1940s and 1950s — a time just before and during the artist’s childhood, but also the tumultuous, transitional early years of modern American art’s emergence onto a world stage.

After World War II, as American art rose in prominence while a ruined Europe picked itself up and began to dust itself off, the formalist literary prohibition and the assertion of a hierarchy of mediums had taken hold. Smith, summoning bracing “ma-chees-ma,” made art that is a pungent corrective. The retrospective is an absorbing thrill.

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Travis Diehl on Alexis Smith’s Same Old Paradise, 1987

IT TOOK THE MAGIC of two Hollywood scene painters to blow up Alexis Smith’s sketch of an orange-crate label to mural size. Same Old Paradise, 1987, is a monumental work, monumental like studio films of the iconic valley: twenty-two feet high, sixty-two feet wide, bigger than a billboard. The two-lane blacktop flows straight down the left side of the picture from the lolling hills, then curves into a snake. The solid yellow line morphs into a ridge of bright scales on the serpent’s tarmac-gray body. To the right is a row of eight assemblages of found objects, photographs, and texts, framed in flaking sea-foam green like the windows of some Steinbeckian shack. The glass of each panel bears a line from Smith’s abridgment of Jack Kerouac’s amphetamine opus On the Road (1957), the text silk-screened over prints abstracted from what could be ads for cigarettes, denim, and beer. The right edge of the rightmost assemblage nestles against an in-your-face cluster of fruit and blossoms, heavy on the bough and swollen by foreshortening. The orange groves shrink toward the mountains in five-point perspective, and the blurs of speckled branches flick apart into straight dirt rows, the effect like orchards watched from the window of a speeding car.

Smith has plied the highways of Americana since the 1970s, sleeplessly splitting the lane between brilliance and cliché. A first act, age seventeen: Born Patti Anne, Smith took the name of a ’40s silver-screen actress, a sobriquet both instantly specific and too common to remember. Yes, perfect—she would be Alexis Smith. Her work would eat its own tail. An early collage, Ma-chees-ma, 1971, presents a sliced-apart paper cutout of the starlet, the incision hidden by two envelopes, like the box used to saw a showgirl in half. The work appears in the catalogue for her 1991 retrospective with the following attribution: “Collection of the actress Alexis Smith.” The Chandlerisms followed—a long series of paper sheets typewritten with one-liners drawn from Raymond Chandler’s sunshine pulp and punctuated by a trinket or two—a tattered matchbook, a pair of little cocktail glasses. From here on out, her collages grew complex and colorful, like a California roadside, incorporating custom frames and found backgrounds with snatches of literature carefully lettered on the glass. Like profound sleights of hand, her juxtapositions can seem superficial. Niagara, 1985, a two-tone granite headstone, is etched with the profile of Marilyn Monroe, her hair cascading into a drawing of the famous falls. It’s almost too obvious. Yes, Monroe starred in a film of that name. She was born Norma Jean. She went over the edge of the American dream. The two or three worried elements of an Alexis Smith, whether text or image, souvenir or toy, open a gulf between them, and the polite horror of the country pours in.

Smith grasped the cliché that Kerouac would become, already was, unspooling the collective recollection of his manic scroll in a way true to the American dream.

In the ’80s, Smith developed room-size installations combining murals, sculpture, and collage. Some of these projects appeared in public: Starlight, 1982, at Unity Savings and Loan in Hollywood; The Grand, 1983, throughout the lobby of the De Vos Hall performing-arts center in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In 1993, for the floor of the Los Angeles Convention Center, she designed a terrazzo map of the Pacific Rim. Same Old Paradise combines her idioms of elegant assemblage and boldface public art. The Brooklyn Museum commissioned the piece for its airy entryway; it was made in Hollywood, hung in New York, then shipped back west to SoCal, rolled up in a God-long crate. In 2021, after thirty years in storage, the work found a permanent home in the Stuart Collection at the University of California, San Diego, unfurled on the clerestory wall of a new auditorium building. It’s the second Smith on campus. Paradise inspired the other: Snake Path, 1992, a mosaic of slate scales winding downhill through a garden to the Brutalist, brazierlike Geisel Library, its diamond head licking the plaza.

If Kerouac captured the Beat generation in a few hundred pages, Smith summed up Reaganite gloom in a handful of koans. THE ROAD WAS STRAIGHT AS AN ARROW, says the first panel, a picture of weathered boards collaged with a tin thermometer housing that reads ROYAL CROWN COLA. It’s an up arrow of rising heat, but it also points forward into the painted land in the way of arrows perpendicular to the ground. Toy arrows protrude from the second panel as if shot there by Hollywood Indians, the heads apparently buried in a photo of a model’s preppy plaid-flannel shoulder in what might be an ad for Newports. MOTHS SMASHED OUR WINDSHIELD, reads Smith’s line (“Moths began smashing,” wrote Kerouac), as the fletched shafts smash into the museum glass. This is Smith at her best: the barb of a pun exquisitely delivered exactly after you expect it. The straight road becomes a weapon.

Same Old Paradise crowns a series of collages that use Kerouac’s words as punch lines. Smith’s ambivalent celebration of the open road and its muscle-car machismo almost pats Kerouac on the head as it takes the wheel. She makes no mention of Dean Moriarty; the narrator, Sal Paradise, is paid oblique homage in the installation’s title. Rather than eulogize two meteoric hipsters, Smith boils down Kerouac’s “He and I” to simply “I”—the authorship of the great American novel compounds and erodes like a blue hill. The already thin veil of Kerouac’s first-person narrator—we know it was him in that car, on that road—blows away. Instead, Smith’s voice laminates the author: Kerouac and Smith, riding the white lines through Eden. Smith appreciated an age of simple metaphors. She grasped the cliché that Kerouac would become, already was, unspooling the collective recollection of his manic scroll in a way true to the American dream—the one of today, having recuperated Kerouac’s skew path into its many chapters on manifest destiny, on masculine thrust, on pearls and girls for the taking.

Smith knew a snake when she saw one. For years, the artist kept a talking Trump doll from the ex-president’s “Apprentice” days in her studio—“I have no choice but to tell you you’re fired!” it says, plus sixteen other phrases—and a framed ticket from his Vegas floor show made its way into a 2013 work. In her art, the snake stands for original sin—not of Eve, the biblical Stacy reaching for enlightenment, but of Adam, turning snakelike himself in his quest to Chad his way back to paradise. In the last days of Reagan’s second term, Smith editioned a silver necklace with the tail of a snake and the nose of a locomotive. Elsewhere, a plastic serpent ripples in the corner of Virgin Sacrifice, 1983; a snake constricts the buxom target silhouette of Asphalt Jungle, 1985; another wriggles down the classifieds in The Holy Road, 1988. Jack, 1990—as in Kerouac—displays the army-green mascot of the Gadsden flag crossed out by a strip of rubber tire. And the woman at the end of the road in California—is she Alexis Smith?

Smith’s first retrospective in three decades opened this past month at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Her last major survey, in 1991, traveled east to west, from the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Maybe her quicksand of tchotchkes, quips, and clichés didn’t quite gel with the bloodless cool of her Pictures peers, at least not the East Coast mode, though she showed with Margo Leavin until the gallery’s end. Smith’s acid taste for Hollywood set her apart. Not many people in the ’80s—nor today—cared to remember that nobody, not Smith nor you nor I, can wake up from the American dream. Smith chose to love that dream, all its golden light and subtending darkness. The intense orange pasted on fruit crates was an early advertising ploy, conjuring an impossibly saturated bounty that was at once a fantastic lie and an awesome possibility. Same Old Paradise pulls off the same trick. The picture is a fake of a fake produced by a professional showmaker, but the result is true. The proverbial road is there, to be taken, beaten, overcome, like the desiccated lands through which the highway slithers—yeah, from one end of this serpentine Eden to the other, the madcap beatitudes hit the ocean and bounce back.

“Alexis Smith: The American Way” is on view through January 29, 2023, at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

Travis Diehl is a writer and critic based in New York. He is a recipient of the Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant and the Rabkin Prize in Visual Arts Journalism and is Online Editor at X-TRA.

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by Lindsay Preston Zappas

Walking into Christine Howard Sandoval’s exhibition at Parrasch Heijnen immediately transports you into the artist’s perspective. A large video projection, which was filmed with a bodycam mounted to Howard Sandoval’s head, spans the first gallery. The camera looks down over her body as she walks barefoot across the caked earth around Mission Soledad, a Spanish mission in the Salinas Valley that settled on Chalon/Ohlone land. Howard Sandoval’s methodical, first-person tracing of the land reads as a type of reclamation, a connection to her Indigenous identity wherein memory—as well as trauma—are rooted first and foremost in the body.

Sculptural mounds made from paper and rich brown adobe span the next gallery, recalling vernacular architecture and the ancient craft of basketry. The fragility of the paper forms belies the rigid strength of the dried adobe, which maintains a soft, malleable appearance even as it weaves complex, lattice-like layers. In Split Metate, between two worlds (2022), the woven mound is split into two mirroring shapes that nestle together but never touch—a profound representation of a severed relationship with the land.

Howard Sandoval extends her exploration of adobe and paper to large drawings in which she uses tape to apply the clay in regimented lines and grids. The caked adobe clings to the paper substrate and chips away in certain areas, leaving behind a ghostly print. Reminiscent of Agnes Martin’s minimal explorations of land and meditation, these drawings seem to be studies of land that has been segmented and ordered, like crop circles and neat squares of farmland viewed from an airplane. But the exhibition’s title, the green shoot that cracks the rock, suggests the potential for the land, and those connected to it, to rebel against the oppressive order that has all but overtaken it.

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by Ezra Jean Black

There was an almost respirational pacing to this show—taken from a slightly more expansive exhibition of the Montana-based artist’s work at the Missoula Art Museum—between variously light or darkness-drenched works on canvas (and/or panel) and the chromatically saturated luminosity of work rendered by photographic means.

The Pond (2021), with a shimmer of silvery foliage whispering through the deeper grisaille of its depicted embankment and dark depths curving deep into the picture space around it, drew the viewer into the subtleties of its rendering. Even the most determinedly monochromatic of Appleby’s canvases reveals abundant chromatic variation and considerable under-painting, however aggressively scraped or flattened. Here, however, the palette veered toward charcoal, slate grays and silvery whites. Foreground foliage, executed in quasi-pointillist style, turned its leaves in a late afternoon or early twilight, rendering the movement of leaves and branches as a kind of effervescence.

As if to answer that whispering pond and its wooded embankment, the sound of water reverberated from across the gallery in a digital video loop with sound, Water Voice (2019–21), fading in from a black-and-white filtered gradient of grays and blacks to color, with the already vividly blue water deepening to sapphire. As the blue deepens, lapping waves are broken by children’s voices, splashing and diving, improvising water sports, and calling their dogs into the water to play fetch. Voices recede, dogs and children fade from view, and blue fades to gray, and finally to white, before fading in again.

The forest takes us further into the woods—a sloping view tumbling towards the viewer and into the right-most section of the (144 inches across) diptych, with pale light piercing the forest canopy to patches of the ground and the darkness falling towards us. Here the painting’s surface grisaille more readily discloses its complex underpainting, with hints of burnt umber or verdigris beneath charcoal black timber and pale gray foliage, and the palest blues where the sky peaks through the most distant trees.

Directly across, Appleby’s triptych (215 in. across) The River (2013) flows not so much into our view as beneath and past us, with the turquoise of its surface scarcely suppressing its complex underpainting of both sunken riverbed debris and reflected woods and sky looming over it.

Mounted on the rear wall of the gallery were four perfect squares (26 x 26 in.) from Appleby’s 2021 “First Light/Last Light” series. Their pleasures multiply on approach, both in the canvases individually and the transitions between them. Close up, the “light” of palest yellows and ambers seemed to seep from the edges while deeper amethysts and blues pooled into midsections.

Directly opposite the First Light/Last Light canvases was a small kneeling figure in fired clay, Untitled (2021)—feminine in contour, but with articulation suppressed; conceivably reverential, but expressing acceptance and resistance in equal measure. Informed and inspired by the natural world, Appleby’s work is also suffused with latency, variation, potentiality—evoking a sinking world that may nevertheless rise and push back.

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For six years Maya Stovall staged Liquor Store Theatre, a conceptual art and anthropology video project---included in the Whitney Biennial in 2017---in which she danced near the liquor stores in her Detroit neighborhood as a way to start conversations with her neighbors. In this book of the same name, Stovall uses the project as a point of departure for understanding everyday life in Detroit and the possibilities for ethnographic research, art, and knowledge creation. Her conversations with her neighbors-which touch on everything from economics, aesthetics, and sex to the political and economic racism that undergirds Detroit's history-bring to light rarely acknowledged experiences of longtime Detroiters. In these exchanges, Stovall enacts an innovative form of ethnographic engagement that offers new modes of integrating the social sciences with the arts in ways that exceed what either approach can achieve alone.

“Sylvia Snowden: Select Works, 1966–2020” was the eighty-year-old artist’s first show at Parrasch Heijnen gallery in Los Angeles. Making up for lost time, this historical (but not chronological) survey of expressively rendered canvases with thickly encrusted surfaces—the paint troweled and visibly mixed in the act of conjuring bodies from the obdurate material—was a contrast to the more focused “Sylvia Snowden: The M Street Series, 1982–1988,” which was concurrently on display for her debut presentation at New York’s Franklin Parrasch Gallery. The latter’s tight grouping featured portrayals of Snowden’s neighbors in Washington, DC, some intimates and others strangers, many of whom were unemployed and unhoused. The artist documents their plight in mostly abstract pictures of irradiating pain that frame splayed, long-armed figures staring at the viewer with palpable urgency. A piece from the “Men on M Street” series, 2001–2004, Men on M Street–George Brown II, 2001, a massive vertical canvas cleaved by the namesake figure, was included in the West Coast exhibition. In this painting, a black arm extends from the model’s torso in a continuous hardened puddle of acrylic, similar in style to the right leg propping him up from beneath, in a warping of bilateral symmetry. Snowden articulates his left arm as so many gashes against a field of signal orange; the effect is something like a Futurist disarticulation of subjectivity into the penetrating light of sick industrial ambience.

This violent commingling of form and space is a Snowden hallmark. The artist sometimes rims the threshold where skin meets air with opaque passages of white, as if to articulate the edges of erasure, as we see in Alice Shannon, 1985. Also included here were Shell 12, 19, and 72, all 2010—nominal portraits of the artist’s daughter that she considers a single piece—in which head and limbs cohere by virtue of their uniform color. These primarily red-silhouetted figures reveal emerald or cobalt at their outer limits, moments that are subsumed by the churning strokes that run across all three compositions. Taken together, they admit an observational intensity redoubled as rawness posing as, or perhaps even shielded by, pictorial irresolution. Exemplary in this effort is the astounding and elephantine Shell aged 13, 2012. In this roughly six-and-a-half-by-five-foot canvas, Snowden’s daughter appears to be dancing exuberantly. We can find no single viewing distance at which these densely wrought images cohere without simultaneously falling apart. As the more abstract Green III, 2020, makes clear, these are paintings thick as sculptural reliefs, and their assertion of physicality, of presence, seems very much the point. (A 2016 show at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC, was appropriately titled “The Feel of Paint.”)

Relationality is quite differently modeled in Betty, 1974, the first work visible in the opening room at the LA space. Made with oils (Snowden shifted to acrylic after having children), it is a picture of bruised flesh, all muddled cream, brown, and salmon. It is also a none-too-subtle depiction of a white woman sexually abusing two Black men. They crouch under the toothy rictus of a vagina dentata amid roving peace signs and a swastika. Besides its brutal depiction of racism and rape, the work forms an allegory that addresses the exclusionary practices of American institutions witnessed by the artist. One major show in 2000 at Washington, DC’s Corcoran Gallery of Art involved a series made after her son was murdered near their home (a monoprint, the verdant Malik, Farewell III, 1995–98, was included at Parrasch Heijnen); Snowden’s insistence that the work was more a joyous remembrance of her son’s life than a grueling meditation on his death was met with near mocking disregard in critic Michael O’Sullivan’s review of the exhibition, published in the September 1, 2000, edition of the Washington Post. In recounting his disbelieving exchange with the artist, O’Sullivan writes: “So it’s Eurocentic morbidity and Western art-historical baggage that makes parts of [your] art feel mournful or angry or funereal when it’s really just a celebration of being alive?” “Yes,” said Snowden. “I do believe it is.”

In 2019, the artist received a Lifetime Achievement Award from her alma mater, Howard University in Washington, DC, recognizing her work for more than half a century. The rest of us need to catch up.

– Suzanne Hudson

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by Johanna Drucker

MANY OF Sylvia Snowden’s vivid canvases are so thick with impasto that they verge on being relief works. The acrylic medium retains the gestures of her fingers, the strokes of her palette knives, and the trace of her brushes. Her compositions are made of peaks and valleys, grooves and protrusions, tracks as well as marks. They are not just a representation in signs and figures, but the thick matter of extruded thought. While the striking material fact of making paint dimensional, using it as a sculpting medium, is not the only striking feature of Snowden’s canvases, it produces a visceral first impact.

The 2021 exhibition of Snowden’s work at the Parrasch Heijnen Gallery in Los Angeles, which ran from November 13 to December 18, included work from six decades (the Washington, DC-based artist is approaching her 80th birthday). This sustained commitment shows in the evident maturity of the work and the range of periods and styles with which the artist has been in dialogue. Sui generis in many ways, the corpus is still situated within the tropes of modern figurative work, color-field abstraction, and engagement with certain aspects of 20th-century art that aspired to heroic achievement — in the best sense of an ambition to struggle with the existential dimensions of aesthetic self-realization.

The work is varied, which is not surprising given its temporal range and the multiple series from which it was selected. The oldest painting in the exhibit, an untitled, modest-sized Masonite panel from 1966 created with a mix of acrylic and oil pastel, has a quietness and capacity for absorption that distinguishes it from many of the later, highly active, pieces. Moody and soft, its passages might or might not reference a head or figure, and their capacity for hovering in an ambiguous zone between representation and abstraction is part of what holds our attention. Such ambiguity carries a critical charge, challenging the viewer not only formally but socially. Snowden seems to suggest that social positions, with their specific forms of knowledge and experience, are at play in the negotiation of viewer and canvas, painter and audience, as they are in all aspects of daily life. There is no neutral spot for a cultural politics of reception to stand on.

In Betty (1974), figures overlap and commingle in a spatially impossible change of scale and a juxtaposition of heads, feet, genitalia, and faces. Breasts, ears, spread-apart thighs are both explicit and not, vividly present as paint strokes yet also deliriously seductive. The only work in the exhibit done exclusively in oils, the painting evokes a nostalgia for the subtle beauty of that medium. The tones of the palette are rich with ochre, carmine, burnt umber, and hints of earth greens and vivid blues associated with another era. Colors, like songs, names, and styles, carry their associations, and this canvas swarms with animate energies appropriate to the predominantly organic pigments of which it is composed. Something of the sensibility of James Ensor — dreamlike and nightmarish, ritualistic and slightly obscure — seems to push the canvas backward in time, toward precedents in Expressionistic modernism. But it has also clearly been painted by someone who has looked at Lucian Freud, Willem de Kooning, and Joan Brown. These are not references quoted or cited by Snowden in any direct sense, however, and the way she manages the figures is distinct from the methods of other painters. She situates her work in deliberate, not derivative, moves.

But the garish central woman-thing in Betty, with her heavy chin, brow beetled forward, hands absorbed in some object, and ghoulish head crouching below the gaping wound of her sex, raises another crucial issue. The nudes of the many modern “masters” (i.e., men) are now routinely characterized as objectification. But how are they different from this depiction of a woman by a woman? Who speaks, presents, writes, and offers an image to view? Who has license to objectify? If subjectivity is the place from which one sees and paints, then where and how is the permission for what to paint about granted? In the last decade in particular, markers of identity such gender, class, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation have provided the legitimization for aesthetic depiction, the warrant for whose point of view is allowed into a conversation. Snowden’s identity is an essential feature of the way her work can be read and received. The cultural politics of production also have no neutral place on which to stand.

Not only gendered but also racialized figures appear, in strong outline and silhouette, throughout Snowden’s works, and the same issues of legitimization arise. The artist is a black woman, but do we need to know this fact to read her images? Should images always be situated within the identity frameworks of their authors? This is one of the unresolvable dilemmas of our time, and critical reflection on how art offers the experience of the self to the other — and captures the other’s experience in an expression of alterity — is ever more urgent. If the processes of empathetic identification through which aesthetic catharsis and epiphanic revelation function are restricted along lines of identity, then where is the ground for an exchange of understanding? In one sense, these issues are irrelevant to the vibrant excitement Snowden’s canvases trigger. In another, they are central to the challenges she offers.

If Betty feels connected to a long history of oil painting in the modern era, then the acrylic paintings in the Shell series (2010–’12) manage to be fully contemporary by virtue of their color, form, and treatment. They are nudes. They are bold. They are frontal and explicit, but also so thickly and richly made that they vibrate between matter and meaning, creating a force field of color as form in space. The sheer heat of the pigment would vibrate on its own, but pulled and molded into thick relief, the paint has a molten quality that refuses to conform to the decorum of mere surface. The strokes thrust into the viewer’s perceptual field.

Among these full figures, their bare bodies active and alive, the nonfigurative Green III (2020) takes on more of a vitalist character than it would if surrounded by other abstractions. Described as acrylic on canvas, it seems also to contain plastic sheets contorted and twisted into the paint, and its color palette partakes of synthetic dyes and chemical compounds unheard of in an earlier era. Sheer matter, the stuff of making, the very fluid of creative energy made visible and palpable is molded into form here. The energy of the works is amazing, as if they have stopped in mid-flow or formation.

Among the vibrant canvases, one subdued work on paper from the mid-1990s — titled Malik, Farewell III — occupied its own separate wall. Set apart in this way, its symmetry and gentleness had their own very evocative effect. The image might be an icon, a bust, with its necklace of glowing stones and pleated collar. But it might also be a meditation on a moment, with the blue sky opening above a living earth, both surrounded by the darkness of a halo or aura. The subtlety and beauty of the image makes the somber stillness and space it creates immediately elegiac. Stop here, the image seems to say, stay with me, in contemplation and company. And, indeed, it is a commemorative image of deep personal loss, very private, but eloquently, respectfully, offered for public view.

Each of these works is alive with energies, compelling active motion caught in the body of paint. Among them, Men on M Street — George Brown II (2001) is an image of undeniable power and struggle. The coming-apart-ness of the black figure against its orange ground — a whirlwind of motion, arms flailing, chest pitched forward — is caught in the raked strokes of the ribs, as the body becomes explosive space. Along the edges of the canvas and in its lower quadrant, a hint of rest from this dynamism appears, some passages that seem quiet by contrast, though they are activated by drips and strokes, bright areas of blue and green set off by the black and orange of the figure in motion. The energy of the Futurists, their attempts to capture the dynamism of movement, is a distant echo here, but it is the contemporary scene — the life of urban streets and sites, individuals caught in and living through the struggles of the world today — that cannot be ignored, denied, or turned away from when encountering this canvas. Heroic, again, in the best sense, the work is evidence of a commitment to the struggle to bring something into being, into form, for all the potency it embodies and gives us to witness.

Strong works, vital but poetic and subtle at the same time, Sylvia Snowden’s paintings are alive with potent energy and all that it challenges us to consider.

¤

Johanna Drucker is the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies and Distinguished Professor of Information Studies at UCLA.

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by Christina Catherine Martinez

The contexts are off. As a critic right now, I am supposed to be looking at objects made in a time of desperation while analyzing them in a historically minded context. There is the sense that life is going on — socially, economically, if not psychologically — as some kind of deadly rehearsal for a new normal that will never arrive. It’s 2022, and I’ve got to bring 2019 eyes to 2021 work. When people say time is a flat circle, I have no idea what that means.

I recently received a press email about a show of new paintings, all orange trees, from a painter who previously did not paint orange trees. During lockdown, orange trees were the most readily available subject. That the painter responded is an important act of creation but does not speak highly of the rush to return to our frenzied cycle of production, exhibition and coverage. I see things now that feel either too private or too personal to be productively lensed through my own criticality, also touched by desperation. We sense, at times, we are being invited to review an artist’s medicine cabinet, or skin care routine. I’ve been reading a lot.

What struck me initially about"purple, black, fog”, an exhibition of new paintings from Yui Yaegashi at Parrasch Heijnen (not the gallery that emailed me about orange trees) running through Feb. 5, is how much her paintings have stayed the same. Still tiny, still marvelous. Still too easily compared to West Coast minimalism, when their scale, their semblance to Japanese textiles and their disregard for the hard edge is its own language. Her paintings have a sense of geometry, yet Yaegashi transcends the Modernist branding of the horizontal and vertical line. These are not polite, shrunk-down versions of Mid-Century big boy abstractions.

I’d last seen her paintings in Los Angeles on Jan. 2, 2017. The date is memorable to me because it was the day John Berger died. I’d received a phone call saying as much while I was driving to Parrasch Heijnen, coincidentally, with a copy of Berger’s “And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos” on my lap, one of his final books, a meditation on time and space, how we access them through poetry, through stories. Yui Yaegashi’s paintings have been described as “stories,” but they narrate only their own construction, drawing attention to their most precise features — the size of her brush, the tightness of the weave of the canvas, the pressure of her stroke, when the blue went before the pink, if the brush was perhaps washed in between. Their scale invites prolonged, intimate looking but seems less concerned with vision or narration than with time and space, two modes that, for all the hand-wringing about the photograph, painting can still explore with unmatched depth and quietude.

These are quiet paintings. All set to eye level and scaled, intentionally or not, at about the size of a smartphone or tablet; privileged modes of vision du jour. They have a meditative presence suited to a vague, California-ish injunction to mindfulness, but they are unlike any other painting I see in L.A. What remains crucially similar between these works and those of her late 2016/early 2017 show, “Fixed Point Observations,” is the hang: In both shows, the annular arrangement of 12 small works in the gallery’s main space are spaced like numbers on a clock. Entering the room, you’re at about 6 o’clock. To survey the show in person is to walk in a flat circle and end where you began.

I’m still adjusting to everything that’s changed. The nature of the change is not immediately apparent. Historian Barbara Tuchman wrote that in the wake of the Black Plague, survivors found themselves “neither destroyed nor improved,” and we are still in the process of identifying our change through negative definitions. It’s not this, but I can’t really say it’s that.

There is a consistent coolness to Yaegashi’s paintings. Not cool as an arbiter of cultural cache, but the measure of a cerebral temperature. Yaegashi drafts color piles onto one another, arresting attention without needing to court it. In “Purple” (2021) the composition is made up of a single inky aubergine, striped across the small canvas with wide lines of varying pressure, creating tones out of shape as the weave of the off-white canvas underneath comes through. “Season With…” (2021) is a block of gray flanked by two bars of bright blue. The composition is simple enough, yet the reward of scrutiny yields rich detail — the ridges that rise between the butting of brushstrokes, the shocks of bright near the corners of the frame, where having surpassed the boundaries of its dark underpainting, her blue makes a new version of itself known.

I just finished reading Don DeLillo’s “Point Omega,” a slim novel about what art and war can do to one’s sense of time. The former is generally within our control, the latter, usually without. His style is simple; the devastation lies in what he chooses to describe. Good writing, I’ve been told, is showing, not telling. What I love about DeLillo’s writing is how he identifies the purple black fog of disaster in the small turnover of details. Trader Joe’s runs out of spinach every day by 10 am. The artist now paints orange trees. The respective titles of Yaegashi’s shows with Parrasch Heijnen — “Fixed Point Observation” in 2017 and “purple, black, fog” currently — do subtly imply a change has taken place, located not in the paint but in the one who meditates on it. Her work has not drastically changed in the face of disaster, but I have.

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by Catherine Taft

Bay Area artist Mildred Howard is known for her compelling assemblage sculptures and installations that mine personal memory, community histories, and diasporic movement. This small survey was a thorough and efficient overview of more than four decades of art, presenting some of Howard’s most recognizable works—including her wood-framed photo-emulsion pieces and a signature glass-bottle house, which she made this year—alongside a surprisingly fresh-looking selection of early works. Her influences are many: Among others, we see Jay DeFeo in the thick impasto surfaces of her paintings and the foundobject deadpan of David Hammons in her sculptures. Yet Howard’s art is unique, with elements of distinctly Californian aesthetics (assemblage, Bay Area expressionism, West Coast Conceptual art, San Francisco Funk) employed in lyrical forms and suffused with political meanings.

Three untitled Xerox photocollages dating from 1978 to 1980 were the unassuming standouts of this show. Among the earliest works on view, they demonstrated a young artist engaging with technology while developing her mature artistic style. Two of the pieces—one with deepmagenta tones, the other a rich emerald—were poetic compositions of flowers, petals, and leaves, flattened by the photocopier. The third, from 1979, was a photocollaged self-portrait. In it, half of Howard’s face is painted with black stripes while the other half is made up in gold with a thickly kohl-lined eye. She is flanked by images of Native American beadwork and a cropped picture of corn. It’s a gorgeous selfrepresentation: at once theatrical, cross-cultural, and vaguely ceremonial. With a romanticism firmly against nostalgia (the collages lack the hackneyed, weathered look of so much 1970s photography), these works might very well have been made by a young artist today. Other pieces seemed more a product of their time, though no less meaningful now. At the front of the gallery space was Howard’s major installation Ten Little Children Standing in a Line (One Got Shot, and Then There Were Nine), 1991. The work, which was created for the Adaline Kent Award exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute, comprised a plinth with cast-copper gloves arranged in a manner that called to mind the phrase “Hands up, don’t shoot,” the Black Lives Matter rallying cry that followed the fatal 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, by a police officer. The wall behind these casts was covered with a tidy, pointillist-like grid created by brass bullet casings lodged into the drywall; on an adjacent wall hung a blown-up newspaper article reporting a 1976 massacre in Soweto, South Africa, during which hundreds of students were killed by law enforcement for protesting the mandatory use of the Afrikaans language (the caption from the AP newswire reproduction falsely reports that only six students were killed). The installation is a poignant reflection on apartheid and the loss of life through senseless violence. And the piece has a feminist dimension too; in writing about its creation, Howard mentions that she has young children and empathizes with the mothers of these murdered South African boys and girls. The work is chillingly current in the context of America in 2020, with the loss of Black lives at the hands of the white supremacist cops and the misinformation that surrounds these incidents. Howard’s installation continues to be powerfully haunting, painfully relevant.

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by Jennifer S. Lee

New York–based Alteronce Gumby works within a rich tradition of artistic precedents whose primary concern was color. The wide fields of stained pigment in Mark Rothko’s meditative canvases were meant to evoke powerful emotion. John McCracken’s volumetric, monochromed planks suggested that color itself could be a stand-alone subject. But, as demonstrated by Kazemir Malevich’s Black Square — a once hallowed work that was discovered in 2015 to bear a racist joke — color can rarely be divorced from politicization.

With society’s focus on color, and especially the ways it has historically been used to label, oppress, or divide — Black and white, red and blue — Gumby’s glass and acrylic paintings are multifaceted, glimmering beacons that propose a more nuanced perception of hue. Using foraged clear glass which the artist paints and shatters into jigsaw puzzle-sized pieces, Gumby’s latest body of work captures a hopefulness for the future — that what is broken can be put back together, for a result perhaps even more brilliant than before.

You received your MFA from Yale and you’ve shown your work in the U.S. and in Europe, but you actually started out as an architect major. How and when did you decide to become an artist?

I decided I wanted to become an artist in a foreign land. I was in Barcelona while studying abroad on a walking tour of Antoni Gaudí when our tour guide mentioned that we could go see the Picasso museum. That was actually the first time I had ever been inside an art museum — I was 18 years old, a freshman in college. The Picasso museum showed his early childhood to his late style. I was mesmerized by the journey he took, from a traditional academic style to Cubism to assemblage to his own personal visual language and an abstraction that he conjured. I realized that was something I wanted in my life.

I dropped out of college and saved my money over the summer to move to New York. I was working as a sound engineer at a nightclub, but I still had thoughts of Picasso. He was an inventive artist: He doesn’t mimic the world, he created his own vision of it. I really admire that inventiveness, the re-contextualization, and sense of originality and play. The world is a treacherous and tormented place. To be an artist is to go into your studio and find bliss; a practice that allows you to expand as a human being and thrive.

You have your own personal ideas about color. Can you talk more about what color means to you, and how you use it in your work, both materially and conceptually?

As an artist of color working with color as a primary vehicle, I want to break open and expand ideas of color, identity, and humanity — to achieve a sense of universality through color. Even the science behind color is a universal one. In the 17th century, Isaac Newton held a prism to the sky and discovered that the refraction of light created a rainbow of colors, but it’s all coming from one source, one light. I wanted to reinstate this sense of universality back to color, instead of a separatist idea of color. And I hope this universality can liberate color from entrenched, harmful associations to help us see others as complex dynamic individuals.

The titles of the paintings included in your latest show, “My Favorite Color is a Rainbow,” at Parrasch Heijnen in Los Angeles are all very lyrical. Can you tell us more about how you name your paintings and the associations behind them?

For the yellow-toned painting I call you Son ‘cause you shine like one, the title is from the movie “ATL” (2006) starring T.I. In Black culture, we have to remind each other of our worth, because society is constantly trying to shift our viewpoint and denigrate how we are supposed to see ourselves. The wordplay between “son” and “sun” takes a diminutive term and transforms it into an uplifting one. My practice is also very influenced by the sun, our star. The painting includes citrine and quartz raw natural stones. Birth of the Cool is named after a Miles Davis album, but it’s also in some ways a self-portrait. The raw lapis lazuli stones are arranged to form my sun and moon astrological signs.

This is the first time you’ve included stones in your work. Tell us more about the stones and why you included them.

I really wanted raw stones because that rawness is part of everyone’s life. No one’s perfect—everyone has a rough edge or two. We’ve all been in love, fallen out of love, had our heart broken. We put ourselves back together and keep moving through life. When the pandemic started everyone said: “I’m not going to survive 2020,” and yet we are still here. Just as the glass in my work is broken and assembled, we as human beings have the ability to persevere. When the pandemic started everyone said: “I’m not going to survive 2020,” and yet we are still here. Just as the glass in my work is broken and assembled, we as human beings have the ability to persevere.

You’ve mentioned the green Claymation Gumby character in previous interviews and in 2014, you created an all black painting featuring the character entitled “Gumby Nation.” Can you elaborate on the significance of Gumby as a pop cultural reference in relation to your work?

When I was in graduate school, I used the cartoon Claymation character Gumby as an avatar for myself. Like Gumby, I wanted to travel through time and engage with certain characters or events from the past. Gumby had this unique sense of otherness about him. I wanted that in my work—for the viewer to see something familiar, and at the same time something new and foreign. I think another iconic example of the Claymation character in pop culture is when Eddie Murphy played Gumby on SNL—a Black male comic playing a fictional green cartoon character. The layering of meaning and perspectives is astounding. I believe that every human being has that same level of complexity. We’re all unique in our own way, yet the uniqueness of Black people and other people of color at times seems to be a disadvantage. Color and abstraction allows me to play with ideas about social politics and identity.

You talk a lot about space and the cosmos. Both embody the ancient and the futuristic at the same time. What are your thoughts about the past and the future in relation to your work and the concept of time in general?

The concept of time is a heavy question. I know enough to know that I know very little about time. The concept of time is manmade just like the names of colors. In my paintings I’d like time to exist in an omnidirectional manner. My paintings can reference the past, live in the present, and have an effect on the future all at the same time.

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by Cat Kron

If the artworld's current efforts to increase programming diversity at times appear to stem more from a concern for optics' than genuine self-correction, this survey evidences no such cynicism. Sifting through five decades of work, Bay Area artist Mildred Howard and gallerist Chris Heijnen selected 15 seminal pieces that showcase Howard's astute commentaries on race and racism, and the role of language in enforcing subjugation and control - as well as her adroit ness at complicating the dominant narrative.

The exhibition functions as a retrospective of a remarkable career, even with the vast majority of Howard's oeuvre represented in absentia: thoughtfully arranged works allow the viewer to fill in the gaps between media and decades, tracing a conceptual through line from Xeroxed self-portraits and collages incorporating familial history to assemblages that address the African-American experience more broadly. But Howard reserves her biting political commentary for her installations. In Ten Little Children Standing in a Line (One Got Shot, and Then There Were Nine) (1991), near the gallery's entrance, rows of copper glove moulds on a low plinth stand erect like hands raised for a school roll call. Behind them is a grid of small, wall mounted brass fixtures. Suggesting a conceptualist wall drawing from afar, it is made of bullet casings. The work is an homage to the Soweto schoolchildren gunned down in 1976 while peacefully protesting government policy that Black students be taught solely in Afrikaans, the language of apartheid-era South Africa's then-ruling white minority. An adjacent enlarged newspaper photograph depicts two Black teenagers with the body of a fallen classmate; its caption betrays its subtext, quoting the government's description of rioting students on a rampage.

The dubious official account also cited two government officials 'hacked to death' by the children in an unprovoked attack. This version of events demonstrates language's vulnerability and how insidiously it can be wielded to suit the oppressor.

Howard uses visual metaphor to capture moments of grace, often in the same works that intimate trauma and loss. The model-scaled You Are Welcome Here (2020), a house whose roof and windowpanes are composed of glued glass bottles, signals 'fallen soldiers' - an expression for empty bottles and an allusion to the sacrifices of African-American soldiers - as well as the spiritual practice of utilising bottles as spirit catchers to provide universal protection from evil.

Throughout the show, we witness the artist harnessing personal and absorbed histories to forge a fellowship with her viewer, here and now.

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by Charles Moore

Once a week, as part of the Kossak Painting Program—a fellowship at Hunter College composed of 10 or 12 painting students—Alteronce Gumby would bring a painting or two to class to be critiqued by renowned visiting artists such as Rashid Johnson and Katherine Bernhardt. “Everybody wanted to hang their work on the best wall for the best sunlight,” the 2013 Hunter graduate reminisces. “People would get there early, set up for class, and you were put on the spot.” The New York-based artist appreciated the challenge; more importantly, he was grateful for the opportunity to contextualize his work. He subsequently enrolled in Yale University’s Master of Fine Arts program, in large part to “keep that fire burning.” Four years and counting since Gumby earned his MFA, there’s no question that the artist has done just that.

Geometric, colorful and above all else, abstract—Gumby’s work explores the very essence of Blackness. He links this to Paris; in April 2017, the artist held a solo show at the Fondation des Etats-Unis titled “Black(ness) is Beautiful” and composed of a series of abstract paintings examining what is means to be Black through the use of color. “That really ties into what I believe to be a cornerstone of my work,” states the artist, “which is constructing these ideas about colorism and stereotypes involving race and identity politics.” The aim was—and is to this day—to redefine what color means, placing rich hues on the canvas to challenge the mind, the eye and ultimately the imagination. Gumby admits he was inspired by artists like Robert Rauschenberg, particularly while finding his voice and style as an undergraduate. “There is a phase, I think, in every artist or painter’s life where they go through a Rauschenberg moment,” he explains. “Especially if you’re an abstract painter—how could you not?” Picasso, too, broke bounds in a way the artist finds inspiring. Yet, by engaging the viewer’s consciousness, Gumby has found his own unique voice and style, seeking to expand the notions through which we perceive race and identity. He attributes his efforts to a flood of childhood memories that resurfaced in early adulthood. In elementary school, the artist recalls a teacher asking him to stand and disclose his favorite color, and then to explain why. “I stood up and said, ‘My favorite color is black,’ and before I could say why, another student beside me said, ‘Your favorite color is black because you are Black.’” Gumby disagreed, defending his preference instead by stating that his favorite Superhero was Batman. But he carried this moment with him nonetheless; one might argue it’s been vital to his painting trajectory. “Over time, you start to realize that people— really even as kids—were confined to these stereotypes,” he says.

Today, Gumby dives deep into what this means. He contrasts the color of one’s skin to modern politics, identity and stereotypes involving people of color. One might argue that he’s effectively redefined Blackness at the conceptual level. Ask Gumby, and he’ll describe a sense of emancipation in his work—of liberation. He states that human beings have radicalized color as a species, citing blue as a symbol of certain emotions, of the Democratic party, of the sky and water and of the jeans so many of us wear day after day. From a young age, he sensed a simplification here—a pigeonholing of color to mean a certain thing, just as we put ourselves into these same boxes societally and create a divide. Gumby’s work skews this divide so that one day we might reconfigure it altogether. The artist’s aim, in his words, is to break bounds, and simultaneously to unify them. “Using color and abstraction to give image to these thoughts, or to some tension, is the best way for me to unlearn what I have learned and see the world in a different way,” he conveys. If he can achieve what he’s set out to accomplish, Gumby is confident he might also shift the viewer’s consciousness. The abstractionist began experimenting with tempered glass at the end of 2018, and so began his love of iridescent pigments. The magnified effect resonated with him and, experientially, viewers will notice a stark progression in the artist’s work over the past three years. Gumby keeps glass in his studio, which he typically paints with a few layers of acrylic to develop the right colors. This process generally takes a couple of days, and if he doesn’t like the effect, Gumby explains he might scrape the material off and start again. He works with a vision of what the painting might look like, and he’ll go on and break glass into smaller and smaller pieces before sliding it atop the painted canvas. “It’s almost like putting a puzzle together from one corner,” he elaborates.

There are ritualistic undertones, and there’s comfort in the fact that Gumby’s process is uniquely his. The artist appreciates that his paintings take time to create because this allows him to meditate on what he’s doing and why. Though the painter explains he doesn’t feel compelled to describe his process, he recognizes that his methods are a labor of love, and that the effort involved provides reassurance—a true sense of originality. “I know my work is hard to duplicate,” he says. “I feel like some people have come to my studio and been like, ‘It takes you forever to make these paintings’—like, ‘I could never.’” To this, Gumby most often replies, “I also want the viewer to look at my paintings and ask themselves “how was it made?” I think there’s value in the unknown. Making paintings that are hard to duplicate gives those objects more value and gives me, as an artist, more space to develop.” He wants the viewer, and really anyone in his circle, to see the extent to which he struggles to craft each piece. There’s reward in the challenge, certainly, but Gumby wants the public to understand that he literally cuts himself to bring his glass paintings to life. Yet, the secrecy, or elusiveness, keeps things from becoming oversimplified.

To this end, there’s a sense of refinement that’s omnipresent in his work—and while Gumby could leave his abstract pieces untitled, naming his paints plays a vital role in his artistry. A fan of rap and Hip Hop from a young age, the painter has consistently paid close attention to language; there’s a sense of energy, in his view—a story and a history—that comes through in text format. “I think that words are a nice gesture to accompany an abstract painting,” says Gumby, “especially if you are trying to conjure some emotion or essence.” He goes on to communicate that the titles of his works are simply another way of allowing observers to experience his paintings. There are times when something someone says in conversation will resonate with him and he’ll incorporate their statement or perspective into his work. “I feel if you’re an artist, titling your painting Untitled is a missed opportunity to activate the viewer or yourself in the painting.”

A recent piece, Heavy is the crown (2018), is dedicated to the late Jack Whitten; a thick coat of black acrylic paint adorns the canvas alongside shards of stained glass on panel, and the work is quite literally heavy. The glass is 3/4 inches thick, Gumby describes; it covers half the canvas, diagonally, and represents a passing of the torch of sorts, paying homage to Whitten’s own black monolith paintings, for Whitten too dedicated works to people he admired: James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Barbara Jordan, Jacob Lawrence, LeRoi Jones aka Amiri Baraka, Terry Adkins, Maya Angelou, Ornette Coleman and Muhammad Ali, among others.

Then there’s the aptly-named My President’s orange, but my painting is still blue (2018)—oil on canvas composed of deep blues (without the slightest hint of orange, it’s worth noting). This piece is a tongue-in-cheek spinoff of another painting from 2015 entitled My president’s black, but my painting’s blue. The latter—which featured pigment sticks on canvas, with gorgeous line work and nuanced shades of blue—was living commentary for Gumby; the artist explains he was expressing his discontent for the United States, and for federal and local governments, his canvas rife with implications of police brutality and—in his words—the “countless Black bodies being murdered on social media… publicly.”

Linear and geometric, both pieces feature blue as a representation of discontentment, sadness and melancholy. Tactically speaking, they’re visceral, perhaps to the point of exhibiting aggression. “My President’s orange, but my painting is still blue is kind of a continuation of that discontentment with America,” says Gumby. “Because now, here we are, with a new president…and the same problems.”

But despite this focus on the color blue, there are many hues at play in the bulk of his work—even if only metaphorically. In You think dark is just one color, but it ain’t (2020), the artist leverages acrylic and tempered glass on wood to honor Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel Song of Solomon; there’s a moment, Gumby recalls, in Morrison’s book, where two children are running for their lives after their father is falsely accused of murder and killed right in front of them. These kids are darting through the woods in search of their next safe house, and the artist felt compelled to explore the beauty—the complexity—of this looming darkness, and of Blackness in general. “This is another example to show that the color black, as we know it, is…one of the most diverse, unique and beautiful colors there is,” he says. What the canvas really represents is an amalgamation of experience—of time and light—and this, above all else, is what Gumby hopes to capture.

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, galleries have begun to reopen, welcoming masked and socially-distanced observers, and Gumby’s work will once again be featured for in-person viewing. In October 2020, Gumby has a solo exhibition scheduled at the Parrasch Heijnen Gallery in Los Angeles. He plans to show a series of new glass paintings, all of them squares, and a number of watercolors he completed in Southern California. The artist is also participating in a group show featuring artists of color working in abstraction at False Flag in New York, with a part two at Denny Dimin later this fall.

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by Jessica Simmons

Depicting an act of targeted violence, the first sightline of Mildred Howard’s retrospective exhibition at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery registers like a sharp blow to the viscera. Situated in the middle of the room, 15 pairs of subtly patinated copper hands stretch skywards from a low white plinth. Behind their craning fingers, a blank wall adorned with a radiating grid reads as a minimalist bullseye. This grid is in fact composed of a barrage of expelled bullet casings, which have punctured the surface of the wall with excruciating, mathematical precision. While physically unscathed by the bullets’ trajectories, the hands nonetheless appear to reach up in abject terror—an urgent, coordinated gesture of surrender. This installation comprises the first small gallery of

Howard’s exhibition of poignantly relevant work, made over the course of four decades. As a point of introduction, it offers an uncanny perspective shift indicative of Howard’s ability to probe subjective truths: upon facing the installation head-on, the viewer is positioned as the assailant, suggesting our complicity in the unfolding cruelty and confusing our primal urge to empathize with these absent bodies. This distressing vantage point begs the question: whose truth are we witnessing?

Chillingly titled Ten Little Children Standing in a Line (One Got Shot, and Then There Were Nine) (1991), the hands and grid are paired with an enlarged newspaper photograph to form a discrete installation. Functioning as the installation’s coda, the photograph, positioned perpendicular to the bulletridden wall, recounts a merciless act of violence: two young, Black South African children flee an unseen horror while gingerly carrying the body of their befallen peer, 13-year-old Hector Pieterson. Pieterson was one of the hundreds of schoolchildren ruthlessly murdered by police during the Soweto Uprising of June 1976, which erupted in response to the mandatory adoption of Afrikaans language instruction in schools, an apartheid-era policy. While Howard created this installation the same year of apartheid’s legislative revocation, the work’s pertinence extends far beyond the specific event that it recounts. By subtly implicating the viewer in a gruesome yet unseen act of violence, Howard uniquely captures the pain and twisted barbarity that sits at the heart of the extrajudicial killing of innocent people. Upon stepping into the gallery, with the atrocious circumstances surrounding Jacob Blake’s shooting by police fresh in my mind, the work’s somber tone lodged in my throat like a heavy stone.

Like many of the works in this exhibition (which span from 1978 to 2020), Ten Little Children deftly mines concrete sociopolitical realities—particularly histories of racial injustice—while simultaneously embracing oblique forms of abstract representation. As a whole, Howard’s expansive oeuvre of work revels in the intersection of social critique and poetic liminality. By embracing abstraction and non-specificity, she inhabits the shifting sands that exist between language, meaning, and collective memory, thereby illuminating hidden kernels of historical truth.

The second, larger gallery presents a diverse array of work that includes gesturally abstract photographic collages, paintings, a tapestry, and conceptual, found-object sculptural assemblages. Collectively, these objects reflect the ways in which Howard wields her materials as tools for not only interrogating truth but for examining whose perspective defines it. On the far wall, six hand-blown glass sculptures—each representative of a punctuational symbol—stand out for their subtle references to language as the vehicle of truth (Parenthetically Speaking…It’s Only a Figure of Speech, 2010). By concretizing these abstract and (quite literally) marginal forms, Howard points to punctuation as the hidden motor that empowers language—and thus, subjective truths—to bloom, pivot, and breathe.

Deepening this inquiry, the work Volume I & II: The History of the United States with a few Parts Missing (2007) comprises two hefty American history books splayed open on a shared pedestal. A symmetrical pattern of deep, gaping holes, stretching from page to spine, maims each book as if they were assaulted by wandering bullets from Ten Little Children. Through this destructive, subtractive gesture, Howard indicates omitted histories––those myriad perspectives glaringly absent from dominant historical narratives that tend to otherwise flatter their victors. Reminiscent of a Rorschach inkblot with their distorted symmetry, these disfigured pages with missing language expand on a previous demand: whose truth is missing?

In Howard’s work, holes become ripe with meaning: abstract voids standing in for instances of violence, absent bodies, bullet markings, bygone memories. Embedded within the historical tome, these holes also become notational—textual markings suggestive of the malleable subjectivity of historical truth.

Mildred Howard: A Survey, 1978–2020 runs from August 15–September 26 at Parrasch Heijnen (1326 S. Boyle Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90023).

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by Shana Nys Dambrot

“Art is on the frontlines of social change, challenging people’s core beliefs,” says artist Forrest Kirk, “and this is where I live in my work.” An exhibition of nine new paintings exploring the raised fist motif in his richly textured, chromatically charged expressionist style had just opened at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery when we spoke—a show that had already been scheduled for November but was moved up in response to the BLM protests and the conversations they have sparked.

“I immediately was like, no, let’s go ahead and do this now,” says Kirk. “Everyone needs that symbol now.” In fact he’s been returning to that image for more than a decade, as part of a much larger conversation on justice, joy and lived experience manifested across portraiture and architectural compositions, including affecting depictions of police violence. “Even a basic portrait still has to be about something,” he says. “Hope, pain, success, failure, the gamut of life.” And in fact the coexistence of beauty and viscerality in his paintings is a signature part of their power. While existing with a presence of harmony, lively gesture, and exuberant color from “across the room,” on approach the details emerge but by then it’s too late, you have seen. It’s important to Kirk that his work both gives the viewer genuine pleasure, and “keeps you honest,” and that is exactly how the suite of nine fists presents.

Each fist speaks on its own as a painting, “it says what it wants to say,” as Kirk respects his impulses at the easel and his choreography of rich amber, steely slate, deep indigo, burnt sienna, lime, chartreuse, fuschia and gold. Each fist holds space for other imagery to exist within the contours, hidden figures revealed as a reward for attentiveness, each telling its unique story. But at the same time, the fist has a specific lineage. Raised by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, it began as a gesture for human rights and became a symbol of Black Power, and now has new currency as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. “Symbols reflect a point of view in time,” says Kirk. “And now that is all coming to a head.”

Kirk is aware that there is the inherent risk of pushback to speaking your mind, and he’s prepared for that; and as far as making “protest work,” Kirk is clear that it doesn’t always have to be didactic, that “you can stay within your practice but elevate the consciousness.” While Kirk’s commitment as a Black artist to community representation in his depictions of joy and violence, power and politics have been foundational to his work throughout, his dedication to his craft is equally apparent in these fiery, gemlike fist paintings.

“Everything is a political choice,” Kirk says. “Everything has meaning.” The narratives and paradigms of beauty and virtue throughout Western art history have been white (and almost entirely male) for 400 years of the canon. For Kirk, it is very important to “remember there might have been a Black genius whose dreams were stolen, and this is a burden I carry with me. Someone from 300 years ago had something to say! Maybe it comes out, through me.”

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by Nancy Hass

Through the winter months, Charles Ross’s existence befits an established New York multimedia artist of a certain vintage: whitewashed SoHo loft with a comfortable studio in the back; a pair of sweet, shaggy dogs that he and his wife, the painter Jill O’Bryan, walk up Wooster Street in the chill, past the wrought iron storefronts that were little more than scrap metal when he first came to the city in the mid-1960s after studying math and sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley, but now are outposts of Chanel and Dior. Evenings, they may drop into a Chelsea gallery opening or two, then linger over dinner at Omen, the Japanese restaurant that’s been on Thompson Street since the ’80s, nodding to the fellow stalwarts of a downtown scene that long ago ate its young: the 92-year-old portraitist Alex Katz sharing a sake with the Abstract Expressionist David Salle, 67; the musician Laurie Anderson, 73, at the bar, her spiky hair stippled with gray.

But come dawn on an April day, when the weather has started to break, such trappings abruptly fall away. A long flight and a bumpy three-hour ride later in the bruised, redclay encrusted 2004 Dodge Dakota that they usually keep in long-term parking at the Albuquerque airport, Ross and O’Bryan are halfway up a craggy mesa, at the base of “Star Axis,” the 11-story naked-eye observatory made of sandstone, bronze, earth, granite and stainless steel that Ross, one of the last men standing of the generation of so-called earthworks artists, has labored on continuously since he conceived of it in 1971. It will be finished, at last, he hopes, in late 2022. He will be 84 years old. “When I’m in New York,” he says. “I’m just waiting.”

The couple, who have been together for almost 25 years, will stay in New Mexico usually through November, returning to SoHo only when it gets too cold to pour the vast amount of concrete needed to complete a 130-foot-tall structure that is a fifth of a mile across, living in what might generously be called a house, barely visible on the adjoining mesa, a 15-minute, spine-jarring ride away. In fact, it is little more than two castoff campers that Ross spackled together at the beginning of this wild ride, as the Vietnam War waned and Watergate exploded, and he decided, after envisioning it on a summer night in 1971, that no matter how long it took him or the cost, he would build a gargantuan staircase aligned perfectly with the celestial pole, marked by Polaris, the North Star. The running water comes via cisterns from the roof of the 600-square-foot living space; the tiny bathroom with its ship’s toilet came with one of the campers, and the two refrigerators are propane-powered, “made by the Amish who aren’t supposed to use electricity,” says O’Bryan, 64. They try to generate as little garbage as possible, bundling scraps left from their plates at the end of each simple meal into meager bits of paper towel, because they haul the trash down the mesa weekly to Las Vegas, the small New Mexico city nearly an hour away. Instead of a sofa — they have little use for one — there is a rough-hewn plank desk, covered in papers, drawings and, of course, bills, illuminated by the only lantern in the place.

O’Bryan, whose dense, Minimalist work, which has been shown at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and New York’s Margarete Roeder Gallery, is made by leaning over a leaf of rice paper to record with strokes of graphite pencil each breath she takes, will often spend 12 hours a day in the studio Ross built for her out back. It is an improvement over where his first wife, also an artist, painted early in their careers in New Mexico: She laid boards over their bed to make a level surface. When Ross is not at the site overseeing construction, he works with a handful of assistants in a studio adjoining O’Bryan’s to craft the gallery work that has partly sustained “Star Axis” over the years (he estimates it has cost more than $6 million so far), including his series of “Solar Burns,” slabs of wood placed under round lenses of various sizes — up to six feet in diameter — set on giant hand-built stands outside the house, amid scraggly clumps of yellow gum weed. The resulting charred impressions are dated meticulously. They have delicate, multidimensional feathered edges that fade to ghostly brown and ocher. As tactile as a wound, like “Star Axis,” they are meant, he says, “to make visceral the power of sunlight.”

“Star Axis” itself is meant to embody an astronomical phenomenon called precession. First noted around 130 B.C. by Hipparchus, the Greek astronomer who is also credited as the inventor of trigonometry, precession refers to the top-like wobble of the earth’s axis due to the sun’s gravitational pull on the slightly bulging Equator. The result of precession is that while Polaris, in the constellation Ursa Minor, is currently the closest bright star to the northern celestial pole, that will change over time, as other bright stars from surrounding constellations happen to slowly become the polestar. (The entire cycle takes about 26,000 years.) “How could I not want to illustrate that,” Ross says. “How could I not want to find a way to walk through time?”

The sun is setting, a prelude to the wrapped velvet blackness that on the mesas renders you unable to see even your own footfalls, which, considering the terrain, can be terrifying. But for Ross, wiry and spry, with eyesight sharp enough to distinguish the headlights of a Ford from those of a Subaru as it chunks down a twisted road on a distant mountain, this is the best time to feel the work rather than merely see it. During the blindingly lit day, the site is alive with giant earth-moving machines, and with a small crew that includes two foremen who have been on the project since the beginning, growing old alongside Ross, lifting the remaining capstones into place in a wellpracticed ballet. But when night falls — the kind no longer available in most of the artificially illuminated world — “Star Axis” becomes what he envisioned all those decades ago.

Soon, a visitor — there have been just a handful allowed in — can see nothing: no outline of the curved 30-foot-tall limestone entry walls made using Roman building techniques, or the outside of the Star Tunnel — a 147-step passageway that leads to the observatory — or the artist himself, in jeans, a denim work shirt and dusty sneakers. When Ross first dreamed of such a staircase, he thought he could build it on the outside of the mesa, a task he expected would take a year or two at most. But soon after he started construction, he had another dream: that to see the stars you would need to actually enter the earth. That meant the stairs would have to be excavated into the mountain itself.

“Relax and lift your head,” he says from somewhere in the void, as you grab the steel handrails — perfectly honed and, like everything else at “Star Axis,” strategically positioned for maximum comfort, at a pitch figured to a minute certitude, in keeping with both the celestial concordance and the human body. The height of the risers, too, has been carefully considered (8.25 inches; any more and they would be too strenuous to mount, any less and they would create the terrifying optical illusion of a nine-story sheer cliff when you turned around to descend). “Just keep your eye on Polaris,” he says.

The elaborately engineered acoustics make it hard to tell how close he is. “I promise you’ll be all right.”

At the first tread, the stars come suddenly into view, framed by an oculus that seems the size of a dime held at arm’s length. You can make out Polaris, at the rim, flashing brighter than the others as it traces its daily small circle with the earth’s rotation. As you ascend, the aperture grows, the haze of cosmic matter coming into focus as though you are turning the knob of a microscope. Earlier, Ross explained how his illustration of precession works: At the bottom of the stairs, you see through the porthole the sky more or less as it is today (actually, as it will be in around 2100, when, as it happens, Polaris and the pole itself will be perfectly aligned). But with each step (he commissioned professors from the University of Washington’s Department of Astronomy to date them in exact increments, one by one), the field of vision widens, tracking the change in Polaris’s orbit. And so, as you climb, you move through the earth’s 26,000 year precession. At the top, you glimpse the most distant past and future orbits of the polestar — the sky as it was at the beginning of the cycle, in 11000 B.C., and as it will be in A.D. 15000. In the darkness, you hear your heartbeat and the in-and-out whoosh of breath; your steps become automatic, effortless, as though you are falling instead of climbing, an odd sensation that he later will explain is the result of thousands of minute calculations of how the stairs hew to the celestial axis. And then — Four minutes later? Ten? Half an hour? — you reach the top. You are alone on the small platform at the 147th step, nose to the glass, 40 inches across — exactly as wide as the human field of vision, as Ross told you earlier — and angled back to be at 90 degrees to the earth’s axis. Although you have been climbing straight up, Polaris appears to have moved to the dead center of a web of stars so thick it seems almost like a solid mass: tiny glimmering fish in a net, gems poured out onto a bolt of velvet. To the side now is Gamma Cephei, in the constellation Cepheus, cued up to become the next North Star about 2,000 years from now. “You’re here,” says Ross, from somewhere in the blackness, his voice trailing off. “Stay as long as you need to.”

And then there were three: Michael Heizer, James Turrell and Ross, the last of the American artists who in the 1970s came to define a muscular, almost entirely male, heterosexual and white American brand of Minimalism that dispensed with the traditional trappings — paint, clay, canvas — to sculpt into abstractions the Western elevations themselves. Each began a massive major work in the desert that he has yet to complete more than 40 years later. Now, it appears that Ross will be the first to finish.

Heizer, 75, with whom Ross shared neighboring studio spaces in the same San Francisco building at the beginning of their careers (they remain friends), began what is now known as “City” in 1970: a low-slung, undulating collection of mammoth abstract geometric shapes molded from rock, sand and concrete that cover more than a square mile in a lunar landscape four desolate hours from the Alamo in the Nevada desert.

Turrell, 77, a daredevil pilot who flew Buddhist monks out of Tibet during the Vietnam War and spent a year in prison for coaching young men on how to avoid the draft, bought Roden Crater, an extinct cinder cone volcano measuring two miles across in the Painted Desert of northern Arizona, in 1977 and has spent the past four decades turning it into an observatory, with 22 viewing areas and a multitude of apertures on the night sky. Throughout the 1990s, Turrell, whose project had by then turned him into an artworld deity, continuously pushed back his self-imposed deadlines for completion; last year, Kanye West reportedly donated $10 million to the project and Arizona State University entered a partnership to help take care of the site once it’s finished. Such gargantuan works require a strange alchemy of obsession and irrational optimism; their sheer size and scope obliterate the notion of money — and time — as a precious commodity. Over the years, some critics have dismissed land art as being too much about too little, just an excuse for faux cowboys to create monuments to their own egos with heavy machinery, a critique that seems intuitive at a time when the critical eye of the art world has turned to long-ignored women artists and artists of color who are at last being given their due.

But there is another way to view such works and their eccentric creators: as prescient. In a culture swimming in expensive objects, where art has become thoroughly corporate, never before has an immersive experience seemed more important; there is singular joy in works that draw attention to the barren beauty of the land and the endless skies above it, pieces too large for even a billionaire to build a private museum around. “People have dismissed the earthworks as monuments, but in fact, they’re critiques of the monumental,” says Michael Govan, the 56-year-old director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who has championed the land artists for nearly 30 years, especially when he was the head of the New York-based Dia Art Foundation in the 1990s and early aughts. He points to “City” and its low, rolling geometries, as well as the hypnotic 1,500- foot swirl of black basalt and salt crystals that make up the most famous of all land artworks, Robert Smithson’s 1970 “Spiral Jetty,” a natural sculpture in a shallow lake bed in northern Utah. Much of Turrell’s “Roden Crater,” Govan says, is underground, purposefully recasting a former site of violent eruptions into a subtle temple of light. Not that such work tends to attract gentle personalities. The artists largely were products of a tumultuous era and landscape: first, the ragged and fierce avant-garde that developed in Northern California at the end of the 1960s, and then the dark, abrasive downtown New York art and music scene, which would soon give way to the canvas of the Western deserts. Safety and caution were never held in esteem. Smithson, a prolific essayist, died at 35 in 1973 when the small plane in which he was scouting locations for a new piece crashed near Amarillo, Texas. The reclusive Walter De Maria, who in his early 20s was a drummer with the precursor band to the Velvet Underground, created “The Lightning Field,” composed of 400 sharpened 20-foot stainless-steel posts in a roughly one-square-mile grid about three hours from “Star Axis” in western New Mexico; he lived alone in the same SoHo loft for more than 50 years and was felled by a stroke in 2013. Over the course of trying to complete “City,” Heizer developed severe respiratory problems and nerve damage that led to years of opiate addiction only recently shook. Mary Shanahan, his wife of 15 years, left him in 2014 — beaten down by his needs and those of “City” — and he stopped eating, plummeting to about 100 pounds. “Every bone in me is torqued and twisted,” he told The New Yorker’s Dana Goodyear in 2016.

Ross, a Pennsylvania contractor’s son, has always seemed the counter example, steady and calibrated with an almost merry, avuncular demeanor. Temperate and healthconscious, he has long availed himself of both Eastern and Western medicine, regarding both arcane herbal supplements and the high-tech surgical procedures perhaps in his future as ways to keep going. In contrast to Heizer, who in his early years debated art late into the night at the legendary bar Max’s Kansas City, Ross spent the late 1960s immersed in a decidedly unmacho milieu: designing sets and performing with the experimental Judson Dance Theater in Lower Manhattan and later with Anna Halprin, the San Francisco-based postmodern choreographer who mentored Meredith Monk and Trisha Brown. It was a scene dominated by powerful women, recalls the dancer and choreographer Yvonne Rainer, 85. When Ross wandered in, offering to adapt some of the vertiginous latticework sculptures he had been working on and then manipulate them onstage for the dancers, there was, she says, “nothing aggressive or macho about him. He listened.”

Despite its audacious ambition to map time, “Star Axis” is far smaller in scale than either Turrell’s or Heizer’s projects. But that, paradoxically, is part of its emotional power. Every granite step to the oculus seems imbued with Ross’s Zen-like determination; you can’t help but imagine the hundreds of sunsets he has experienced there in silence. “His project,” says Govan, “is not only for us to meditate on time and light. It’s also Charles’s mediation, and you feel that when you’re experiencing it. The calculations, the moving of stone, the mixing of concrete, the collaboration with those same workers all those years. There’s a humanness to it.”

Humanness, however, doesn’t pay the bills, which is yet another reason to marvel at Ross’s particular achievement. Through the decades, “City” and “Roden Crater” have been bolstered by massive financial and emotional support from institutions including the Dia and Guggenheim Foundations. Friends of “Roden Crater” and the nonprofit Skystone Foundation maintain a vibrant fund-raising effort — the pop star Grimes staged a surprise performance at the last benefit, where the billionaire founder of the online gaming company Zynga pledged $3 million. Such support has allowed Turrell to focus over the years on his vast studio practice, which has included profitable private commissions as well as a 50-year retrospective at LACMA that opened in 2013. Heizer, who by 2012 hadn’t had a gallery for decades, was broke and living alone on his ranch, also was resurrected: That year, Govan commissioned the permanent installation at LACMA of a Heizer piece called “Levitated Mass,” a 340-ton white boulder that was moved laboriously over 11 nights from California’s Jurupa Valley. The ensuing feature film made of the journey jolted interest in “City,” and in 2015, the gallerist Larry Gagosian gave the artist his first show in years, with paintings from the 1960s and ’70s and a giant hunk of iron ore that sold for more than $1 million. Not long after that show, the gallerist moved the artist to New York so he could make a series of new paintings — his first in decades — that sold out instantly.

Ross, on the other hand, mostly has gone it alone, which is partly why “Star Axis” has taken this long. The SoHo loft was originally 10,000 square feet, but in 2008, to raise funds for the next stages of the project, he sold off 6,500 square feet of it to a private family. There is no staff of enthusiastic supporters to make cold calls to raise money and throw parties. Though museums and galleries still seek him out for commissions and exhibitions, he typically lies low, and is represented not by an enormous gallery with multiple global outposts but the small New York dealer Franklin Parrasch.

His longtime patron — granted, an important one — has been Virginia Dwan, an heiress to the 3M fortune, who was among the most influential gallerists of the midcentury, with spaces in Los Angeles and New York. She was the first to show Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes and Robert Rauschenberg’s 1962 “Combines” (for the record, only one painting sold), and works by the light artist Dan Flavin, the conceptualist Joseph Kosuth and Niki de Saint Phalle, the French-American sculptor and filmmaker. After Dwan closed her doors in the early 1970s — the increasing commercialization of the art world turned her off — she began to put all her energy into land art, becoming one of the few noninstitutional backers. De Maria turned to her to finance a smaller precursor to “The Lightning Field,” and she underwrote “Spiral Jetty.” She purchased a square mile for the work that made Heizer’s reputation: “Double Negative” (1969), a pair of trenches, 30 feet wide by 50 feet deep and 1,500 long, dug on either side of a canyon near Overton, Nev.

But now, at 88, the only work Dwan is still funding is “Star Axis.” She was there at the beginning: She and Ross were introduced in 1967, by the conceptualist Sol LeWitt. And she will remain till the end, though even with her support, O’Bryan takes breaks from her practice to write grant applications. Dwan has been a part of most of the great art movements of the mid-20th century, but she and Ross share an elemental faith in the aesthetic and mathematical power of the cosmos as well as an aversion to the trite clichés of modern day “wellness” and spiritualism. In the mid-1990s, she commissioned him to design the Dwan Light Sanctuary, an unadorned round loft with 20-foot ceilings inside a stand-alone circular stone building on the campus of the United World College, a nonprofit institution in Montezuma, an hour from “Star Axis.” Open to the public, it is illuminated through skylights by 24 enormous prisms of Ross’s own design. Suspended at precise angles dictated by the artist’s complex calculations, they throw massive rainbows against the white plaster walls in slashing patterns and shades that change radically throughout the day and the season. “I had a unique connection to each of my artists, but there is something that is different with Charles,” Dwan tells me as we sit in the living room of her sand-hued 1930s house in Santa Fe. She spends much of her time here these days, and in 2013 bequeathed her collection, full of pieces by the artists whose careers she jump-started — the Abstract Expressionist painter Ad Reinhardt, the Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre and Yves Klein, who spurred the French Nouveau Réalisme movement — to the National Gallery of Art. Still willowy and impeccably chic — photos of a young Dwan in aviator glasses at “Spiral Jetty,” or in a black leather jacket with windblown hair next to De Maria, are as iconic to fans of contemporary art as classic shots of Gloria Steinem at the barricades are to second-wave feminists — she now uses a wheelchair. She can no longer hop into her Jeep, alone, and drive hours into the desert, rarely seeing another car, just to catch a sunset. But her passion for “Star Axis” and Ross remains undimmed. One wall of her living room is dominated by a massive work O’Bryan made by rubbing graphite on a giant stretch of rock formation from the piece. “I can’t get up to see the site now, which is hard,” Dwan says, “but that they are so near to finishing gives me a great deal of happiness. The idea that it will be seen, that’s enough.”

These days, Ross and O’Bryan have begun to consider, for the first time, what it will mean to be finished. Forty-five years of construction may seem like biblical torment, but you get into a rhythm where the outside world becomes comfortingly moot. That’s the thing about art that takes twice as long to finish as the pyramids: The process becomes the piece itself, the work tracing the arc of your life. Still, Ross and O’Bryan now must engage with practicalities like finding an institution to help them run the site. This much they have figured out: no crowds, like De Maria’s “Lightning Field,” where only six people per night can stay in the rustic guest cottage. But that site, whose cabin is booked years in advance, has had the institutional infrastructure of the Dia Art Foundation to take care of all that. And “The Lightning Field” is, well, a field, by definition pretty safe for visitors (in fact, lightning rarely strikes), whereas the steep stone staircase of Ross’s Star Tunnel is crowned with the Solar Pyramid, which has a set of 20 additional fourfoot-wide granite stairs open to the elements — no railing — leading to the top, 11 stories up. In Ross’s perfect world, visitors to the site will move through time twice — once in the sunlight and again in total darkness. “We’re going to have to have good insurance waivers,” says O’Bryan. In 2011, the director of the Museum of Outdoor Arts, Cynthia Madden-Leitner, collaborated with MOS Architects to create Element House, a striking and luxuriously minimal solar-powered modular guesthouse for the project within walking distance. Clad in aluminum panels, its billowing volumes are dictated by the Fibonacci sequence, the natural mathematical progression mapped by the 12th-century Italian thinker Leonardo of Pisa. But Ross and O’Bryan are undecided on what to charge per night and other small details. Do they need to keep both Trader Joe’s soy burgers and chicken breasts in the freezer? “This is so not our thing,” says O’Bryan. This past spring, as the novel coronavirus shut down the country, the couple found themselves marooned in SoHo. Thrown off his routine, Ross didn’t quite know what to do with himself; the drawings he was making for lightning rods that need to be incorporated into the sculpture as invisibly as possible seemed to be taking forever. But in New Mexico, the prep team kept working; neither they nor Ross want to delay. “When there is finally some semblance of normalcy,” he says, “I think this is the kind of place people will want to come to re-enter life.” With shelter-in-place restrictions lifting, the couple and the dogs finally made their annual flight to Albuquerque in early June. The roads were even more barren of cars than usual, the air sharp, and by the time “Star Axis” came into view on the mesa, the sky was awash in light.

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by Paul Laster

As art exhibitions have begun to reopen amidst the continuing coronavirus pandemic, we’ve discovered that a number of American galleries are highlighting abstraction, even though figuration is what’s generally trending today. Whether it’s a stylistic shift or merely a coincidence, we’ll have to wait and see in order to further evaluate, but what we can uncover now is that regardless of gender or age, abstraction still holds a fascination with artists and continues to convey a pictorial language that takes viewers beyond their day to day existence. Rounding up six recently opened shows in Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, New York, and Miami, we offer a contemplative tour of some of the ways artists are using abstraction today.

Edith Baumann: New Painting

Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, Los Angeles May 22–July 2, 2020

Creating sublime abstractions since the 1970s, Edith Baumann makes meditative paintings, where things come together and interact in simple, precise, and poetic ways. Developed over periods of time, her abstract canvases employ monochromatic and geometric forms to subtly construct paintings with a pulse. Completely nonobjective, they use patterns to create energetic fields of floating forms. In her second show with the gallery, Baumann presents six new paintings with overlapping horizontal shapes juxtaposed with an early, monochromatic canvas consisting of three different, solid blue, vertical bands. The new abstract paintings, which are titled Pattern Recognition and accompanied by a number to identify each individual piece, mix hardedged geometric shapes overlaid with softer, light brushwork that mimics the underlying forms while beautifully veiling their existence.

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With Frieze LA around the corner, we asked Elizabeth Dee of the Independent art fair, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn of Salon 94, and 3 art advisors (Anne Bruder, Heather Flow, and Candace Worth) what their favorite LA galleries are.

Elizabeth Dee, Founder of Independent Art Fair

Parrasch Heijnen Gallery: The LA gallery has an intergenerational program focused on California’s history with major historical artists, like deeply influential Tony deLap who passed away last year.

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by Sarah Cascone

As the art world turns its eyes to the West Coast for the second edition of Frieze Los Angeles—held at Paramount Pictures Studios, February 13–16—make sure to save some time after the fair for these shows across the city. From household names like Anish Kapoor to red-hot up-and-comers like Nicolas Party, here are the exhibitions worth adding to your LA itinerary this week.

“Dennis Hopper: Morocco Paintings” at Parrasch Heijnen
Through March 21

One of Dennis Hopper’s “Morocco Paintings.” Photo courtesy of Parrasch Heijnen. Actor and film director Dennis Hopper was also an artist and photographer; he began painting way back in the mid-1950s. The late star’s first show at Parrasch Heijnen features his series of “Morocco Paintings” (1991–94), made on location when Hopper was filming in the country, merging tropes from local architecture with influences from Abstract Expressionism.

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by Andrew Berardini

Alexis Smith’s oeuvre slips easily into this American life. Using language and literature, toys and glamour, ads and junk shop finds, Smith descends from the droll end of West Coast Conceptualism. She turns culture over and pokes at its squirming parts with an air of critical romance and a smile. If Sol Lewitt wrote sentences on Conceptual art and John Baldessari sang them, Smith’s wry retorts follow. (“I’m like a writer who makes art,” she told an interviewer for MOCATV in 2010.) Sometimes her asides feel like they’ve slipped out of a Tom Waits song or a Jack Kerouac novel more than from the arch intellectualism of contemporary art. Even her name is stolen, borrowed from a Canadian actress—another example of the artist bending a bit of mass media to her own purposes.

Here at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, more than forty years of the artist’s assemblage acumen stretched through eleven pieces that softly emphasized her visual puns more than her more literary forays (where long paragraphs were tucked into the picture plane). The earliest work had been exhibited in her first solo show, at Riko Mizuno’s gallery in Los Angeles: In The Einstein Piece, 1973, she attempts, over twenty-five sheets of graph paper, legal paper, diagrams, and frottage, to wend her way through the physicist’s conceptions of the universe. The thick explanation, even if relatively plainspoken by the standards of high-level scientists, sits alongside the various pictures that alternately succeed and cheekily fail to illustrate the ideas, as if this were the homework assignment of a student more prone to doodling Einstein’s name in gel pen than to working out his mathematical proofs. Across the room (and her career), in Easy Rider, 2016, Smith gave a reverent, rugged frame to a studio still of Marlon Brando in all his Black Rebels Motorcycle Club glory in The Wild One (1953). After checking the work’s title, I had to chuckle at the slick red lollipop stuck on his right eye and the bright-red button stamped with EASY (the kind you might find in some of the more humor-strained cubicles out there) on the front headlight of his bike. “The button works,” the gallerist told me. I regret not pressing it. One of the more literary pieces on view, which still pivoted on a visual pun, hung in a frame shaped like a house of the Monopoly game-piece variety. A print of Sébastien Le Clerc’s labyrinthine design of the garden paths at the Palace of Versailles from 1677 was coupled with a handwritten quote from Walt Whitman: THE PATHS TO THE HOUSE I SEEK TO MAKE, / BUT LEAVE TO THOSE TO COME THE HOUSE ITSELF. The lines are from “Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood” (1872), which expresses Whitman’s own dream for democracy in America, a swift and subtle counterpoint to the tangled tracks of France’s absolute monarchy. The first two footpaths lead to a third, the straight route around the Monopoly board, through the debt and domination of American capitalism.

The most arresting piece in the show greeted you as you walked in. Made from carefully handpainted letters and mounted objects, this rebus involved an upside-down heartshaped box replete with ribbons, as well as a broken children’s drum set whose kick drum’s paper skin was ripped and faded. Reading the title, Medium Message, 2013, you understood the simple riddle: The heart is the beat. But these are not just symbols. The heart, meant to hold sweets, couldn’t hold anything in its inverted position. The drum kit didn’t have any potential for percussion in its tattered state. Marshall McLuhan’s “The medium is the message” rarely gets trotted out these days, except in media studies classes, but it still resonated here on a few different levels. And this rebus, with its impractical common objects, felt like both a joke and a prayer, a phrase worth repeating. Underneath all of this humor and artful reference lay a heart, and despite its battered drum I could certainly hear its beat.

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by Angie Rizzo

In the 1990s, Virginia Dwan conceived of the Dwan Light Sanctuary, a secular space for contemplation that would be free and open to the public. Well-known for her career as an art dealer, her longstanding financial support of major earthworks such as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, and her promotion of conceptual art in the 1960s and ’70s, Dwan is also a longtime resident of northern New Mexico. She collaborated with artist Charles Ross, known for his work with prisms and light, and architect Laban Wingert to create the Dwan Light Sanctuary in Montezuma, New Mexico on the grounds of the Montezuma Castle and the United World College.

The sanctuary is just over an hour’s drive east of Santa Fe and is best seen on bright, sunny days for optimum light refractions. Upon approaching Montezuma Castle, one might think they have arrived at the Hogwarts School of Wizardry with the backdrop of mountains, turrets reaching toward the sky, and smiling students playing soccer on the front lawn. The light sanctuary is situated in a grove of ponderosa pines just adjacent to the castle and offers a complimentary if not contrasting experience. The stand-alone building is accessed via a magnetic key card supplied by a helpful security guard and once entered is a world onto itself. All sound ceases except the echo of footsteps. The circular interior is lit by soft, diffused light and stray prismatic rainbows move slowly across the curved, white surfaces of the walls. White benches hug the walls creating seating in the round. An inlaid metal pattern on the floor alludes to an astrological chart complete with planet-like circles in shades of gray. The circular central space opens up on three sides, two of which house prisms which are designed to refract light at certain times of the year, depending on the Earth’s orientation.

While the colorful light refractions are what I had hoped to see, I was far more struck by the structure itself and the marriage of art, architecture, and contemplation in a secular setting. The Dwan Light Sanctuary feels like a church, but one that might have existed in a postapocalyptic sci-fi movie like Blade Runner, where nature is a relic of the past. Like a Catholic cathedral, there is an apse, but where an altar would be is a large square plate-glass window through which the gentle swaying of ponderosa branches can be seen. The window functions more like a religious painting, elevating its contents to holy levels. To what or whom do Dwan and Ross suggest holiness? The tree itself? The idea of “nature” in our time of climate catastrophe? The intention at its opening in 1996 most likely differed from a contemporary reading of the space, in which the changing climate is an ever-present influence. The window in the apse acts as an icon with the help of the architectural language of cathedrals. And where there is an icon, there is devotion.

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As we enter into the new decade, the revitalized spirit of painting is an insurgent force gaining traction online and in critical circles. At once, standard bearers of the art world rise from institutional halls and New York studios even as populist fervor follows a social media firestorm of painters who are gaining popular attention online. Together, much as in society writ large, insurgent forces with grassroots support are challenging the traditional power centers that have long served as gatekeepers. The new decade will be shaped by artists of all these ilks, testing the limits of cooperation and support between art worlds with opposing origins.

New Movements

Painters hailing from outside traditional power centers are better positioned today than in any recent decade. Social media’s newly decentralized art audience, especially on Instagram, has no care for geographic location. With a spirit of experimentalism and a bit of a fuck it attitude, some artists have built their own ecosystems online with digital tools that let them access and excite likeminded audiences before entering the gallery system. Rising out of the stiff competition of endless artists who engage online everyday, a very small group of these artists are finding social media to be a viable springboard in the art world. Those artists who push painterly ventures without succumbing to the profitable allure of totally standardizing their practices for online branding purposes stand to be relevant forces in the coming decade. Meanwhile at elite institutions, traditional gatekeepers remain powerful with their high-end connections, large pocketbooks, museum board seats, and media access. However, political pressures are pushing a more diverse range of people with new ideas into the most respected schools. These artists push new values into established art circles. With messages that are much more romantic and soulful than their peers’ calculated conceptualism, these painters hold the potential to introduce more honest and broadly relevant conversations within the established art systems. The artists who are achieving these goals are laudable. They, too, will face the challenge of resisting profitable paths towards poacher galleries who will seek to monetize their work by watering it down. Between both worlds, a consensus towards a new and radical abstraction is coming into focus. Certainly not exclusive to recent graduates, the movement contains many painters who have been laying in wait for a decade perhaps most notably in Germany. Within this 21st Century movement, geographic flattening and a decentralized audience allows for artists to participate practically worldwide. Just on the limited list below, abstractionists sharing formal qualities are living in Miami, Düsseldorf, Richmond, Los Angeles, Leipzig, Berlin, Denver, London, Frankfurt, and New York.

Looking Back on The 2010s

Whether or not these two painterly movements are able to survive simultaneously in the next decade, the most salient lesson to be learned from the last decade is the importance of supportive patronage. In the next decade, artists of both elite and populist pedigrees will need to find less predatory patrons than their 2010s predecessors did. Most famously, speculative collectors preyed on promising, young artists loaded with student debt after the recession. These collectors turned paintings into stocks and aesthetics into trading cards as they fueled unsustainable prices, standardized artworks, and dead end careers. The makings of what could have been an exciting abstract painting movement were sacrificed by a class of unhinged collectors and the critics who were understandably thirsty for those collectors’ blood.

Not to be outdone, a market-friendly figurative painting movement arrived on the scene defined by its post-digital candy crush aesthetics. These painters employ formal gimmicks reminiscent of their zombie abstract predecessors to create physical objects that look digital without actually being digital. Common tropes are airbrushed surfaces so flat that they might as well be printed, extreme drop shadows, painted pixels, distorted figures, and knock-off Laura Owens impasto. When you take the faux digital veneer off, these paintings are just physical commodities loaded with the same commercial information you find in tacky pop art galleries and department stores: dollar signs, big red hearts, Adidas or Nike logos, cats and dogs, fast food branding, inspirational quote tattoos, airbrushed AirPods, big tits, and hipster clothes. The works capture a fashionably faux digital experience shared by a small class of uncommonly well off young people. By sprinkling in just enough cynically commercialized woke signifiers and narrow art historical references, they provide cover for any collector salivating to put a french fry painting or goopy dog portrait in their dining room.

Institutional Support and New Patronage

Across the pond, some European institutions have taken notice of the influence of abstraction and emerging online art movements while maintaining an institutional scope and high curatorial vetting standards. To that end, Jetzt! Junge Malerei in Deutschland (Now! Painting in Germany Today), is a survey of Germany’s contemporary painters presented in institutions including Kunstmuseum Bonn, Museum Wiesbaden, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, and Deichtorhallen Hamburg. Using a website-as-catalogue, the institutional survey has an online nexus. Curated by Prof. Dr. Stephan Berg, Dr. Frédéric Bußmann, Dr. Jörg Daur, Dr. Alexander Klar, Anja Richter, Lea Schäfer, and Dr. Christoph Schreier, the exhibitions include artists with large social media presences and those without. The show is an ambitions and fair, albeit not entirely exhaustive, view of German paintings being broadcast on and off the internet. To quote the exhibition concept text, “the goal is to present a valid cross section of the painting produced in Germany by young artists, while giving consideration to all the forms in which it appears.” Through curatorial efforts like this one, a synthesis can exist between the more populist and elite strands of painterly movements today. Institutions that are willing to even the playing field and give consideration to diverse career paths are vital to creating an ecosystem that does not shun grassroots support in the new decade. At the same time, a model for a more supportive and knowledgable patron is coming into focus with successful curators and artists taking major steps to support emerging artists. Some of these bellwethers are noticeable in the biographies of multiple artists throughout the forthcoming list. Curator Bill Arning, Swizz Beatz, and residencies like The Macedonia Institute or Long Road Projects come to mind. Players like this arrive in the new decade with enough influence, resources, and passion to be the tastemakers of a new decade. No one is more effective in achieving this coalescence of influence and taste than artist Kehinde Wiley, who opened his revolutionary Dakar artist residency at Black Rock Senegal last year. Black Rock redefines the nature of patronage at the intersection of place and creative support by “promoting conversations and collaborations that are multigenerational, cross-cultural, international, and cross-disciplinary. Black Rock takes its physical location as a point of departure to incite change in the global discourse around Africa in the context of creative evolution.” The residency, well outside the art world’s power centers, is a form of patronage positioned to spark a creative renaissance of a type no speculative collector would ever dream to implement.

Artists for A New Decade

Below, find a list of artists who will shape this decade.

Alteronce Gumby

In Alteronce Gumby’s Black Star, the hint of a reference to the recognizable world comes into focus, but the artist’s real prowess is translating the everyday into a macro experience of cosmic abstraction. Indeed, Gumby’s gestures are emancipatory actions that shape paint in uniquely experimental ways. Full of painterly wit, Gumby renders a conversation about the African American experience in compositions of thick impasto shaped like puzzle pieces that construct his own world of material essence and playful abstraction. The puzzle-shaped works recall Jack Whitten’s historical precedent perhaps filtered through Matisse’s cutouts all converging into a celestial symphony of light and pigment. Alteronce Gumby received his MFA from Yale School of Art in 2016 and BFA from Hunter College in 2013. Solo exhibitions include Fondation des Etats Unis, Paris; Long Gallery, New York; 6B.ASE, Bronx, NY; and Mildred I Washington Gallery, Poughkeepsie, NY. Group exhibitions include Color People curated by Rashid Johnson at Rental Gallery, East Hampton, NY and other galleries such as Hammond Harkins Galleries, Columbus; 6B.ASE, Bronx, NY; Camden Arts Center, London; and Infinity Room Gallery, Los Angeles.

Read more here.

by Alina Cohen

The divide between abstraction and figuration is a false, but helpful, dichotomy. Painters who are primarily concerned with the interactions between color, line, and form also make marks and shapes that may suggest body parts, landscapes, and objects traditionally relegated to still lifes. Even monochrome paintings can conjure familiar settings: A gray canvas might evoke a rock face, while a blue one may suggest the sea. This principle can go the other way, as well. “I would consider myself a figurative painter fundamentally,” artist Louise Giovanelli told me, “but I certainly have a loose idea of figuration—anything that suggests a form, even if this suggestion is faint.”

A new generation of painters, all 40 years old or younger, are rethinking what we might call, for lack of a better term, abstraction. For them, labels aren’t important. They’re more interested in the infinite ways paint can be applied to develop suggestive, beguiling, and transcendent compositions. They explore what it means to make a painting in the digital age and use contemporary research to generate new patterns and designs. Despite the diversity of these artists’ practices, a near-mystical devotion to the act of making and a desire to communicate via symbols and hues unites them all.

For Alteronce Gumby, abstraction feels liberating. During London’s Frieze Week in 2019, he debuted a twinkling series of paintings at Sunday Art Fair—a departure from the monochromes he’s made in recent years. The new works feature colorful shards of glass—in teal, cornflower blue, and peach—embedded in black backgrounds. As viewers walked from one side of the installation to the other, the compositions changed colors before their eyes.

Gumby was coy about discussing his process: “I think every good artist has their tricks, and just like magic tricks, they should remain secret,” he said. The new works revel in their own fantastical deceptions of color and form, while simultaneously suggesting the cosmos and something broken here on Earth. Gumby said that the best abstract painters “are using some form of logic or making reference to nature,” while leaving ample “room for ambiguity and for the viewer to use their own imaginations and experiences to finish the work.” He recalled childhood reveries of a stick transforming into a spaceship, baseball bat, or rifle. Abstraction allows for similarly imaginative leaps. “There’s no fixed narrative,” Gumby said. “I can change the story or who I am at any moment, and that’s okay.”

Read more here.

by Jonathan Griffin

In Must See

The museum landscape in Los Angeles is set to look very different over the next couple of years. Already, LACMA has shuttered its collection galleries as construction continues on its new building, scheduled to open in 2024. Admission fees will be a thing of the past at LA MoCA by January, which should have a marked impact on attendance. And two major openings are in the works: the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is scheduled to open its doors next year while the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, founded by the film-maker George Lucas, is anticipated to open in 2021.

But this year, the real action was found in the commercial galleries. Aside from a few noble exceptions, including the retrospective of Lari Pittman’s work at the Hammer (“Declaration of Independence”, until 5 January 2020) and “With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985” at MoCA, the most exciting exhibitions were not in the museums.

Major, multi-city galleries including Matthew Marks and Hauser & Wirth have refused to patronize LA with second-tier shows (as cynics expected they might), while hometown players like Parker Gallery and Nonaka-Hill have contributed to the ongoing education of the city’s art lovers. Here are my picks of the best shows of 2019—any of which would have been a credit to the institutions.

The Dilexi Retrospective, Parker Gallery, Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, The Landing, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Brian Gross Fine Art, Crown Point Press

A project coordinated across six different galleries in two different cities, Los Angeles and San Francisco, deserves admiration if only for its logistical and diplomatic achievement. Organizing curator Laura Whitcomb managed to divvy up work shown at the Dilexi Gallery—which was cofounded and run by jazz aficionado Jim Newman in San Francisco between 1958 and 1969 and briefly in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. Highlights included the phantasmagoria of Roy De Forest and Franklin Williams at Parker, and carved wooden sculptures by Jeremy Anderson at The Landing.

Read more here.

by Christopher Knight

Alexis Smith has been a major artist since her first mixed-media text-and-image collages of the 1970s. No one does assemblage better than she.

A beautifully installed survey at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery tracks the arc of Smith’s career in just 11 smartly selected works.

From 1977, “Labyrinth” lays out many salient aspects of her approach. The work is simplicity itself — a printed book-illustration pasted onto paper and captioned with a snippet of text, all set within in a shaped frame. Frames are important to all of Smith’s work, which itself is dedicated to reframing established points of view.

This one is shaped like a Monopoly house, similar to Joel Shapiro’s little cast-iron house sculptures from the same period. Those set aside Minimalist art’s obsession with nonfigurative abstraction.

Rather different houses collide within Smith’s homey frame. Sebastien le Clerc’s intricate 1677 plan for an elaborate garden labyrinth at the royal Palace of Versailles outside Paris meets an 1872 fragment of Walt Whitman’s democratic poetry: “The paths to the house I seek to make / But leave to those to come to the house itself.”

In Smith’s image-and-text pieces, art is proposed as a playful and meandering refuge, an exclusively aristocratic European legacy evolved to a self-directed, inclusive American model.

Given the domestic focus on the home, the work also resonates with a shrewdly feminist undercurrent. It turns up repeatedly in the show, not least in “Medium Message,” a large wall mural from 2013.

“Medium Message” inserts a lavishly decorated, heart-shaped candy box, notably upside-down, and a child’s battered drum set into a gray text painted on the wall. The objects take the place of words: “The [candy box] is the [drum set].”

Our topsy-turvy adult interactions are given form that is interchangeable with long-ago childhood disturbance. Smith’s poetics of unanticipated consequences — a Marshall McLuhan-like observation about mediums and messages — are the fundamental stuff of art.

Read more here.

Walking through aisle after aisle during London’s Frieze Week, it’s easy for all the art to blur together. But for those paying close attention, there are plenty of discoveries to be made.

We scoured the major fairs underway in the UK capital this week, from Frieze London and Masters to 1-54 and beyond, to find exciting talents. You may not have heard of them yet—some are better known in their home countries and are just beginning to gain international renown—but you will know them soon enough.

We selected artists based on a mix of factors: they have gained some institutional traction, with inclusion in biennials or major exhibition; they have some high-profile buyers and supporters; their work is memorable and distinct; their prices still have room to grow; and they have that distinctly unquantifiable, ever-elusive distinction: buzz.

Alteronce Gumby

Who: The Bronx-based artist, born in 1985, is showing new abstract works that transform fragments of colored glass into terrazzo panels that explore identity and how people rebuild their lives after traumatic events. Named after jazz compositions, Gumby’s iridescent wall pieces pack plenty of what auctioneers call wall power. The young artist brings something new to the party thrown by similar artists, such as Jack Whitten, Sam Gilliam, and Robert Rauschenberg.

On View: False Flag at the Sunday Art Fair 

Based in: New York

Why You Should Pay Attention: Trained as a painter, Gumby found his voice in glass. Like Rauschenberg when he spotted the potential of rubber tires, Gumby’s turning point came after he saw a smashed bus shelter near his studio in the Bronx. After earning his MFA at Yale, Gumby undertook a year-long residency at the Fondation des États-Unis in Paris via a summer residency at the the Camden Arts Centre in London. He has also hung out at Captiva in Florida on a Rauschenberg fellowship. The artist Rashid Johnson included Gumby’s work in the 2017 group show “For Color” and other recent group shows include “Abstract, Representational, and so forth,” at Gladstone Gallery in New York this past summer. 

What to Look Out For: The New York-based False Flag gallery is showing a series of square terrazzo panels in two sizes. All have romantic titles, many inspired by classic jazz tracks. The artist’s blue-note piece Soul Searching (2019) is one of three works that have sold or are on reserve.

Prices: $3,000 and $12,000

Up Next: Lars Kristian Bode of Hamburg will be presenting Gumby’s work at Art Düsseldorf in November.

Julien Creuzet

Who: Born in 1986, Creuzet is a French-Caribbean visual artist, filmmaker, performer, and poet. He grew up in Martinique, and his work interrogates his own diasporic experience, as well as issues of migration and creolization.

On View: High Art at Frieze London

Based in: Paris

Why You Should Pay Attention: Creuzet is the recipient of the Camden Arts Center’s emerging artist prize this year. The award, which is in its second year, underwrites a major exhibition at the center. He has had solo exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo, the Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, and the Frac Basse-Normandie.

What to Look Out For: Creuzet is best known for his hanging sculptural work, but his practice also includes video works.

Prices: €5,000 to €17,000.

Up Next: Creuzet has an upcoming solo show at High Art opening on October 17, and he will be part of a group exhibition at the musee d’art moderne in Paris titled “You” opening on October 11. His exhibition at the Camden Arts Center is slated for October 2020.

Suki Seokyeong Kang

Who: Born 1977, Kang originally trained as a painter, but her practice shifted towards sculpture around a decade ago. There is a painterly quality to her works, which also spans installation, video, and choreography. Her work draws on her own personal history to probe her position in the rapidly transforming society of South Korea.

On View:  Kukje Gallery  at Frieze London

Based in: Seoul

Why You Should Pay Attention: Kang’s career has been skyrocketing since last year, after she won Art Basel’s Baloise Art Prize, which is given to young artists exhibiting in the fair’s Statements section. She has been growing her profile as a biennial artist, having made work for the Gwangju Biennial and the Liverpool Biennial. Perhaps most significantly, she is included in the main exhibition of the 2019 Venice Biennale.

What to Look Out For: Keep your eyes peeled, because Kang’s interest in the human body means that she doesn’t make works larger or heavier than she can lift herself. She is probably best known for her “Grandmother Tower” series, which consist of abstract sculptural portraits of her grandmother, emphasizing her curved stature and hesitant gait.

Prices: The works at Frieze London are priced between $18,000 to $23,000.

Up Next: Her work in Venice is on view through November 24, and she has an ongoing solo exhibition at the Mudam Luxembourg until April 2020.

Tania Pérez Córdova

Who: Córdova, born in 1979, creates sculptures of prosaic objects—like a brass trumpet, a piece of wire fence, or a glass jar—by casting them, melting them down, and recasting them in their own molds. The results are objects that look like echoes or memories of their former selves. The artist likes to say that she could continue this process indefinitely—or at least until each object degrades so much that it disappears. 

On View: Galerie Martin Janda at Frieze London 

Based in: Mexico City

Why You Should Pay Attention: Córdova’s career has been on a steep upward trajectory since 2015, when she was included in the New Museum Triennial in New York. Since then, she has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2017 and the Kunsthalle Basel last year. Her work has also been acquired by top patrons including the Colección Cisneros.

What to Look Out For: Like lots of good art, Córdova’s work makes you look at the world with a bit more care and attention—it makes things you normally take for granted just strange enough to require a second glance. Two of her objects—including a worn trumpet she bought off a man busking in her neighborhood—are on view at Frieze, offering an opportunity for elegiac reflection amid the sensory overload of the fair. 

Prices: The works at Frieze London are priced between €11,300 and €13,600.

Up Next: She will be the subject of a solo show at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City next year, according to her gallery. 

Jacqueline de Jong

Who: Jacqueline de Jong, 80, is one of those artists who played an important and active role in the European avant-garde, but whose contributions were largely sidelined in favor of her more famous male companions. Her work—unabashedly autobiographical, brash, bright, and figurative—was unfashionable at the height of Minimalism in the 1960s and ‘70s, but looks exceedingly forward-thinking and fresh today.

On View: Pippy Houldsworth Gallery at Frieze Masters

Based in: Amsterdam and the Bourbonnais province of France

Why You Should Pay Attention: De Jong won this year’s outstanding merit prize—awarded to a female artist who has been working for 30 years or more—from the Paris-based nonprofit AWARE. Her work has been extensively collected by museums in Europe, including the Moderna Museet, the Centre Pompidou, and the Stedelijk Museum. She also counts Texas-based collector Howard Rachofsky as a supporter. But she remains relatively little known in the United States.

What to Look Out For: The Frieze Masters presentation focuses on de Jong’s work between 1968—when she produced posters for the student protest movement in Paris—and 1971, when she was living between Paris and Amsterdam. During that time, she began to make paintings on small-scale canvases that were hinged together like suitcases so they could easily be opened and closed and transported from one city to another.

Prices: The works at Frieze Masters are priced between €24,000 to €45,000.

Up Next: The artist had a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam earlier this year and her first UK solo show opens next month at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London.

Mary Sibande

Who: The 37-year-old South African photographer and installation artist makes works depicting an archetypal Apartheid-era domestic worker named Sophie.

On View: SMAC Gallery at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair

Based in: Johannesburg

Why You Should Pay Attention: Sibande is having her first solo exhibition in the UK, titled “I Came Apart at the Seams,” at Somerset House in London. It is organized in partnership with the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair. Earlier this year, she had a solo exhibition at the LeRoy Neiman Gallery at the Columbia School of the Arts. Her work is included in collections including the Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, South Africa, and the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.

What to Look Out For: Sibande is continuously transforming representations of Sophie, and each series can be distinguished by a presiding color.

Prices: The works at 1-54 are priced between £8,000 and £12,000.

Up Next: Her work is on view at Somerset House until January 5, 2020.

Jeanette Mundt

Who: Mundt is a 37-year-old artist who creates tirelessly inventive paintings that overflow with technical precision while still disarming with grace and humor.

On View: Société at Frieze London

Based in: New York

Why You Should Pay Attention: After showing with beloved but now-shuttered New York galleries Clifton Benevento and Off Vendome, Mundt staged solo shows in 2018 at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in Harlem and at Bridget Donahue in Chinatown. She also had a show with her Berlin gallery, Société, that was called “Lana Del Rey,” and did not appear to have anything to do with the singer of the same name.

What to Look Out For: She may be best known for the work that she debuted at the 2019 Whitney Biennial, which showed Olympic gymnasts in various freeze-frames. At Frieze, her gallery is showing earlier works, yellow green landscapes from 2014, that are no less stunning.

Prices: Around €30,000

Up Next: Mundt has a show at the Los Angeles gallery Overduin & Co. that is up until October 26, and will have her next show at Société in 2020.

Read more here.

by Daniel Sturgis

Known to too few outside of her home country, the USAmerican artist Joan Snyder has been creating largescale abstract paintings since the 1970s, full of gesture and color. Snyder’s practice continues to evolve today, and London was recently home to an exhibition of newer works, all of which continue to confirm Snyder’s status as a central figure in the history of feminist painting. Snyder’s expressive work is here considered in light of its history and its revelance for the present. In 1992 the American painter Joan Snyder published an article, “Not Neo To Us,” in The Journal of Rutgers University Libraries. The Douglass Library at Rutgers had been important to Snyder when she was an MFA student studying on the Douglass campus in the early 1960s. Having then left the college, she returned in 1971 to work with Daisy Shenholm at the library. Together they set up the hugely influential Women Artists Series – an exhibition and discussion platform in the library’s lobby – which is, remarkably, still ongoing, and which was the first program of its kind in the US. It was a move that, in the early ’70s, had real urgency: a way to counter the blatant bias against women artists and painters that Snyder saw in all US art departments at the time, when faculties were notoriously male-dominated. Snyder’s own professor at Rutgers was Robert Morris, but there was a lack of female role models. If women were teaching, they appeared, as Snyder then did after she became better known, as a very occasional part-time sessional visitor. The 1992 article remembers this moment, but it also pointed to something else at stake. Namely, that the so-called neo-expressionist return in painting at the time the article appeared – personified in the US by artists like Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl, and David Salle – had well-developed roots in the practice of American women artists. According to Snyder, she and her female counterparts had tried to distance themselves in their work from the “visual anemia” of the dominant artistic fields of Minimalism and Color Field painting. Snyder maintains that she and others worked to fill up their canvases with life, “with everything we can lay our hands on […] Nancy Spero did that, Faith Ringgold did that, Jackie Winsor did that. WE DID THAT.”

It is precisely this plentitude (filling up), kicking against the “pricks” of Minimalism, that one sees so clearly on display in the exhibition “Rosebuds & Rivers” at Blain Southern in London. “Rosebuds & Rivers” focuses on Snyder’s paintings from the last decade. These are multifaceted canvases that come from the gut. They are bright and brash, with a seductive, relaxed freedom that seems to encompass both the tragic and the comedic. That they were made when Snyder was approaching 80 is remarkable, for their spirit is youthful, passionate, and not beholden to anyone or anything. This does not mean that the paintings are somehow easy. They are not out there to be liked or to please, but they do – through their vitality and grit.

Proserpina (2013) is one of the standout works in this exhibition, as it shows how Snyder can weave together complex layers of meaning in a single work. In one sense it is a landscape painting: at over three meters in length it is long and thin, and it is painted on raw linen in oils and acrylics, but also stained with earth, drawn and written upon in charcoal, and scattered with poppy seeds and papier-mâché flowers. The format of the painting is mainly built through detached brush strokes; strokes that are at once reminiscent of Snyder’s breakthrough “stroke” paintings of the early ’70s, such as Smashed Strokes Hope (1971), which steals the show in the Metropolitan Museum’s “Epic Abstraction” exhibition in New York. These are paintings that sought to use paint, all manner of paint – spray paint, oil paint, acrylic paint – to physically and materially speak, as they broke through the Minimalist grid with freedom and new conditions all their own. The strokes in Proserpina move from big, wide, and dark umbers and earth colors to short, delicate pinks and reds. Within the darker left-hand section Snyder has scrawled in charcoal, with a determined urgency, single words – “earth,” “stone,” “fields” – highlighting a heavy sense of land and ground. The use of watery drips, poppy seeds, and charcoal all add to this material and organic base. And then the lightness of the red passages, where Proserpina’s name is written, garlanded by rose-like forms, providing otherworldly relief to the laden sobriety of the earth. Snyder has used the natural world to express emotion many times before, creating a remarkable and underrated series of paintings of beanfields in the ’80s that, through wildness and a reflection on personal narrative, liberated her from the perceived confinement of the stroke works. Proserpina also connects to the way in which Cy Twombly used and saw landscape as a therapeutic and contemplative place attached to myth and renewal. Proserpina is after all the Roman name for Persephone, and the painting has a feel of that mythological story of a mother searching for her daughter and the connection between the living world and the underworld. Snyder had stumbled across the myth through a song of the same name by the US folk singer Kate McGarrigle, whose haunting refrain goes: “Proserpina, Proserpina, come home to momma, come home to momma.”

References to music and landscape return throughout the exhibition in Heart of a Fugue (2016), Womansong (2016), and Little Bark Beach (2018), where song in particular provides the genesis for many of the recent canvases. Snyder draws to music, often initially in concert halls, through being absorbed in what she sees as the “the most abstract of art forms,” which also forms the basis of her paintings. In most cases she is inspired by vocal classical music, which she plays on repeat while painting, enjoying the polyphony within the compositions, where opposites are held in tension with one another: joy and sorrow, beginnings and endings. It is this richness that Snyder draws upon as she couples her internal organic sense of being with the totemic, symbolic, and voluptuous painted world. Snyder happily embraces the subversive element of camp as a means to add a profound “charge” to her paintings; to speak with humor about serious subjects. To create double and triple meanings by using and reusing the tropes of a feminist language of painting – a language she radically helped to form many years ago. This fact perhaps gives Snyder a license to indulge (and get away with) a deadpan of the vaginal as “seed catchers” in paintings such as Celadon & Silk (2018), a work stuffed ceremonially with little glass beads. Snyder then often revels in the general abundance of landscape detritus: straw, twigs, and the like in Fragments of a Soul (2018). In other works, she points to almost restorative and healing properties in paintings that are scattered with rosebuds and Chinese herbs. Finally, she can even call a painting Really (2015), as in – as she says in her catalogue interview – “Really, you must be fucking kidding me.”

Read more here.

by Carolina A. Miranda

“Dilexi: Totems and Phenomenology,” at Parrasch Heijnen. Early in June, Parker Gallery kicked off a series of exhibitions in locations around California devoted to the artists of San Francisco’s Dilexi Gallery. Dilexi focused on counterculture artists whose work channeled an uncommon spirituality and who often employed ethereal or nontraditional materials. As part of this, Parrasch Heijnen is showing pieces by Arlo Acton, Deborah Remington, Charles Ross, Richard Van Buren and Tony DeLap (who died this month), artists whose work touched on environmental qualities and the nature of perception. Opens Saturday at 4 p.m. and runs through Aug. 10. 1326 S. Boyle Ave., Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, parraschheijnen.com.

“Dilexi Gallery: Disparate Ontologies,” at the Landing. Also part of the Dilexi series is this exhibition at the Landing, which features an array of artists who exhibited at the gallery, including John Altoon, Joe Goode, Leslie Kerr and H.C. Westermann. Though the artists who exhibited at Dilexi occupied the avant-garde, their styles were wildly different — working in sculpture, painting, installation and happenings. Opens Saturday at 6 p.m. and runs through Aug. 10. 5118 W. Jefferson Blvd., West Adams, Los Angeles, thelandinggallery.com.

“Dilexi Gallery: Seeking the Unknown,” at Parker Gallery. This exhibition is one of a six-part retrospective — staged at galleries around L.A. and San Francisco — that will examine the legacy of San Francisco’s Dilexi Gallery, a space where art intersected with the magical. Artists in this show at the Parker include Wallace Berman, Kurt Schwitters, Roy De Forest and Franklin Williams. Other participating galleries include Parrasch Heijnen, the Landing and Marc Selwyn Fine Arts, whose shows are opening at separate dates. Through Aug. 10. 2441 Glendower Ave., Los Feliz, Los Angeles, parkergallery.com.

Read more here.

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

When talking about the L.A art scene in the 1960s, the name of the Ferus Gallery is foremost. Founded in 1957 by Walter Hopps with artist Ed Kienholz, it was a free-wheeling operation initially showing artists from the Bay Area alongside the L.A. set.

But Ferus was not the first gallery started by Hopps. That would have been Syndell, opened in 1954 in West L.A. with his friend Jim Newman. They had become friends a few years earlier while students at Stanford where they spent as much time organizing jazz concerts as studying.

After his first year, Hopps returned to his native L.A. to attend UCLA, Newman went on to Oberlin College. They remained friends. Neither expected to become a conventional art dealer but opened Syndell with the idea of supporting the artists they knew who were challenging ideas about making art in the 1950s, especially in abstract sculpture or assemblage. After his experience at Syndell, Newman and Beat poet Bob Alexander started Dilexi in San Francisco in 1955. At that time, the city was considered the apex of culture with a museum dedicated to modern art as well as a growing counter culture.

Though Hopps had left Ferus to become curator and director of the Pasadena Art Museum, many of the Ferus artists continued to show at Dilexi in San Francisco. Newman opened a short- lived L.A. venue down the street from Ferus in 1963 with the Rolf Nelson as director. Newman, who parted from Alexander after the first year, remained closer to artists who lived and worked in the Bay Area.

This summer, the fascinating but rarely studied history of Dilexi Gallery (1958-1969) is the focus of a group of shows in four galleries in L.A. and two in San Francisco.

Some of the artists are well-known, others deserve to be. Co- organized by Laura Whitcomb, an independent curator, a catalog is forthcoming.

The largest portion of the exhibition opens this Saturday, June 22, at The Landing, a large warehouse of a space on Jefferson Blvd.. Titled Disparate Ontologies, the exhibition includes a wide-ranging group of works by more than two dozen artists that conveys the taste for experimentation that Newman embraced.

The progressive nature of San Francisco, with artist-run exhibition spaces and progressive art schools, meant that there was a growing interest in dance, Happenings and film-related art. One of the big moments in this show is a rare 1958 expressive abstract painting by Robert Morris just as his choreographer wife, Simone Forti had interested him in dance and movement. Soon after, they moved to New York, where those interests evolved as key components of his Minimalist art of the ‘60s.

The interest in abstract expressionist painting that dominated the Bay Area can be seen in powerful pieces by Hassel Smith and Frank Lobdell. It can also be seen in the early work of L.A.- based artists like Ed Moses and Craig Kauffman. All showed at Ferus so the show proves the regular migration of artists and the constant recycling of ideas between the two cities.

The Landing show also includes a major 1963 Milk Bottle painting by Joe Goode, who had his first solo show at the Dilexi in L.A. But Newman’s enduring legacy turned out to be his support of music, film and performance. After closing Dilexi in 1969, he funded 35 Happenings and produced films of work by Terry Riley, Sun Ra and Walter De Maria which were shown on KQED in San Francisco in the years before such work could be seen in any sort of public way. Many of these programs and some live performances will be held at The Landing over the course of the show, which continues to August 10.

At Parker Gallery, which is located in a series of rooms on the ground floor of a large Tudor style h ouse in Los Feliz, the selection of 14 works is titled Seeking The Unknown. On a pedestal near the front door stands an exceptional tablet-shaped sculpture by the mystic artist Jess, which remains in Newman’s own collection.

This work of collaged panels of black and white illustrations is set within a voluptuous bronze-colored frame. Peach-colored velvet on the reverse is set with silver sequins that state the title: Variations on Durer’s Melancholia (1960).

An icon of the Bay Area scene, Jess was known for his “paste- ups,” collages of carefully cut-out bits of illustrations and photographs. Along with his partner, poet Robert Duncan, he pursued research on arcane theories from the distant and recent past.

A fascination with arcane and ancient spiritual beliefs was embraced by poets, artists and musicians of the Bay Area. The very name of Dilexi was taken from the Latin, “to select, to value highly, to love.” The show at Parker includes a 1965 Verifax collage by Wallace Berman, whose inaugural show at Ferus was shut down as erotic by the LAPD, which prompted his move to Northern California.

Eccentricity was in large supply especially in the paintings of Roy De Forest, who had the most shows at Dilexi. One of his early constructions Napoleon on St. Helena (1961) is a collection of molded and painted organic shapes mounted on a rectangle of painted white wood. The show continues through August 10.

Another aspect of Dilexi is called Totems and Phenomenology at Parrasch Heijnin downtown, opening Saturday, June 22.

With work by five artists, it highlights the interest in perception that activated the work of Tony DeLap and Charles Ross. These artists were interested in ideas about mindfulness and seeing and spiritual presence. The show continues to Aug. 10.

A key figure of LA and San Francisco art of the 1960s was Jay De Feo. A show of her work will open on July 13 at Marc Selwyn Fine Art.

Meanwhile, Dilexi Gallery: The Early Years is at Brian Gross Fine Art in San Francisco through July 27. Also in San Francisco, Crown Point Press is featuring Fred Martin’s 1967 publication Beulah Land.

Taken together, these exhibitions complicate and fulfill a history that is still being written. All the galleries deserve credit for starting to fill in those large gaps in the story.

Read more here.

by The Editors

Summer is a great time to explore the world of art and architecture, whether through tours of an exquisitely restored historic house or through online exhibitions that celebrate the cutting-edge work of the Bauhaus. Here are some openings you might have missed:

Dilexi: Totems and Phenomenology is on display at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery in Los Angeles, California. (Courtesy Parrasch Heijnen Gallery) June 22 – August 10, 2019

Parrasch Heijnen Gallery in Los Angeles is displaying counter-cultural works of art from San Francisco’s Dilexi Gallery, including pieces by Arlo Acton, Tony DeLap, Deborah Remington, Charles Ross, and Richard Van Buren. Much of the art featured in the exhibition, which ranges in media from photography to sculpture, uses nontraditional materials and explores the very nature of perception.

Just: The Architectural League Prize Exhibit

June 21 – July 31, 2019
66 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10011

In an exhibit closing today, The Architectural League of New York has put work by the winners of its 2019 Architectural League Prize on display, a coveted award that has been recognizing promising young architects since 1981. Provocative models, drawings, and installations produced by the six winners have been assembled in the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at the Parsons School of Design.

The work selected for display covers a wide range of scales and media. With honorees hailing from cities across the United States and Central America, the exhibit gives visitors the opportunity to engage with a diverse array of perspectives and thematic focuses that relate to architecture, urbanism, and the design world at large.

Big Ideas Small Lots

August 1 – November 2, 2019
526 LaGuardia Place
New York, NY 10012

Starting tomorrow, New York’s Center for Architecture will exhibit winning submissions from Big Ideas for Small Lots NYC, a competition jointly organized by the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) and the American Institute of Architects’ New York chapter. The competition asked designers to propose ideas for converting small-scale, difficult-to-develop lots across the city into viable affordable housing. Five finalists, including Palette Architecture and Michael Sorkin Studio, emerged from an initial pool of 444 proposals. The exhibition highlighting their work will be on display from August 1 until November 2.

Changing Signs, Changing Times: A History of Wayfinding in Transit

Through November 6
Grand Central Terminal
New York, NY

The New York Transit Museum is hosting an exhibit on wayfinding in its satellite gallery at Grand Central Terminal. On view through November 6, the exhibit includes objects, photographs, and other archival materials exploring the evolution of signage in New York’s transit system. The items, which come primarily from the museum’s own collection, shed light on the changing needs of transit users and the ways in which designers have addressed those needs over time.

The gallery is located just off the Main Concourse in the Shuttle Passage, next to the Station Masters’ Office.

Bauhaus: Building the New Artist

Online

Earlier this summer, the Getty launched an online exhibition as a complement to Bauhaus Beginnings, a gallery exhibit on display at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Planned as a centennial celebration of the Bauhaus’ groundbreaking approach to architectural education, the web-based exhibition features historical images from the Getty’s archives and information about the Bauhaus, as well as opportunities for visitors to test exercises crafted by the school’s pioneering luminaries, including Josef Albers and Vassily Kandinsky.

Pope.L: Conquest

September 21, 2019

New York’s Public Art Fund will present Pope.L’s most ambitious participatory project yet. Pope.L: Conquest will involve over one hundred volunteers, who will relay-crawl 1.5 miles from Manhattan’s West Village to Union Square. According to the Public Art Fund, participants will “give up their physical privilege” and “satirize their own social and political advantage, creating a comic scene of struggle and vulnerability to share with the entire community.”

Pope.L has organized more than 30 performance art projects since 1978, but this will be the largest of the bunch. The crawl will take place on September 21, beginning at the Corporal John A Seravalli Playground.

It Might Be a Place (for LLH), as part of Unfoldingobject

June 20 – August 11, 2019
Concord Center for the Visual Arts
37 Lexington Road, Concord, Ma 01742

The Concord Center for the Visual Arts in Massachusetts is displaying an installation by James Andrew Scott as part of its ongoing exhibition Unfoldingobject. Curated by Todd Bartel, the exhibit compiles collages by 50 different artists, each of whom has a distinct interpretation of the medium. Scott’s work, which is integrated into a skylight in the gallery building, presents a dramatic series of irregular pyramids that protrude from the ceiling at different angles. The entire exhibition is on view through August 11.

Read more here.

by Jessica Simmons

At Parrasch Heijnen, Suzan Frecon’s studious works on paper and Julia Haft- Candell’s meaty ceramic sculptures share an affinity for amorphous forms—each embrace a canny marriage of sloping geometries and bleeding edges. An accounting of these intricacies necessitates acute, attentive viewing, revealing both a material and philosophical sensibility that champions slow, conscientious making. Framed as a conversation between two discrete bodies of work (one by each artist), the exhibition begins with an intimate grouping of six small-scale works by Frecon, and consequently opens into a more cavernous room of sculptures by Haft-Candell, most of which roost on staggered white plinths of varying heights. Both artists occupy their respective spaces with a composed yet commanding physicality. Haft-Candell’s ceramic sculptures (all works 2019) sit like scattered islands, each with an unexpected gravitational pull. Like land masses, they appear to be in constant tectonic flux, shape-shifting at each vantage point. Forest Green Shift morphs from earthen vessel to torso; its surface dripping with a muddy green and eggshell glaze and bearing the markings of fingers dragging through wet earth—both a visual metaphor and a precise summation of the work’s own making. Likewise, from one angle, Folded Slab: Rose, Slate enacts its title: the clay slab folds in on itself like a piece of paper, splintering— seemingly in situ, as if it could instantly crack and crumple— under the pressure of its own mass. This rupture finds echoes in Frecon’s work, a collection of watercolors that similarly embrace mutable organic states. The paper in composition in 4-5 colors with lapis and malachite (2015) puckers and buckles under pools of ochre, lapis, and moss paint, echoing the weighty materiality of Haft-Candell’s sculptures while also mirroring their painterly glazes. Discordantly, a small half-wall bisects the two artist’s spaces, partially segregating them from view of one another, and subsequently dampening the viewer’s opportunity to be fully enmeshed in the works’ nuanced connections. Akin to a lapse of direct eye contact during intimate conversation, this curatorial partitioning effectively privileges monologue over dialogue.

While Frecon and Haft-Candell’s pairing alludes to the ways in which both paper and clay function as malleable receptacles for the weight of the artist’s hand, the connective tissue tethering the works’ already quiet subtleties threatens to disperse in separation. As their sculptures and drawings undoubtedly reciprocate sympathetic gestures from across rooms, it begs the question of how a more interwoven installation could have fleshed out these complexities and coaxed them to bear fruit. One entry point into this mysteriously dangling dialogue rests with the notion of the vessel—that sacrosanct paradigm inherent to the history of ceramics, but more or less absent from even the most esoteric discourse surrounding drawing. In Martin Heidegger’s classic 1971 essay “The Thing,” he asserts a purely philosophical definition of the vessel: “the vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that [it] holds.” While neither Frecon nor Haft-Candell present vessels in the traditional sense, they maintain Heidegger's inference with regard to their holding of the void, or space abstracted. In speaking of her work, Frecon has stated that it seeks the “highest possible plane of abstraction,” interpreted here as an oblique compositional state wherein all external reference points are obliterated. This is particularly clear in orange b, i (2012–2013): an oblong, marigold wing of color overwhelms the edges of the paper, which can barely contain the contours of its shape, as if color were a pigmented void capable of slowly eating away at that which surrounds it. The warped, skin-like materiality of the paper nonetheless remains apparent, suggesting that the paper substrate is as pertinent as the abstraction that it contains.

Haft-Candell similarly cradles voided space as if it were concrete, alterable matter. In Interlocking Arch, the most monumental sculpture in the exhibition, a set of ashen, ceramic hands, connected by a limb-like appendage, sprout up fromthe ground to meet andinterlace with an identical pair of hands, fused together by a second serpentine limb that cranes down from above. The sculpture forms a veritable ouroboros—the ancient Grecian metaphor of infinite wholeness characterized by a serpent consuming its own bodily appendage— and as such reads more as a portal than an archway. The work’s tension derives from the fact that the void at its center both buttresses it and appears poised to destabilize it, as if the limbs could tumble and unfurl if the interlocking hands lost their grip around its brute force. As both Frecon and Haft-Candell embrace the manipulative compositional power of material absence, they activate the negative space within and around their works as an elemental force, revealing the complexities of their relationship to abstraction. In the end though, this negative space extends to the physical space between rooms, where the distance ultimately becomes too great to sustain the subtle intricacies of this conversation.

Read more here.

by Monica Khemsurov

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Airbrushed ceramics made from analog paintings, our favorite discoveries from two French design shops, and the best of this year’s Frieze New York.

We spent a gloriously sunny day last week taking in Frieze New York; this piece by the London-based artist Gabriele Beveridge at Seventeen Gallery was the first thing we saw and also the best thing we saw, mixing as it does slumped blown glass with workaday chrome shop fittings.

The LA gallery Parrasch Heijnen also had an excellent showing. Those pastel Peter Alexander cubes are a perennial favorite, but the real showstopper was a textured, ombré painting by Yale MFA grad Alteronce Gumby (top of this post) that looks like glinting, oil-slicked water.

Our love for Ethan Cook’s work has been professed loud and proud on this site, so no wonder that Anat Ebgi made it onto our list of top five booths. Work by An Te Liu, Samantha Thomas, and Tammi Campbell rounded out the presentation.

It was the furniture at Lisson Gallery that first caught our eye; turns out it was by the Mexican artist Pedro Reyes, who also had several sculptures in stone on view at the fair.

We were less familiar with the work of Charles Hinman, whose canvas and wood pieces fold and explode off the wall in a way that seems to presage artists like Robert Moreland. An American pioneer of hard-edged shaped canvases, Hinman was a peer of Frank Stella, Donald Judd, and Carl Andre, but is still living and working in New York and in fact has an exhibition on right now at the Kreeger Museum in Washington, D.C.

Read more here.

by Ariella Budick

Nobody was plotting revolution on the night of June 28 1969 at the mafia-run gay bar on Christopher Street in Manhattan’s West Village. Mostly, patrons just wanted to be left alone. The police raided the Stonewall Inn, as they often did, but this time they met resistance, and resistance detonated six days of mayhem. Someone uprooted a parking meter and used it as a battering ram. Street kids formed a chorus line and faced down the police with synchronised kicks and a song: “We are the Stonewall Girls, / We wear our hair in curls, / We wear no underwear, / We show our pubic hair.” A fire hose was deployed.

“I associate the whole thing with the police coming there and basically trying to stop us from dancing with each other,” recalls Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, a self-described “gay teenage runaway” who grew up into an artist. But at some point that spasm of violence gathered into a beam of world-changing energy. In his book, Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution, David Carter quotes a bar patron who instantly transformed into a street fighter: “I was really experiencing liberation and radicalisation and everything — bang! — right then and there.” The shockwaves slammed New York and San Francisco, and 50 years later continue to ripple all over the country. Art After Stonewall, 1969-1989, an exhibition that began at the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, has now forked into two Manhattan locations: the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art and the Grey Art Gallery at New York University.

It’s not a connoisseur’s selection, but an overstuffed, two-headed, polytentacled portrait of a period’s chaotic variety, as exhilarating as it is dizzying. At its heart “is a suspicion of any systematic classification or traditional notions of what qualifies as a work of art,” write Anna Conlan and Jonathan Weinberg in a catalogue essay.

Some pieces do fall into familiar rubrics of craft, subtext and beauty: Joan Snyder’s 1975 “Heart On”, for instance — a Cartesian grid overlaid with suggestions of flesh, skin, fluids and scars. Snyder sliced into the canvas and sewed some of the flaps back together, evoking the wounds that go with womanhood. The result is lushly beautiful and almost abstract, the rare precious object in an exhibition that mixes document with desire, spectacle with witness, political rage with joyful self-expression.

Conservative politicians often invoke the spectre of “the gay agenda” as if it were a defined set of policies, pursued by a monolithic interest group. The expandable acronym LGBTQ+ more accurately describes a coalition of individuals, subgroups and factions who join in overarching purpose but define themselves in many different ways. Unity is elusive. Huey Newton declared in 1970 that black, feminist and gay activists all shared a simple, inalienable right: “A person should have the freedom to use his body in whatever way he wants.” And yet even that choice of pronouns has since acquired the power to inflame.

A movement that demanded inclusion into mainstream society could at times be exclusive too. Transgender people fought for recognition within the revolution, lesbians upbraided homophobic feminists, and black activists had to cut through multiple layers of prejudice. The exhibition threads its way among these sensitivities, recognising, for instance, that a 1974 mural by Mario Dubsky and John Button, crowded with bare-chested young men, short-changed everyone who wasn’t.

Peter Hujar’s famous “Come Out!!” photo, in which a group of Gay Liberation Front activists trot down Wooster Street shoulder to shoulder, with wide grins and raised fists, reads as an exuberant display of fearlessness. The text panel lets some of the giddiness out of the scene, though, when it points out that the picture “leaves the impression that gay liberation was primarily for the young, the white, and the cis-gendered.” On top of that, the encouragement to abandon the closet became a command and later a threat, as some people were involuntarily outed.

As Stonewall’s high-kicking rioters implied, going public about sexuality became a kind of performance, and the exhibition brims with poses, costumes, signs and dramatic lighting. The “Gender Play” section focuses on the fusion of activism and theatre, especially by the Cockettes, a San Francisco drag troupe that favoured beads, beards, feathers, fruit, warpaint, silks, hairy legs and bangles. Martin Wong’s poster for the group’s “Pearls Over Shanghai” show is a hallucination full of visual non-sequiturs: a dragon-fanged hippo belching a plume of five-pointed stars in a landscape of Chinese characters.

Sexuality was theatre, theatre was political, and sex itself became a form of civic engagement. One section lingers on the West Village piers in Manhattan, where Gordon Matta-Clark chain-sawed a hole out of the side of a dilapidated shed, producing a gaping mystery that looks erotic alongside a pair of erect smokestacks. The pier became a magnet for men in search of hookups and artists in search of sexual subjects.

Death has always tolled through images of sexual self-discovery, but in the 1980s the ringing got louder. A clangour of dreams collapsed into the central nightmare of Aids. Art and activism focused on a concrete goal: advancing medical knowledge in the face of intransigent homophobia. Clarity of purpose translated into stark imagery: Gran Fury’s bloody handprint, the pink triangle with the slogan “Silence=Death”; Luis Cruz Azaceta’s acrylic of a shrunken figure lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by a sea of unfeeling numbers. A show that begins in violence and blossoms into elation and anger turns, at the end, to tragedy.

For reasons that are never quite articulated the “After Stonewall” narrative concludes in 1989, which feels arbitrary and abrupt. Right around that time, a movement born from declarations of difference started demanding inclusion in the mainstream’s institutions. Activists concentrated their political firepower on winning the most ordinary of rights: to teach, study, work, marry, raise children and serve in the military — all without having to lie. The curators may have worried that the task of broadening the definition of normalcy would be anticlimactic. But just think of what followed their chosen span: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, wedding cake lawsuits, Brokeback Mountain, Ellen DeGeneres, Michael Sam and Obergefell v Hodges. Perhaps a sequel is already in the works.

Read more here.

Film by Kate Geis, 2019. Produced by the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Museum of Contemporary Art and CANADA (New York.)

Link to video

by David Pagel

Two artists’ work exhibited in side-by-side spaces at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery inspires us to see and know more than we’d see and know if we were viewing each artist’s creations separately. The show “Julia Haft-Candell / Suzan Frecon” is magical and gratifying, its back-to-basics title belying the sophistication of everything in it.

Frecon (born 1941) is a New York painter who works on paper, making abstract compositions that are intimate and sensual, tough and understated, taut and expansive. Haft-Candell (born 1982) is a Los Angeles sculptor who works with clay, making figurative forms that are innocent and physical, playful and primitive, gritty and transcendent. Although Frecon’s six small drawings are installed in the first gallery and Haft-Candell’s nine hefty sculptures in the second, it doesn’t matter where you begin. You end up going forth and back between the two rooms, following your own path, at your own pace. Haft-Candell’s sculptures make Frecon’s works on paper look weighty, their patiently painted shapes taking on greater sculptural solidity than their intimate dimensions suggest. And Frecon’s palette — rusty reds, midnight blues and deep forest greens — draws out the gentle shifts in HaftCandell’s glazes, revealing their surfaces to be covered with an infinite range of colors, from milky white to deep-space black and beach-sand tan to frothy blue. Similarly, the scraggy textures and furrowed surfaces of Haft-Candell’s ceramics attune you to the little wrinkles that have puckered the once-wet surfaces of Frecon’s paintings on paper. In turn, those organic accidents alert you to the sheen of each sheet of paper she has used. One is crisp and clean, like freshly starched sheets. Another resembles a hand towel torn from a public dispenser. And a couple are so thick they call to mind tree bark, wood shavings, even veneer. Each type of paper interacts differently with the paints Frecon has layered atop it, creating more depth and presence than immediately meets the eye. Similar subtleties animate Haft-Candell’s sculptures. Many recall common bodily experiences, like kneading dough when it’s too wet and gets stuck between your fingers. Or slipping your hand into a well-worn catcher’s mitt and smacking it with your fist. Or using your hand to cast a shadow whose silhouette resembles an animal. Or simply interlinking your fingers with those of someone you love.

That gesture takes larger-than-lifesize form in Haft-Candell’s “Interlocking Arch.” But it also describes how the two artists’ bodies of work function as one, cooperating and collaborating while leaving each free to be itself.

Read more here.

by Skye Sherwin

Blood and glitter …

Joan Snyder is a grandee of US abstract expressionist painting who has been creating gloriously improvisatory and personal works since the 1960s. Lush experiments with bodily textures, offset by playful materials such as ribbons and glitter, mean this feminist pioneer’s vision is a far cry from the bombast of the ab-ex boys’ club.

Flower power …

Flowers are a favourite motif. In 2013’s Proserpina, they are created with rice paper, scattered across the canvas like wedding confetti, then painted red.

Mother knows …

This diptych is hardly light-hearted, however. It is inspired by Kate McGarrigle’s wrenching 2009 song Proserpina, composed when she was dying of cancer. In it, Proserpina’s mother laments her daughter’s half-year in the underworld. Song and painting hardwire the mother-daughter bond, and the pain at its loss.

Bitter sweet …

Fragments of the lyrics are scrawled across the canvases, which move from brutal winter hues to a sweet pink spring: a cycle of death and renewal. The petals could be bloodspots, the continued eruptions of grief.

Read more here.

by Julie Wolfson

On Hollywood Boulevard, at the infamous Hollywood Roosevelt, a new art fair took place this past weekend—coinciding with Frieze Los Angeles and ALAC. Founded by Dean Valentine with brothers Al Morán and Mills Morán, Felix (named for the beloved animated cat) was spread throughout the hotel‘s guest rooms and poolside—offering a different approach and flow than traditional art fairs. The result was a more intimate experience for visitors, and many gallerists, artists and collectors could be found relaxing on lounges or perched on beds and armchairs. While wandering the rooms of the hotel, the CH team was specifically taken by all bold and bright structural artworks. Here, we have selected some of the vibrant, optimistic and oftentimes playful, colorful sculptures that intrigued at the charming new fair.

Sara Gernsbacher’s “11 stories Butterfly Blue and Black”

Parrasch Heijnen gallery often focuses on exhibiting sculpture, and their presence at Felix reflected that. Sara Gernsbacher’s piece, “11 stories Butterfly Blue and Black” is an organic form that resembles the animal—but also perhaps flowers or even a spine. The artist’s organic forms begin as developing shapes through a controlled pigmented silicone pouring technique that’s then hung, floating near but not against, the wall. A complementary, nearby standout, Peter Alexander‘s “11/12/14 (Green Box)” looks like a mystical expanse of water captured in a cube. There’s a mythic quality to this serene color, captured in such a precise shape.

Ilona Rich’s “Untitled”

In Kenny Schachter‘s room, Madrid-born artist Ilona Rich’s sculpture of a neon orange Shih Tzu had a fiberglass candy-colored rainbow body that extended up the hotel room window toward the ceiling. This caterpillar-meets-pooch stares, with intense glowing electric eyes, at visitors who enter the room.

Kim MacConnel’s “Please Disturb”

Kim MacConnel is one of the founding artists of the Pattern and Decoration movement of the ’70s and has been creating painted and fabric-covered furniture since that time. His installation at Felix featured wall pieces, furniture, and a rug made from toilet covers and bath mats. This room, called Please Disturb and presented by the Thomas Solomon Art Advisory, gathered a crowd who wanted to be immersed in MacConnel’s playful world. Altogether, the busy, jovial spirit of the fair is captured perfectly here.

Kimiyo Mishima “Work 19-C”

A diverse collection of materials smothered the Nonaka-Hill room, creating a delightful visual clash for visitors. Kazuo Kadonaga‘s natural forms composed of multiple layers of cedar sit next to Miho Dohi’s works made from roughly cut copper plate. While scanning the space, a trash basket filled with empty cans seemed out of place—until a closer look revealed it to be a sculpture by Kimiyo Mishima. Born in Osaka in 1932 Mishima’s early works were reactions to World War II, but by the early ’70s, Mishima began to create pieces by transforming single use items like newspapers and beverage cans into realistic sculptures. Here, “Work 19-C” is made from printed and painted ceramic and iron. Inside, cans of Coca Cola, Ebisu beer, and Monster Energy drink are piled up.

Alake Shilling’s “Garfunkel the Cat”

LA-based Alake Shilling formed her cheerfully warped “Garfunkel the Cat” from glazed ceramic, painted in a seemingly crude manner. Shilling’s recent solo show Monsoon Lagoon saw her animal characters displayed on faux moss-covered rock structures, but they looked at home at Felix too—sitting patiently on lavender cubes. Kitsch, wonky and sweet, Shilling’s creatures are wildly endearing.

Beverly Fishman’s “Untitled (Digestive Problems Missing Dose)”

Beverly Fishman calls this bold piece from her pills/relief series “Untitled (Digestive Problems Missing Dose).” Crafted from urethane paint on wood, yielding an intensely glossy surface, the piece sees brightly colored geometric shapes next to and in opposite relief of each other. Shiny and precise, the artist’s work (brought to Felix by Chicago’s Kavi Gupta) asks the viewer to look closely at the color choice and how one side corresponds to the other. The name reads like the note from a nurse at a doctor’s office, but the result is ultimately mesmerizing.

Read more here.

by Suzanne Hudson

Last spring, Sara Gernsbacher showed hanging sculptures of silicone, acrylic, and canvas at the Franklin Parrasch Gallery in New York. In her home base of Los Angeles, she offered a new group of the slippery-looking cutouts, which appear to be remnants imbued with purpose through lavish care. This set was colored with pigments and spray paint and set into interlocking plaited or abutted configurations. The represented shapes—including cavities (plugged with black silicone or open to the supporting wall); petals; and spindly, rodlike sticks—felt elemental, ever malleable, even as they were fixed in spatial relationships. They were evocative of figures: The fleshy bits of Shape is Your Touch, Magic Child, and Up Arms Center in 3 (all works 2018), among others, had been trimmed into slender appendages recalling legs and arms—or, more accurately, the skin that would cover them. The substance was floppy, hanging limply from the grommets where it was attached to the wall, minutely but perceptibly stirred on occasion by ambient motion. The surfaces were pockmarked, with cracks that resembled veins, and sullied with a dusting of the paint flecks and fine-grained stuff that settled in her studio, where they spent time before being drafted into use.

The installation at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery smartly exaggerated the oblique, portrait-like qualities of would-be abstraction—those indexical registrations of sensible and somatic manipulation that transpire in the studio—by juxtaposing Gernsbacher’s seven sculptures in the main gallery with two of Bruce Nauman’s in the front gallery. This arrangement framed Nauman’s Untitled, 1965 (a test cast of a sand mold made as a demonstration for patrons of the arts at the University of California, Davis), and Untitled, 1966 (a cardboard geometry fitted into a corner high enough off the ground to read not as the matte-black painted box that it is but rather as a hovering iron or steel construction), as portals to Gernsbacher’s work. Both artists deal with architecture and the residual traces of work spaces, as in the flaunted seams of her studio’s concrete floor, which become a visually continuous register within the varied amalgamations. Both allegorize making and thematize process. And so on.

We might also think of Eva Hesse, to whom Gernsbacher seemed to appeal in the modular repetition of 7 Stories, a vertical daisy chain of dirty peachy-tan flowers whose central pistils (termed the “female” part of the plant) are represented as black holes, and in the playful parallax of the even more obviously bodily Flower Brick Body—Black Center Yellow Out, which comprises a bright two-by-two grid of what looked to be either botany or nipples. The press release explained that Gernsbacher’s symbolism is intensely personal, with representational codes cued to sensations: “Holes represent energy flowing through the works, triggering the space and the violence that is felt when something is abruptly taken away from pure forms; legs, indicative of two imperfect parts meeting as one, encompass an emotional space; flowers challenge conventional ideas of femininity where the grime and evidence of the studio floor leaves marks upon their innocent petals, relieving them of their bolstered ego.” To be sure, there were many points of connection; the Nauman works set off an associative and historical chain in which Gernsbacher’s recasting, as it were, of post-Minimalist tropes—with all their material sensuality—gained significance. Yet to her credit, the comparison also felt superfluous, or at least compensatory: The meaning behind her work was right there, even if still out of reach.

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by Roberta Smith

When it comes to postwar art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art rarely lets you breathe easy for long. Just when it hits a good phase, it suddenly changes course and more than likely shoots itself in the foot. Things were really looking up at the Met Breuer, with its superbly installed recent exhibition of Jack Whitten’s sculpture. Then the Met suddenly pulled out of the last three years of its eight-year lease there. It cut short a project that was producing results, giving the Met’s 20th-century curators sustained access to larger and better-designed galleries.

And there’s more to worry about than just exhibitions, as has been made clear with the dismaying “Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera,” a long-term display of nearly 60 works drawn mostly from the Met’s permanent collection. This show creates the impression that despite the Met’s expertise in every other area of art, it frequently seems clueless and guided more by fashion than imagination when it comes to its collecting of postwar art.

As a title, “Epic Abstraction” is overblown, especially once you see the show, which contains plenty that is modest. The phrase “Epic Abstraction” seems to be an attempt to rename the heroics that began with Abstract Expressionism, and now are supposedly continuing in an art world with a widening canon — one much more diverse and inclusive of women and artists of color.

As for the “Pollock to Herrera” part of the title, there are four canvases and five commanding drawings by Pollock here, but poor Carmen Herrera is expected to hold up her end of things with just one geometric abstraction — a recent work that is a promised gift to the Met and her first to enter its collection. The show is intermittently chronological, moving generally from Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism, then Color Field painting. It begins canonically, in great-man mode, with eight of the nine Pollocks in the first gallery followed by 10 paintings on canvas or paper by Mark Rothko, which look less dazzling than they should. The Pollocks are disrupted by an extraordinary untitled 1958 painting by Kazuo Shiraga of the Japanese Gutai group. Shiraga made paintings like this mostly by dragging his feet through mounds of oil paint in response to Pollock’s work. Here his effort makes the scale of Pollock’s great “Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)” of 1950 suddenly look almost delicate. It is a telling comparison.

Rothko’s thunder is stolen by Isamu Noguchi’s striking 1945 sculpture “Kouros,” whose biomorphic pieces of pink and gray marble have a smooth fleshiness and a generally figurative configuration. Standing at the center of the gallery, the piece is fully visible on all sides, in quantities of space. It looks stunning. From here things devolve into a kind of free-for-all. The idea that art needs space is lost to overcrowding, and everyone else is represented by a single work. (Except Clyfford Still, who has two — including the compact black-on-black-on-black “1950-E,” which hasn’t been on view in five years.) The largest gallery is overshadowed by Louise Nevelson’s overweening black sculpture “Mrs. N’s Palace,” whose footprint rivals that of the Temple of Dendur’s (and look at all the space that gets). It ends with works by Thornton Dial, Frank Bowling and Yayoi Kusama, and the dueling craziness of Elizabeth Murray’s imploding “Terrifying Terrain” (1989-90) and Jean Tinguely’s outstanding “Narva” (1961), a seeming explosion of wire and machine parts. It’s an outstanding example of his work.

Several of the stronger works are extended loans. If you find yourself giddily thinking “Wow! The Met owns this?” the answer may be no, it doesn’t. Not “Dutch Interior,” Cy Twombly’s big beautiful mostly handwritten painting from 1962; not Helen Frankenthaler’s bold “Western Dream” (1957); and not the big rutted Shiraga. You wouldn’t feel shortchanged if the Met had more paintings of this caliber, but it doesn’t. Thankfully, at least one of the standouts is a promised gift, headed for the collection: Joan Snyder’s 1971 “Smashed Strokes Hope,” a mural-like canvas whose big strokes of color float separately in space, like words. It takes no flak from Joan Mitchell’s immense “La Vie en Rose” of 1979 (acquired in 1991), in which harsh black strokes crash against softer sprays of pink, white and lavender.

Other new acquisitions disappoint, including paintings by Bridget Riley and Hedda Sterne and a sculpture by Barbara Hepworth; none of these works shows the artists at their best. Stronger recent arrivals are Judit Reigl’s foreboding “Guano (Menhir)” of 1959-64; Ilona Keseru’s pink, red and purple wall hanging, inspired by tombstones but resembling open mouths, from 1969; and a handsome shaped abstract painting by Robert Mangold.

Among the great old standbys is Alma Thomas’s “Red Roses Sonata,” of 1972, owned by the Met since 1976, its red mosaic pattern lighted from within by shifting shades of celadon. It would be wonderful to see it near Barnett Newman’s regal “Concord,” of 1949, instead of the more Minimalist “Shimmer Bright” (1968), which is displayed here. Several of the new acquisitions are by women or artists of color; the exhibition makes a mild attempt to shift the canon away from white men and toward everyone else. But it has no historical rhyme or reason. It skips around arbitrarily and leaves out a lot. Mark Bradford is a talented painter whose career has blown up. I don’t know that I’d call him “pre-eminent” except in prices, but his work is actually quite conventional. Including his 2016 “Duck Walk” signals little more than a desire for hipness; putting it next to a big Clyfford Still is not going to reshape any canon. But it does rather brutally ignore the history of African-American abstraction. The Met has a 1970 painting by Sam Gilliam, “Whirlirama,” that would have been much more appropriate here. It also owns a canvas by Stanley Whitney.

For something more recent, there are David Hammons’s insurrectional shrouded “Tarp” paintings. He’s pre-eminent, and they’re epic. Could the Met’s trustees have said yes to one of those?

History has it that they (the trustees) weren’t too keen on Jackson Pollock’s “Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)” when Robert Beverly Hale, then the head of its newly created contemporary American art department, presented it in 1957 — the year after he convinced them to buy Willem de Kooning’s “Easter Sunday” (which is here, opposite the Twombly) and four years after he brought them the marvelous Noguchi sculpture. It might seem that blame should go to the show’s organizer, Randall Griffey, a curator in the department of modern and contemporary art, but that’s too simple. For one thing, Mr. Griffey’s specialty is American art before 1950. His ground-floor arrangement of earlier modernist works from the collection — including European art and design objects — is solid and lively, as was his installation of the outsider artwork from the show introducing the Souls Grown Deep Foundation gift last spring. But the problem signaled here is larger than one curator. It represents a lack of vision that has, on and off for decades, plagued the Met’s collecting of recent art. Fixing it will take money, courage and commitment from several levels of the institution’s hierarchy.

It’s horrible to see the Met look this hapless.

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by David Pagel

Sara Gernsbacher’s new sculptures are so unassuming you may not notice how good they are. If you like your art big, bold and aggressive, you’ll probably think that the young L.A. artist’s seven body-scaled works fail to hold the walls on which they hang. And that they make the large main space at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery feel hollowed out, even empty.

You would not be wrong.

But you’d miss the supple strength — and silent power — of Gernsbacher’s scrappy sculptures.

Emptiness, and the sense that something is missing — either lost or stolen — is intrinsic to Gernsbacher’s exhibition “Threefold Body.” Each of its quietly compassionate pieces takes its place in a world of suffering and sorrow, both obvious and immeasurable.

Gernsbacher makes her irregularly shaped forms by puddling pigmented silicone onto her studio floor and letting it dry into skin-like sections. She spray-paints some areas, trims selected edges and cuts sleeve-size holes in others. The resulting shapes vaguely resemble flowers, garments, limbs, easels and architectural elements. Gernsbacher then loops together three or four shapes and pins the casual composition to the wall, where it droops, like a coat thrown over a chair or a decorative garland that has fallen to the floor and been trampled underfoot. All of her works look limp and dirty, as if they have been scraped from a downtown sidewalk. The sense of exhaustion is palpable and poignant, suggesting the kind of weariness you feel in your bones. Pie-in-the-sky idealism is nowhere to be found. The same goes for saccharine sentimentality. But ennui does not win out.

What you get, instead, is a no-nonsense assessment of art’s place in life: an intimate endeavor that flies under the radar of everyday attentiveness, a sotto voce communiqué whose meanings get under your skin and won’t go away. Underdog optimism is Gernsbacher’s great subject.

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by Marc Haefele

Sara Gernsbacher’s wall works are not paintings. They are compositions of simple colors and shapes that suggest, rather than indicate, juxtapositions, combinations, interconnections, meldings and separations. Spray painted, trimmed and further layered, they evoke a multidimensional presence. They are often semi-figurative. And they are tactile, mostly wrought of acrylic and enamel on poured, colored silicon sheets. Yes, you can touch them. If you dare. There are seven of them on display at the Parrasch Heijnen Gallery. They surround you in a single room. If they—for the most part—share a single motif, it is that of a flat-figured floral shape, much recalling Andy Warhol’s famous, brightly colored five-petaled hibiscus shapes of the mid-’60s. But Warhol’s blooms were flatly displayed in orderly rows in regular, rectangular formats. Gernsbacher’s blooms, however, challenge the flowers’ passive, decorative, feminine role. They have been sullied, dirtied, besmirched, pierced or entwined by the other colored shapes in the work. They have all led a rough tough life. In Ronald Firbank’s phrase, they are “The Flower Beneath the Foot.’’ Yet, each blossom shape also finds its place as a highly stressed component in Gernsbacher’s work.

Take her creation Shape is Your Touch (all works 2018). An orange figure-eight body seems to be holding a magenta blossom as a shield, while it takes a step. Is it receding or advancing? Aggression or retreat? The beholder decides. Three into One is the most multi-dimensional of Gernsbacher’s pieces here (it juts out of the wall nearly five inches). Three feet tall, its two leg-like components join at the cowled top at a narrow angle. Its colors are dull and muted, but its cloaked torso and hooded facial vacancy mournfully address the onlooker. In its jointed scalene triangularity, Magic Child is like a more affirmative cousin to Three Into One, but here, the yellow “blossom” is more of an ornament than an implement of battle. It circles the right segment of the construction like a bright cuff, giving the fleshtinted element a dancerly pose and the work itself a sense of latent movement. Flower Brick Body, on the other hand, is a four-eyed, jump-up delight, evoking SpongeBob SquarePants. Combined of four of Gernsbacher’s trademark paperylooking blossoms, it clings to the gallery wall like a large, bright-yellow moth. You almost expect it to flutter. Again, the sense of impending motion. Most pleasing to me of all was Up Arms Center, a being consisting of a black, squat torso with four extended pink-colored limbs. The two “arms” grasp a yellow Gernsbacher blossom overhead, as though it were an oversize golden ball. For all the world, it seems like the figure is trying to sink a basket. Maybe that is one of the subtler delights of Gernsbacher—her dry, invasive humor that infects her most colorful works and animates their sense of imminent motion, as though they might spring to life before our eyes. Meanwhile, they fire our imagination.

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by Nancy Hass

A few days after Sept. 11, the artist Robert Longo noticed his youngest son, 6-year-old Joseph, standing in his bedroom in their Brooklyn apartment before a skyscraper made of Montessori blocks. Longo watched as the boy rammed it methodically with one of the three-inch cast-metal planes he collected, a Boeing 767-223ER, the exact model Mohamed Atta had just used to fly into the first tower of the World Trade Center. “He just kept crashing it into the blocks,” Longo, 65, recalls, “over and over and over. I just can’t get the image out of my head.”

Soon after, Longo began to translate the memory into a sculpture that he is still working on to this day. He began designing a life-size replica of a 159-foot-long 767-223ER, with an epoxy-resin charcoal-blackened exterior, which he planned to show someday at the Deichtorhallen museum in Hamburg, Germany, where its fuselage would command the entire central space, one wing jutting through the building’s arched windows like a charred limb. Viewers would maneuver around the piece, leaving footprints in the charcoal dust. Longo always imagined displaying the work in Hamburg because Atta had lived there; a friend of Longo’s had, some years before the attacks, been a passenger in Atta’s taxi and had forgotten in the back seat a gift for his young daughter, which Atta had demanded money to return.

But the 17-year slog to realize the work the artist calls “The First Plane” is still ongoing. There have been endless prototypes, numerous engineering studies, countless rounds of fund-raising. Scheduling at the Deichtorhallen, where the work was originally to be shown in February, has been problematic — that’s what happens when deadlines sprawl — and it occurred to Longo that he should contact the families of the victims who died in the flight to ensure the installation has their blessing. Where less dogged artists might consider each complication a deal breaker, Longo regards them as “wrinkles.” The image of his son and the first plane remains undimmed. Despite its elusiveness, the project has become in some ways as emotionally essential to him as the “Men in the Cities” charcoal drawing series that made his reputation in the 1980s. “I have no idea how long this will ultimately take me,” he says. “You just keep going. You don’t let it die.”

Any serious art requires prodigious commitment. Ambitious works can take years. But there is dedication to one’s craft, and then there is what many might call obsession, the decades-long fixation on a consuming project. Sometimes the work remains unfinished forever, but even those that eventually reach fruition take their toll: Both the piece and the artist can end up, in the words of Michael Heizer — who has worked for 46 years on “City,” a mile-plus-long, as yet unrealized minimalist compound of ramps, slabs and chasms in the Nevada desert — “torqued and twisted” forever.

Artists throughout history have worked on single pieces for spectacular lengths of time. Auguste Rodin worked for 37 years on “La Porte de l’Enfer,” a set of carved doors with more than 180 figures inspired by Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” commissioned in 1880 for a Paris design museum that was never built. Marcel Duchamp spent the last 20 years of his life secretly toiling in his Greenwich Village studio on the installation “Étant Donnés” (1966). The world thought he had officially retired from art to concentrate on competitive chess, but it turns out he was also concocting a room-size fantasia of sticks, aluminum, parchment and plastic clothespins, with a splayed female nude at its center. Duchamp considered the piece finished, but it was not exhibited until a year after his death in 1968. Installed permanently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it was designed to be glimpsed through a peephole in a heavy wooden door, as if the work itself were meant to remain a secret.

These kinds of efforts have long been acknowledged as much for the otherworldly patience they require as for their artistry. But in an era of digital hyperdrive, the meticulous, even tedious work that once went into art has been largely replaced by a keystroke, and attention spans have shrunk to virtually nothing. The notion of a contemporary artist pledging fidelity to a single work over decades now seems even more heroic.

“You have to have the sort of singular personality that enables you to delay gratification way, way beyond normal limits,” says Lisa Le Feuvre, the executive director of the Holt-Smithson Foundation, which supports the work of the husband-and-wife duo Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt, each of whom specialized in massive environmental installations that took years of planning and execution. Smithson, whose “Spiral Jetty” (1970), a 1,500-foot curl of earth and basalt on a Utah lake bed, has come to symbolize such all-consuming devotion, died as a result of his outsize ambition: In 1973, the tiny plane in which he was surveying land for his next, vast project crashed into a mesa near Amarillo, Tex. “You’re like a research scientist,” says Le Feuvre, “willing to tolerate constant failure, pick yourself up and begin again.”

Visual artists who labor for decades are often compared with writers famous for their glacially paced efforts. Ezra Pound worked for 47 years on “The Cantos”; William H. Gass began his novel “The Tunnel” in 1969, finishing it in 1995; Ralph Ellison’s follow-up to 1952’s “Invisible Man,” eventually titled “Juneteenth,” was pulled together from 2,000 manuscript pages and scraps after the author died in 1994. But a writer’s progress can be measured in pages, and the image of the writer banging his head against the wall trying to write a lone sentence is enough of a cliché that we have a colloquialism — writer’s block — to explain why a book might take eons to finish. There is no equivalent term for visual artists, however, and at any rate, the work they do can be less tangible, less narratively tidy, more difficult to define as complete — by both artist and audience. Pablo Picasso, who mostly worked very fast, once remarked, “To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense!”

A work of art, then, is never completed so much as it is forever evolving, like a child. And like a child, an artwork requires attention, concern, respect, love — even though (unlike a child), it can’t return these emotions. Certain artists build the concept of a long gestation period into the work itself: “Black Square XVII,” an installation by Taryn Simon at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, is currently an empty shelf in the museum, reserved for a chunk of vitrified nuclear waste once its radioactive properties have diminished to a level safe for human exposure — about 1,000 years from now, in 3015.

Though all artists can be given to meditating on a piece for longer than might seem rational or sane, it is the so-called land artists like Smithson and Holt, minimalist sculptors who left New York in the 1960s for the open, malleable vistas of the American West, who remain the poster children for creative endurance, in part because of the nature of their particular obsession. Making works that can be seen from the stratosphere and can outlast the elements means blasting through rock and transporting endless tons of soil. Walter De Maria, whose 1977 “The Lightning Field” comprises 400 pointed steel poles in a 1-mile-by-1-kilometer grid on a plain in New Mexico, once joked that his “paintbrush is the Caterpillar.”

The living icons of such effort are the trio of Heizer, Charles Ross and James Turrell. Each has worked almost constantly on their defining chef-d’oeuvre for at least 40 years; at this point, their efforts have arguably tipped over into performance art. “City” has reportedly cost Heizer — or rather, his funders, including the 86-year-old 3M heir and patron Virginia Dwan and the Dia Foundation — as much as $25 million. (The artist now says he will be finished by 2020.) Since 1977, Turrell has been laboring on Roden Crater, a 400,000-year-old extinct volcano in the Northern Arizona desert, slowly turning it into what he has called a “controlled environment for the experiencing and contemplation of light.” In the first phase of construction alone, he moved 1.3 million cubic yards of earth.

In an early morning phone call from the site of “Star Axis,” his 11-story naked-eye observatory of sculptural forms in dirt, granite, sandstone, bronze and steel on a mesa in the New Mexico desert, Ross, the most accessible and voluble of the three men, insists that the project he began 47 years ago will be done by 2022. (But, he concedes, “I’ve been saying it will be finished in three or four years for 20 years now.”) By many accounts, he does seem close to finishing the work, which can host six people at a time in a guesthouse on the property. One by one, visitors will scale the thousands of steps up an ascending tunnel toward an opening that will align them with the earth’s axis, witnessing the progression of the stars over a cycle of 26,000 years. Although he has private support, last year Ross sold his Manhattan loft to partially finance a foundation that will maintain the site for perpetuity.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, such artists tend to live at the “intersection of narcissism, obsession and megalomania,” says James Crump, who directed “Troublemakers,” a 2016 documentary about the land art movement. “You have to wonder if there isn’t an element of not being able to face the finish.” In any case, the artists themselves wind up as profoundly transformed as the landscape, for good and bad. Heizer’s wife, the artist Mary Shanahan, who was instrumental to “City,” left him four years ago, presumably depleted by the ordeal and the relationship. Not long before, he nearly died from chronic neural and respiratory problems, and developed a morphine addiction from the pain treatment. The work can start to overtake everything else, to serve as a stand-in for reality, a kind of escape from everything that isn’t the work itself. There is something attractive about continuing to tinker with a piece — perhaps superfluously — to stay in a suspended state of artistic nirvana in which the work can simply continue and the end never has to come.

But the beatific Ross, now 80, marriage intact (“though to be fair, she is my second wife”), seems to be moving one step closer to the bliss of completion with each strenuous section of “Star Axis.” The work may point toward the infinitude of the universe, but Ross measures his progress in fairly practical terms. “I consider it an adventure in geometry and astronomy, bumping into the spiritual,” he says. “It still unfolds every day for me.”

At its best, fruition after so many years may spark an unexpected late-life creative renaissance. Consider the Los Angeles-based light artist Mary Corse, 73, who since the 1960s has worked largely without the acclaim granted her male peers, including Turrell and Dan Flavin (though that recently has changed with her first solo museum survey at the Whitney and a new permanent Dia: Beacon exhibition of several works). The Tet Offensive was barely over and students were storming the Democratic National Convention in Chicago when she began “The Cold Room” (1968-2017), an immersive environment in which a wireless light box hangs in temperatures chilled to near freezing — the better to focus the viewer’s mind on the light itself. Over the years, she struggled for financing, took physics classes to aid planning and built parts of it herself, but it was not until last year, at Los Angeles’s Kayne Griffin Corcoran gallery, that she was fully able to display the completed work. On the gallery walls around the work hung what amounted to a survey of her artistic stages since 2003, including luminous paintings she made as she struggled to bring “The Cold Room” fully into being. “Finishing the piece has finally made the past present for me. Was it five minutes ago? Five years? Fifty?” Corse says. “Never would I have thought that this is how it would end — with a new beginning.”

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Cleverly convoluting scientific and sociological meanings of the word “culture,” Sophie von Hellermann’s paintings portray clear disks brimming with mysterious vignettes in “Petri Dishes,” her show at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery in Los Angeles. Each canvas functions as a petri dish for von Hellermann’s painted explorations where microbiologic vessels serve as symbolic spheres for testing paint’s properties and experimenting with human microcosms. With boundless variations potentially occurring within its limited framework, the petri dish is an ingenious metaphor for the chance and creativity inherent to painting. Artists and scientists both quest insight. Just as scientists mix ingredients on agar plates, painters spread fluid material over flat surfaces, having some goal in mind but never knowing exactly what will happen.

Von Hellermann emphasizes this unpredictability via loose brushwork that leaves her subjects’ identities and her scenarios’ purport open to interpretation. Incipient figures and creatures emerge as from organic material within dreamily indefinite scenes seeming to swirl around in fluctuant vortexes. Von Hellermann paints with watery acrylic on unprimed canvas—a one-shot technique that can’t easily be corrected, for each brushstroke soaks indelibly into the surface as soon as it is applied. This imbues her works with a mysterious sense of nascence, like Chinese and Japanese ink paintings. Fluid and ethereal, her thin washes still seem wet, underscoring the formative evanescence of her subject matter. You can almost sense the artist dipping her brush in a vat of paint, swishing its bristles into the linen, and delicately tracing calligraphic lines. Among the first pictures one sees, Bursting Bubbles (all works 2018) could be interpreted as a self-portrait. Holding a stick appearing symbolic of a paintbrush, a grayish-purple woman bears an expression of inquisitive wonder as she leans over a group of six transparent floating globes. The woman and her surrounding landscape are vaguely formed; her legs dissolve into grass, and her left arm seems to emerge from her side. The globes are mostly empty, except for one containing hazy gray figures. Perhaps they are petri dishes that have yet to be painted, or microcosmic bubbles that must be punctured for their content to emerge.

Painting tools intermingle with scientific and cultural references. In Hyenas, a paintbrush draws a white line amidst a dish where layered blotches appear as test strokes or colors upon a palette. In Canterbury Bells, a bloody crucifixion is enveloped in a swirling delirium of lurid yellows, neon oranges, and blinding bluish whites.

Many paintings feature mythological creatures and legendary characters. Krakens, Petra, mermaids, and dragons collide, frolic, and preside over expressionistic realms within shallow cylinders.

Omnipresent microscopes suggest artist’s scrutiny and viewer’s gaze. A pair of hands theatrically hovers above the dish in Strange Growth, as though having just performed a magic trick. Microorganisms and their realms are so tiny that humans cannot relate to them without the aid of mediatory devices. In this respect, bodies of scientific knowledge seem like parallel worlds of magical fantasies, no more real than fairy tales.

Drawing on traditional folklore, von Hellermann paints society as a curated collection of microcosmic myths. Just as scientists manipulate cellular matter, we, operating underneath the powers that be, help shape normative societal notions. Human cultures are as mercurial as cell cultures. Von Hellermann’s “Petri Dishes” frame painting as an empowering method for reconstituting societal narratives on one’s own, if only within the dominion of a canvas.

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by Shana Nys Dambrot

Across a series of ethereal vignettes in Sophie von Hellermann’s new series, the petri dish operates as both a quirky formal motif and a sophisticated allegorical framework. Each of the mostly large-scale paintings (all acrylic on canvas, all 2018), display a picture plane tipped forward, raking like a stage so that the “dishes” are flattened, but without fully losing their form and function as containment. Her scenes play out within these shallow circular confines.

The series premise evokes a science set-up, like an experiment or specimen array. Culture itself is a word with meanings in both society and laboratory. The recurrence of microscopes, gloved hands, and medical-type instruments here and there in several paintings reinforces this idea. But at the same time, the containers also skip through a sweep of art historical tropes, from the “Unicorn in Captivity” and its famous low white fence, to the saintly halo of religious icons, or crest-lozenges in court portraits common to the Renaissance aesthetic, both Italian and Northern.

There are also clear references to core modern emblems of art history, such as languid guitars borrowed from Picasso in Electric Cool Aid Acid Test; floating dancers evoking Matisse in Ballet, and also in Strange Growth; glowing grass in neon poofs like Kandinsky’s poplars in Bursting Bubbles; a striking cross on a hill and what might be architecture in Canterbury Bells; animal spirits in Hyenas and Kraken Under Scrutiny. In all cases, things are both seen and sensed.

There are human forms and even portraits present as well, but these and indeed all the figures are ghostly, they waver and hover like apparitions in opium smoke. This is partly due to von Hellermann’s breezy rendering, but mostly due to her treatment of the acrylic pigment. She presses her color firmly and smoothly into the canvas, in a methodology linked to Frankenthaler but in the service of narrative and imagery, of actual pictures, beyond pure gesture. Her surfaces can’t be worked in any sense of painterly, so her figures stay ethereal and, like Turner’s, her atmospherics are rife with signs of life.

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by Christopher Knight

Usually, the front of a painting is the part that counts most. It’s the field where a composition lives, color blooms, subject matter — figurative or abstract — unfolds, brushstrokes are elided or emphasized. The front is where the action is.

Tony DeLap has been making highly unusual paintings since about 1974. A current show handily demonstrates that the front of a DeLap painting, contrary to expectations, is almost never the main event. The welcome retrospective exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum features 60 paintings and sculptures, plus more than 80 works on paper, by the widely admired Orange County artist, who turned 90 in November.

In fact, more often than not, the front of a DeLap painting is mostly blank. It might be a flatly painted jolt of intense, monochrome color — crimson, say, or especially cobalt blue. A sizable number are a neutral gray or black or else a near-neutral — a dusty gray-green, for instance, like a leaf of lamb’s ear or desert sage.

And good luck finding a brushstroke. DeLap’s paintings are mostly monochrome, but not gesturally so. Each one looks as if it is an uninflected chunk of industrially manufactured color, like powder-coating that has been electrostatically applied.

Mostly, though, the surface plane is a keenly wrought mechanism to get you to look to see what’s going on along the sides. There, beyond the painting’s edges, the possibilities are several.

The side might twist like a section of Moebius strip, its wood ribbon starting off as a framing edge but torqueing into a smooth sculptural form. The side might bend into itself and disappear altogether, leaving the surface plane to hang free a few inches from the wall. Or it might be a canvas-covered curve, arcing away from an edge that’s as straight as an arrow.

Eccentric shadows on the wall don’t always correspond to a viewer’s expectations, based on the shape of the painting as seen from the front. Shadow play is a cue that something is up, something that disrupts convention.

By the late 1960s, when artists were intensely scrutinizing every aspect of painting, the rectangle used in conventional canvases had come under concentrated inspection. Ellsworth Kelly, Ron Davis, Frank Stella and many others experimented with canvases in eccentric shapes.

DeLap began slicing up the traditional rectangle — as well as the less common (but equally traditional) circular tondo — into various irregular geometries. A square and a circle might intersect, creating a virtually indescribably shape. A hexagon internally cut up into pie sections could visually flip into an illusionistic projection of a cube, like something by Larry Bell, its internal ridges rippling outward like a pebble dropped in a pond. Unorthodox contours emphasized the painting as a physical object — a thing occupying space, a place where illusion and reality collide.

Some works, such as “Maga” from 1974 and “Spirit Extras” from 1979, are even assembled from multiple shaped canvases.

“Maga” looks like a schematic rendering of a theatrical stage. The top is curved, like a proscenium. The bottom is notched at each side, like steps. Three canvases are cobbled together, the schematic lines that appear to be drawn on the painting’s surface actually made from each canvas abutting the others.

The polished wooden frame around the proscenium twists in toward the wall as it approaches the summit. DeLap is putting on quite a show.

“Spirit Extras” is a leisurely curve nearly 7 feet long — but less than 4 inches wide. On closer inspection, that already modest width turns out to be more modest still, made from not one but two joined canvases. Lines do not exist in nature, so the curved line in the center of the painting is formed by the physical abutment of two canvases.

Just for good measure, DeLap has also torqued the two outer edges of the curve. One bends away from the front, the other bends toward it. “Spirit Extras” is itself a line, assembled from a surplus of linear edges.

Edges are a thing with DeLap. He wants to push you over them.

The most profound edge, metaphorically speaking, is the one that separates life from death. Appropriately, his paintings’ titles often come from the great beyond: Spirit art is a type of picture said to be guided from the afterlife, while Maga is a Hindu priestly caste.

One pleasure of the show is the abundance of his early works, dated between 1961 and 1974, when DeLap’s well-known shaped hybrids of painting and sculpture began to emerge. The earliest are not often seen. Guest curator Peter Frank, who is also responsible for the indispensable catalog, lays out the evolution.

The artist was born in Oakland in 1927, and his work began to mature in the Bay Area just prior to his move to Southern California. (DeLap was a founding faculty member at the then-new UC Irvine in 1965; he taught at the school for the next 26 years.) Eccentric barely begins to describe those early works.

Double-sided tabletop boxes are fronted in glass. Inside are layered planes of thin, painted chipboard stepping down toward the center, often mysteriously suspended in space. The design is like an aerial view of an amphitheater.

At their center, peepholes or narrow slits allow you to look through the object — although typically, the focused view is blocked by a dot or line that DeLap has painted on the glass. Sometimes, the work’s title is spelled out in letters tucked into the four corners on either side of the box — “Mona Lisa,” “Ping Pong,” “Flip Flop,” “Hard Edge.”

These works are like an abstract cross between a Joseph Cornell shadow box and William Hogarth’s “Satire on False Perspective,” a famous 18th century engraving in which the artist deliberately confuses illusionistic effects of linear perspective. (“Whoever makes a design without the knowledge of perspective will be liable to such absurdities,” Hogarth wrote across the bottom of the print.) Frank, the curator, provocatively connects DeLap’s geometric design to the slitted, cast-concrete blocks with which Frank Lloyd Wright built Pasadena’s great Millard House — a DeLap favorite.

To that I would add the growing prominence of Marcel Duchamp. The Dada imp’s word games and visual pranks were busily bumping off Picasso as the primary influence on the ’60s American avant-garde.

DeLap’s eccentric boxes, which focus vision while blocking it, are related to impossible objects — a type of optical illusion. M.C. Escher’s endless, interlocking stairways are the genre’s most popular example, but its 20th century origins in art are traced to Duchamp.

In Duchamp’s 1916-17 “Apolinère Enameled,” a commercial advertisement for paint showing a little girl painting a bed white is cleverly altered to confuse the perspective lines. The bed impossibly collapses in on itself, while a mirror reflection of the little girl is skewed. Duchamp underscored the deliberateness of his visual trickery by removing a piece of the picture’s frame — telling, perhaps, for the oddball framing devices DeLap was soon making.

The show also includes freestanding painted sculptures — mostly flat, layered, linear forms that unfurl and undulate on the floor or pedestal. These are hybrids of painting and sculpture, like the shaped canvases, but they are less engaging than their wall-bound cousins. DeLap is at his best when approaching hybridization from the painting side rather than the sculpture side. He comes across as a painter at heart.

The exception to the rule is “Floating Lady,” 1974-78, which stands in front of the Orange County Museum of Art a few miles from Laguna Beach. (The maquette for the sculpture is in the show.) A 46-foot wooden beam whose ends balance precariously on two concrete cubes slowly transforms from being square at one end to triangular at the other.

The sculpture is too long for a viewer to take in its slow metamorphosis all at once. It demands close-up scrutiny and attentive inspection to know what’s happening right before your eyes. In the process, a forced perspective both shortens and lengthens the beam’s appearance, depending on where you stand.

“Floating Lady” is its own impossible object. I suspect Hogarth and Duchamp would both approve.

So would Harry Houdini. DeLap has been famously obsessed with magic and magicians throughout his life — his 90th birthday was celebrated at Hollywood’s Magic Castle, where he’s been a member for 50 years — and the results of that fascination are in abundant evidence in the retrospective. It’s a show where the hand of the artist might better be described as often marvelous sleight of hand.

Read more here.

by Jody Zellen ·

At first glance it appears as if there is nothing there. Then the eye is drawn to a faint shadow on the gallery wall. A silhouette appears, then it is gone. Where did this shadow come from? Is it an illusion? The answer is that the image on the wall is a faint projection, one of many barely visible moving images created by Tom Friedman for this exhibition, “Ghosts and UFOs: Projections for Well-Lit Spaces.”

Among the works (all short projected loops dated 2017) are One Minute Egg, a white egg-shaped oval that wobbles to and fro as if in a pot of boiling water; Pong, a rendition of one of the earliest arcade games, consisting of two vertical bars and a small square bouncing back and forth between them; Wall, an uncanny image of a hand pressing against fabric as if trapped behind the gallery wall; Kite String, two wavering lines crossed in the middle that simulate the movement of the back side of a kite fluttering in the sky; and Guardian, an image of a small silhouette walking back and forth along the top of the opening in the wall that leads from one room to another. Most of the pieces project white light onto white walls, creating subtly captivating and ephemeral impressions. The few works in color include Sun, an undulating and glowing yellow/orange ball, and Dotted Line, which is the most charged work on view. Here, Friedman has isolated the heads of the last 14 U.S. presidents, presenting them as a horizontal line of gesticulating and squirming circles that comprise an ongoing continuum of silent talking heads.

Friedman is best known for obsessive, impeccably crafted, witty sculptures where he often painstakingly replicates mass produced objects using everyday materials; for example, Untitled (1999), where nine “Total” cereal boxes were cut into small squares and combined to make one large box that was entirely handcrafted to approximate the original. His often humorous pieces evoke a sense of wonder. Whether working in video or sculpture, Friedman is interested in questioning perception. Is what you see what you think you see? The idea of creating projections for a bright room is absurd, as projected imagery all but disappears in a well-lit room. But this is Friedman’s point. Rather than create objects, he presents a suite of moving images that are barely visible. They are ephemeral and ambient, there and not there. As in his previous exhibitions, Friedman has filled the gallery with that which is recognizable and iconic—the sun, an egg, pong, U.S. presidents—yet showcases them in unpredictable and innovative ways. The videos in “Ghosts and UFOs: Projections for Well-Lit Spaces” avoid materiality; ever-changing forms, they defy objecthood while simultaneously alluding to a fleeting physical presence.

Read more here.

Tony Delap

Interview by Amanda Quinn Olivar, West Coast Editor

Tony DeLap is a pioneer artist of West Coast minimalism, LA’s Cool School of Finish Fetish, Op Art, and the Light and Space movement. He was born in 1927 in Oakland, California, attended the San Francisco Art Institute and the Claremont Graduate School, and then moved to Southern California where he taught at University of California, Irvine. He had his first solo exhibition at Oakland Museum in 1960. Tony participated in both the 1965 Responsive Eye at MOMA and the 1966 Primary Structures exhibition at the Jewish Museum. He has had retrospectives at the Oceanside Museum of Art in 2013, the Orange County Museum of Art in 2000, and the San Jose Museum of art in 2001. Major museum collections include the New York Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim museum, the Tate Gallery in London, the LA County Museum of Art, Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, and Le Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland. DeLap is represented by Parrasch Heijnen Gallery.

Amanda Quinn Olivar (AQO): How would you describe your work? It seems “the edge” is consistent throughout much of your career. Why do you find it so important?

Tony DeLap (TD): My work has been described as hard-edge geometric abstraction. I developed a hyperbolic edge on the painting that allows the viewer to see changes in the painting’s shape as one moves across the surface of the work. From a single viewpoint, one misses those changes. Often a painting edge is cut back toward the wall and that reconfigures the shadow cast by the painting, as well as the painting itself.

AQO: Did your fascination with magic as a young boy influence your life as an artist?

TD: The art of magic is a long and varied one. When a master magician performs "sleights” with a deck of cards, he is creating a beautiful work of art. The paintings of mine that I am particularly fond of are those that have a sense of magic to them.

AQO: When did you become interested in architecture and design?

TD: When I was young, I built things: models, boats, airplanes. Models of hot dog stands were one of my favorites. I used wood, soap, found objects, whatever was available. Architecture came later.

AQO: What are some of the most unconventional materials you’ve worked with?

TD: Over the years, I have used many, many materials--lacquer spray paint, metal, wood, glass, plexiglass, chipboard, graphic letters, fiberglass--and many techniques, using a heat gun to form plastic, using various adhesives to combine materials. I have worked with fine printmakers, wood pattern-makers, bronze casters, and metal fabricators.

AQO: What role does color play in your work?

TD: My use of color is very intuitive and important to me. I spend a great deal of time deciding and mixing.

AQO: Agnes Martin connected you to your New York gallery, Robert Elkon, in the early 1960s. Please tell me about your friendship with Agnes.

TD: Agnes saw two of my double-sided sculptures, about 1963 at the San Francisco Museum of Art, and told Robert about them when she returned to New York. She sent her friends to my first show at the Elkon Gallery in 1965. We visited at her studio whenever we were in town; she introduced us to some of her artist friends, and one day several of us walked on the Brooklyn Bridge.

AQO: Why did you move to Southern California, and how did that come about?

TD: The British artist and critic John Coplans had been a good friend of mine when we were both teaching in San Francisco. We had also worked on an exhibition titled ‘Pop Art USA’ for the Oakland Art Museum, with him writing the catalog and me designing and producing the catalog. Some time after he moved to Los Angeles, he called to tell me he was joining the faculty of the new University of California, Irvine. He asked me to come to Southern California and discuss being hired as the first studio art professor. Kathy and l visited John in LA, toured the unfinished UCI campus, and decided to leave UC Davis, where I had been teaching, and join UCI.

AQO: You were the very first art professor at UC Irvine, and taught there for 30 years. Talk about balancing your studio practice and teaching.

TD: I enjoyed teaching at UC Davis, but it was a long commute from my life in San Francisco. I was able to find both very good living space in Corona del Mar, and studio space in nearby Costa Mesa just a few miles from UC Irvine. My actual teaching was two days a week, with some additional student time. So I was able to work as much as I wanted, and to also explore the museums and galleries in the LA area.

AQO: Which of your peers influenced your work the most?

TD: I was very influenced by aspects of the development of modernism in the 1940s, particularly by the works of Moholy-Nagy.

AQO: What is a typical day in the studio for you?

TD: Normally I spend several hours a day in the Corona del Mar studio, or the one in Washington state, if I am not traveling, buying supplies, checking projects outside the studio. This has been a particularly busy and productive couple of years for me. I have had shows at Parrasch-Heijnen in Los Angeles and Franklin Parrasch in New York. Parrasch Heijnen LA presented my work at Spotlight, 20th Century Pioneers, Frieze Art Fair, Randall Island Park, New York, and at Feature, Basel, in Switzerland. As you know, my Retrospective opens at the Laguna Museum of Art on February 25th. I have enjoyed very much working with Malcolm Warner the Museum Director and his staff. I have just received a preview copy of the catalog for that show, and I am truly delighted with the book. We have all worked on it, with our family helping when possible, our archivist/studio assistant very involved, and I am looking forward to the book’s distribution.

AQO: Please relate a memory that influenced or changed your life and career.

TD: I was extremely interested and impressed the first time I read the Language of Vision by Gyorgy Kepes.

AQO: What is your favorite art accident?

TD: I am very fond of making drawings and I was very pleased with the effect I achieved with spray painting on paper, in the early days.

Tony DeLap: A Retrospective will be on view from February 25 - May 28, 2018 at Laguna Art Museum.

Read more here.

By David Pagel

Just after Impressionism left some painters feelings that art was getting too loosey-goosey, Pointillists such as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac strove to make painting more scientific. They applied colors in tiny dots and let them mix in our eyes.

Today, Xylor Jane takes their experiments further. At Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, the Massachusetts-based artist makes painting mathematical. She applies colors in even tinier dots, often arranged so that they represent numbers, which form aesthetically charged sequences. Her third solo show in Los Angeles, “Magic Square for Earthlings,” is a tour de force of delicacy and nuance, its devotion and generosity putting visitors in touch with otherwise invisible patterns and rhythms that structure the cosmos while making us see that we are part of the mystery.

No two of Jane’s 10 intimately scaled paintings look alike. Each changes radically as you move close and step away. That’s because the dots of paint Jane has applied are smaller than the head of a pin and pointed, like the pin’s business end. They cast mini shadows. Some of Jane’s paintings resemble the impossible offspring of fractals and crazy quilts and Navajo blankets and diamond-studded jewelry, their subtly pulsating patterns appearing to be kinder and gentler versions of Op Art’s jarring compositions, perhaps what Agnes Martin would have painted if she were into hallucinogens. Others recall signs illuminated by LEDs, their flashing numerals transformed into constellations of various densities. Still others do both: interweave numbers and patterns in intoxicating geometries that evoke infinity while remaining grounded in the present. With great patience — and a large magnifying glass — Jane has made paintings that invite you to do two things at once: look at them and through them, relishing the tactility of their surfaces and peering into spaces that seem to reach far beyond what is possible. Like Lee Mullican’s great palette-knife paintings, Jane’s do double duty — and then some.

The numbers Jane parades across her panels add mind-expanding complexity. A lovely pink field, interspersed with black and blue triangles that form a seemingly endless string of numerals is titled “Nines (Twentysix 11 digit prime palindromes arranged in columns selected from a group of 42,100).” Another painting's title, “91418,” represents the date (Sept. 14, 2018) when she will have been alive 19,991 days — the last prime palindrome she expects to experience. All her paintings seem to be breathing, pulsing with the quiet vitality of living things. Best of all, they breathe life into their surroundings, where visitors are the recipients of their beneficence.

Read more here.

by Andy Campbell

An accidental smudge on the left edge of PeopleMover (all works 2017) reveals Xylor Jane’s geometric paintings to be an incommensurate tug-of-war between the steady work of the hand and the roving pleasure of the eye. Like a well-crafted collection of couturier garments, these ten paintings have in common certain marks and signs—little colorful dots, lists of prime-number palindromes—and most are handsomely framed out in steel with a dull, brassy finish. And yet, each work is unquestionably its own, possessing traits unique to itself. In PeopleMover, this individuated element would be the silvery ground, which appears nowhere else, and upon which Jane has painted a sequence of pastel triangles undulating across the painting’s surface. Similar to works by Agnes Martin, from afar, PeopleMover looks cool and mechanical, but when viewed up close one can see it is filled with little instances of humanity. The artist’s paintings vacillate between an enlivening riot of rainbow colors (Magic Square for Earthlings or 91418) and more deadpan, subdued palettes (Zahav [Ninety-four 11 digit prime palindromes arranged in four columns, selected from a group of 42,100]). Information—in the form of integers—seeps from the work, but its use value is anyone’s guess. In this way, Jane’s oil-on-board works put a kind of phenomenological spell on a viewer as she joins histories of Op art and the occult. If they could speak they would chant. And as with any good mystery, paying attention only deepens the enigma.

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by Annabel Osberg

A must-see for abstract painting devotees, Xylor Jane‘s show at Parrasch Heijnen is aptly titled “Magic Square for Earthlings.” Adhering to logic so bizarre as to have issued from outer space, her enchanting pictures do indeed appear to possess kinetic thaumaturgy as shape-shifters. If this sounds exaggerative, see for yourself. Stand a few inches from any one of the ten paintings and study its surface. Intricate panoramas unfold, kaleidoscopically shifting, glowing, shimmering as your eyes skim across the dotty brushed expanse brimming with structured texture. Now slowly back away. Squares and triangles oscillate and stagger, morphing size and shape. Two (2017) and Magic Square for Earthlings (2017) best exemplify that from certain angles, entire canvases appear to bulge —skew —jump as you wend around them. Magic lies in the fact that these squares weren’t painted by an alien, only an earthling with ingenious methods of employing her talent. Jane accomplishes her startling effects by devising compositions from recondite systems and wearing a magnified visor while painting. She incorporates manual idiosyncrasy into patterns of machine-like precision. Her painted patchworks are technically rigorous, but never too perfect: her touch, often irregular but never careless, is always present. Bristling like occult handmade motherboards, Jane’s pictures are reminders that digital devices are devised through human dexterity, computers powered by human fingers as well as mathematical digits. If you normally disfavor abstraction, give these paintings a chance and they might pull you in.

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by Christopher Knight

In chronological order of their opening, these were the 10 most engaging art museum exhibitions that I saw this year within L.A.'s immediate orbit. (Good news for the holiday break: Six of them are still on view.)

“Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth,” The Broad A big survey, not a full retrospective, the show offered a deep, satisfying dive into how Jasper Johns’ work launched a compelling critique of pure abstraction in the 1950s and beyond, changing American art’s direction.

“Tony DeLap: A Retrospective,” Laguna Art Museum

By 1974, Tony DeLap was making eye-bending hybrids of paintings and sculptures, distinctive for their mix of craftsmanship and discerning wit.

“Made in L.A. 2018,” UCLA Hammer Museum

With a smart focus on a wide variety of recent art keenly attuned to the turbulence of our socially disturbed time — notably, two-thirds of the artists were women — this was the best Hammer biennial yet.

“The Chiaroscuro Woodcut in Renaissance Italy,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Sleeper hit of the year, this splendid, unprecedented array of 107 woodcuts showed how Italian Renaissance printmakers crafted an illusion of illumination emerging from the shadows as a metaphor for unfolding thought.

“3D: Double Vision,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art

A provocative survey traces how, since the proliferation of camera images began in the mid-19th century, artists have grappled with the simple fact that physical depth is missing from a likeness found in any two-dimensional picture. (Continuing through March 31.)

“Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths,” UCLA Fowler Museum

More than 225 remarkable iron objects crafted in Africa, mostly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, embody power as a trait of human knowledge and facility rather than merely physical might. (The show ends Dec. 30.)

“Adrian Piper: Concepts and Intuitions, 1965-2016,” UCLA Hammer Museum

A big retrospective of the Berlin-based American Conceptual and performance artist ricochets between her enthusiasm for soulful popular culture (psychedelia, funk music) and academic philosophy (Immanuel Kant, David Hume), building on the powerful precedent of artist Sol LeWitt. (The show continues through Jan. 6.)

“One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art,” Museum of Contemporary Art

Full of surprises, this wide-ranging group exhibition is keyed to San Diego-based artist Manny Farber (1917-2008). His paintings, like his influential film criticism, value unexpected, down-to-earth, rigorous points of view over grandiosity and flash. (The show is on view through March 11.)

“The Renaissance Nude,” J. Paul Getty Museum

A fascinating look at how — and why — naked male and female bodies emerged as an artistic staple during the European Renaissance, this is the dazzling kind of art historical exhibition that only the Getty seems to do. (Catch it before it closes Jan. 27.)

“Laura Owens,” Museum of Contemporary Art

An entrancing midcareer survey of the L.A.-based painter lays out her pictorially savvy way with unexpected imagery, gathered from sources as far-flung as mainstream European art history, children’s books, greeting-card racks at the drugstore, traditional Chinese scroll-painting, wallpaper and — of course — the internet. (The show remains on view through March 25.)

Honorable mentions

“Olafur Eliasson: Reality Projector,” Marciano Art Foundation.

“Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions,” Getty Research Institute and Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

“King Tut: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh,” California Science Center.

“Robert Pruitt: Devotion,” California African American Museum.

“Stones to Stains: The Drawings of Victor Hugo,” UCLA Hammer Museum. Review.

The artist Olafur Eliasson, best known in this country for his 2008 installation of giant waterfalls in New York Harbor, has a new L.A. installation: a film themed light artwork called “Reality projector” at the Marciano Art Foundation.

Read more here.

by Christopher Michno

Tony DeLap: A Career Survey, 1963 – 2016, the bi-coastal double-venue exhibition at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, Los Angeles, through December, and Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York, through January, sampled the artist’s refined material treatments, quirky geometries and subversive edge-to-canvas relationships. DeLap’s category defying work intersected with a number of significant movements, including hard-edge abstraction, minimalism and finish fetish. His upcoming retrospective at the Laguna Art Museum (Tony DeLap: A Retrospective, February 25 – May 28, 2018) will exhibit 80 of his works and offer a comprehensive look at his five decades of art practice. In a recent studio visit, DeLap discussed his early career in the Bay Area, his subsequent move to Southern California, and his art.

CHRISTOPHER MICHNO: You were interested in a number of different disciplines—graphic design, architecture, design, painting and sculpture—and you once worked in architectural design.

TONY DELAP: I had a wide interest—not that I was that great at it all. When I was in Claremont, I was doing my best to paint. Then I took an architecture class from Whitney Smith. We took field trips, and I was very interested in architectural design. We went to houses in the Case Study House Program and to the Frank Lloyd Wright houses in LA.

I was also interested in graphic design. Going to the Aspen Design Conferences helped me realize that the hierarchies—that painting was painting, architecture was architecture, and graphic design was graphic design—were not exactly what I had thought they were. And I liked aspects of all of them. At Aspen I had an opportunity to meet the top people in their field, whether it was filmmaking or photography or painting or graphic design. Then I started becoming more my own artist. That was really a turning point for me.

MICHNO: In his essay, “The Shadow on the Wall,” Bruce Guenther pointed to a shift between 1962 and 1963 when you began to really refine your work. There was a lot happening then.

DELAP: Yes, and also, irascible John Coplans came to San Francisco. I met him because at that time we both had a class at Arts and Crafts (CCA) in Oakland. John liked what I was doing, and I was very pleased by that. Artforum was in its beginning stages in San Francisco, and Phil Leider was the major writer for Artforum at that time. Coplans, who was just over from England was also writing for Artforum. He was the first hire for the UCI art department. He asked me if I would come down and help him start all of that. Coplans was all over the place. Walter Hopps and Irving Blum and all of those LA people quickly became part of his group.

So here, right in this area, it was so conservative; it was just outrageous. But our house [Tony and Kathy DeLap] was like some underground thing. At the end of classes, everybody would come here. One day I came in and there was someone cooking. I said, I’m sorry, you have to introduce yourself. I didn’t even know who it was. But John was bringing in New York artists. I became very good friends with John McLaughlin, who was down in Dana Point. For the most part, he wasn’t driving. So when we had a get-together, I often would go down to get him. For a couple of years we had those very close goings-on with the art world of Los Angeles and whoever Coplans was bringing in from New York. It was really quite terrific. Coplans finally went east, and I think annoyed a lot of people because he had a tendency to come into a place and expend all of his own energies and then kind of write everyone off and go onto a new thing. He was sort of that type, always wanting something new. When we were in San Francisco, he left San Francisco because he thought it was such a provincial, backward place, as far as the arts were concerned, and he was in some ways quite right. And then he came down here. He didn’t like the idea that I was still in San Francisco.

I taught for one year in Davis, and when I finished that year, I could have stayed at Davis—it was interesting for me. Or I had the offer to come down here and help Coplans start UCI. By that time many of the younger artists, artists my age, were here—much closer to my world than what I had in San Francisco. We had a great time for those first two years. And then John got involved with the Pasadena Museum. Walter Hopps, Coplans, Irving Blum and a few others, they ran around together. And then of course eventually, I think, Coplans began to write off Los Angeles a little bit because next, it was New York.

MICHNO: And John McCracken was your studio assistant?

DELAP: John McCracken was my student at Oakland. When I first started teaching at Arts and Crafts, he was in one of my painting classes. We became friends, and he became my teaching assistant. For years he was my studio assistant. When Kathy and I came down here, he was without work. So I said, come on down. I got a studio in Costa Mesa and told him, make yourself at home. So the two of us worked in that space. He did his first plank there.

When Coplans and I talked about who we would get to teach at UCI, we thought we could certainly get McCracken because he was right there and didn’t have a job. So the department grew, and we brought others in. It was quite terrific.

MICHNO: Some of your early work looked like Joseph Cornell boxes.

DELAP: Absolutely. I didn’t know Joseph Cornell until I came to Los Angeles, and Irving Blum had a couple Cornell pieces, which I certainly very much liked. Those were the first I had seen. I was a kind of junk collector/painter. I used to go to the junk yards around San Francisco, which I quite enjoyed, find things and include them in collages in a very abstract-expressionist way. I think a lot of that came from seeing the art magazines from New York.

There were some real collage artists in those days. So I was quite involved in that, and I was doing OK with the work locally and having San Francisco museum shows. But then, one day—and it hit me rather quick—I went from that to a whole different approach. I put together a small hard-edge piece, with circles stepped down and a hole in the center. But it was two sided. I glassed that into a box, and it said “Mona” on one side and “Lisa” on the other. And then I did some paintings that were two sided. I made a similarly stepped-down painting. I took it off the wall and said, what’s going to happen if I put a back on this that’s the same as the front? It became a painting that you could walk around in real space.

So I started doing those–mainly the boxes–first, with trivial four letter words: “Time Bomb,” and things of that sort. I got the graphic characters from the art store. I was good at making precise imagery with simple tools because I had grown up making things. And I enjoyed it. It was nice to get back to materials.

That became a very successful avenue for me. There were various museum people from the East Coast around. I somewhat quickly got a reputation for what I was doing and was in some of the major shows on the East Coast. I was very pleased with that. I remember one phone call from a show they were doing in Oakland. They asked if they could borrow one of these pieces of sculpture. I said, I’m not a sculptor. The guy said, I don’t give a hell what you call yourself, can we borrow one of those things?

It amused me. I went around for a few days and said, gee, I’m a sculptor. But then I thought, well, I’m not a sculptor; I’m a guy that makes two-sided paintings. About that time, we came down here and I continued. But things began to change a bit in the work. I was going into different modes of expression, into what I call the twisted pieces and freestanding sculpture. Probably from my involvement in school with architecture, I always wanted to work on a larger scale. I had a number of opportunities to work out doors at an architectural scale. I enjoyed working with that kind of space, something you could move around or walk under, as compared to working in the studio. I think my work, even the paintings, have always had a physicality that certainly was, from my thinking, between painting and sculpture. That kind of hybrid work is what I was interested in.

MICHNO: The stretcher/support relationship to the canvas is important in much of your work. Is the curvature of the edge, which changes radius, all one piece of wood?

DELAP: Yes, one piece of wood, and it starts at ninety-degrees and then twists in toward the wall. That twist is hyperbolic. So it’s very much like the endless column. For example, you take a piece of paper and twist it and bring it around again in a childlike image—a figure 8 or whatever the case may be. When I developed the cutback edge, for me it was very interesting. I made a–it could have been just a square, and I made it with 90 degree sides. I stretched the canvas and put it on the wall, and I looked at it one day and just hated it. I thought, this is the dumbest thing to bother doing.

And then I went in one day with the same piece and took the canvas off, and that was when I made that hyperbolic edge, starting at 90 degrees, and having it cut back. And in that, there is a twist, which is an architectural form. Correctly made, architecturally, that twisted form is made out of straight lines. You can take straight timber and make a hyperbolic shape. So with the tools I have in the shop, I would cut all that. I would take a 4 x 4, just as an example, and I would start at one end and just start taking it off. When you put a straight edge on that, where light doesn’t come through, you have a hyperbolic curve. There are a number of buildings around the city—Eric Moss has a building or two like that.

MICHNO: The pieces you made with text–that got paired away pretty early.

DELAP: Oh, yes, it did. That was kind of a whim. I don’t know how many of those I did—probably a dozen. That was also quite early. When I came to Southern California, I had some of the first ones fabricated in aluminum.

MICHNO: Were those influenced by your interest in graphic design?

DELAP: Yes, and at the time I wondered, this is silly, isn’t it? But that’s where Coplans was good for me because he often protected me from my stupidity.

MICHNO: How?

DELAP: I would do something, and he would tell me, you’re really onto something here. Because sometimes you wonder just where you’re going.

MICHNO: Your new paintings are a combination of hard edge abstraction and shaped canvases.

DELAP: I have been looking for a more traditional means of ending up with something. I’ve been getting medium-sized pieces of aluminum cut into a square—eighth inch aluminum—and I’ll take that and stretch linen around it. After I’ve done that, I’ll paint.

MICHNO: I was looking at a photograph of the floating lady at what was then the Newport Harbor Museum. How did you pull that off?

DELAP: I really like this story. I hired a crane. Noisy as could be. He could only travel at certain times of day. We had hired Farrah Fawcett’s double as the floating lady, and I made a cradle. She was paid by how high off the ground she was going. At twenty feet, the theory was, if she fell, maybe the worst that would happen would be a broken arm. But then when it got up to forty feet, the cost really went up. Anyway, it worked out fine. Night time came. She got up to about thirty feet off the ground. There was a high intensity light on her. It looked terrific. What I enjoyed out of the whole thing was that I had Dai Vernon, the great magician, my hero actually, in the magic world, come down from uptown. He was the guru at The Magic Castle. I was always so honored to have him as a friend. Several weeks later I was at The Magic Castle, and Vernon was holding court with four or five magicians. I walked over and he said, Tony, come and sit down. So I sat down. After a little while, he said, oh by the way, I have to tell you guys, I went down to Newport a couple of weeks ago, and my friend here, Tony DeLap, he levitated this woman out over the ocean. One of the magicians said, my god, at that distance, how in the hell did he do that? And Vernon said, I haven’t the slightest idea. And all these guys were sitting there aghast. It was really quite funny. He was the best—really a great guy.

MICHNO: Barbara Rose and Mike McGee wrote about your work related to illusionism. Christopher Heijnen said that he thought people made a little too much of that, that it was too easy of a connection.

DELAP: The magic bit. I was very sensitive to that in the early years in particular. It’s not that I didn’t like it, but I thought that very often the layman would rather hear those stories than talk about art.

MICHNO: It’s interesting that Levitated Lady at the Orange County Museum and the piece with the beam balanced on two sheets of glass in the show at Parrasch Heijnen both allude to sleight of hand.

DELAP: Yes, I guess they do. The beam, which is mentioned in the catalog for the Laguna Art Museum retrospective, is something I was working with in those days. I liked how it divided a space and pseudo-floated above. I did that at John Berggruen’s at San Francisco. There was the floating beam that didn’t touch the wall, and right at the end, a painting of mine, and that was pretty much the show. A middle aged couple came into the gallery, looked all around, and one said to the other, we’ll come back when the show is up. That was about the way it was received.

MICHNO: One of the things I thought was interesting about the beam at Parrasch Heijnen is that you could see the seams. From a distance, you might think it’s a solid beam, but when you look at it closely you realize that it’s birch plywood. So it’s hollow.

DELAP: In the old days I never covered the ends. I left them open. But the scale was about the same on the early beams. The beam at Christopher Heijnen’s was a beautiful beam, I think. I never did something exactly like that, but I did some with right angle pieces of glass and a beam at the top. There was one I liked quite a lot, with a glass sheet on top of a step ladder. And then, of course, there were the ones that didn’t touch the wall. So I did play with the beam in a fair number of installations.

MICHNO: With your shaped canvases, were you intentionally engaging in a discussion of the painting as an object?

DELAP: I think it was something I was attracted to, and I think a lot about those kinds of things. I always did, but maybe even more now. I think I always felt the most comfortable when I had something on paper, with drawing and working out something that would eventually be dimensional. And I was always, particularly in the early years, very comfortable with working in a craftsman-like way with materials. I enjoyed it. In my quite early years, when I should have been doing school work, I was much happier making something, whether it was carving a boat, or something else. I went through a period where I made model hot dog stands—it was so weird. I wish I still had one or two of them today. I made outdoor hotdog stands with little seats, and then I’d make little signs: Hot dogs for sale.

The first water colors I made, I couldn’t wait to put in the telephone poles. I always felt that if I put in a telephone pole, it made it a more modern painting. It indicated something to me. So it’s funny about those kinds of things. For one artist, it’s one thing; for another artist, it’s something else.

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by Christopher Knight

Whaling away at an aluminum painting support with a ball-peen hammer to dent and dimple the surface before hitting it with lacquer and polyester resin paints might not seem like the best idea. Unless, of course, you’ve seen Billy Al Bengston’s “Dento” paintings. Then, the idea seems frankly charmed.

Bengston made an unknown number of Dentos between 1965 and 1970. The best ones are ravishing. At Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, 17 have been brought together. All are centered on an image of sergeant stripes, which first turned up in Bengston’s paintings four years earlier. In the context of postwar art, resolutely flat, abstract images were being championed. So were demands for so-called “American-type” painting that could distinguish a work from European Modernism. Sergeant stripes kill those two birds with one very well-placed, very witty stone.

To further seal the deal, the 14 paintings that sport titles — “Fighting Kentuckian,” “Three Faces West,” “Seven Sinners,” etc. — are all named for John Wayne movies, famous and obscure.

Speaking of flatness, a work produced on a wafer-thin sheet of aluminum meant that the painted plane would hang in front of the wall, emphasizing its two-dimensional quality. Even the convention of a picture frame was absorbed into the flat picture-plane, as Bengston painted a neat borderstripe around all four edges of each Dento. And, wham! Having smacked that flat plane with a hammer, sometimes gashing the surface or even bending the sheet, two dimensions were transformed into three. A painting is asserted as a material object — not a metaphorical window onto another world or mirror reflection of this one, but an independent thing with its own pictorial demands. Lacquered dents, dings and ripples in a resin-coated Dento catch the light, flickering and glinting as you move past, animating an otherwise static surface. The image is given life through the mechanism of reflected light, not unlike all those John Wayne movies up on the silver screen. These paintings, none of them quite square, are all just slightly taller than they are wide; a vertically oriented picture implies a figure, unlike the landscape suggestion of a horizontal one. A viewer standing in front of them is being consciously addressed. Given all that glamour, it’s refreshing to see Bengston simultaneously bring things down to earth. The palette is varied, although secondary and tertiary hues far outpace primaries. Surprisingly, the colors are anchored by the frequent use of a warm, buttery ochre — not bright yellow or gold, but a pale, earthy pigment that is the opposite of glitzy. All of it adds up to a resounding refutation of “finish fetish,” the term coined by critic John Coplans to describe the industrially slick, often pretty appearance of ’60s L.A. art, which was picked up as an unfriendly put-down by detractors. Bengston’s glamorous yet banged up Dentos run finish fetish through a ringer.

These are also not paintings that pretend they exist outside an art market. They come in small (about a foot on a side), medium (2 or 3 feet) and large (one is more than 7 feet by 6, a sheet assembled from three welded aluminum strips). Something for every wall, in other words, whether at home or in a museum. It’s surprising to realize that Bengston’s Dentos, while included in many group and survey exhibitions, have never been the subject of a focused museum show. (Among other things, they anticipate the Pattern and Decoration movement that would not emerge until the mid-1970s, itself a type of painting ripe for reconsideration.) On the evidence of this striking presentation, which is the tip of a larger iceberg, the subject is overdue.

Leading a regiment of Kentucky riflemen during the War of 1812, John Wayne is the frontiersman who battles to save his love, a French general's daughter, and his homeland

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By Shana Nys Dambrot

Billy Al Bengston is kind of a badass. Despite the sweetness and sunkissed beauty of his saturated palettes, expressive abstractions and popular symbolism, much of his inspiration over the years has come from edgier and more adventurous places -- smoke-filled clay studios, motorcycle races, mechanics’ repair shops, lost summers trekking penniless through Europe, relying on the kindness of strangers, living by his wits, rule-breaking, night surfing. He was after all, born in Dodge City.

In Los Angeles where he has lived and worked for basically all of his career, people are more familiar with the “Dentos” series than other audiences, and they are frequently cited as favorites. That said, it’s been since about 1970 that a significant selection of them has been exhibited in LA, which is a shame, because they are awesome. Although by the time he started making them in the mid-1960’s Bengston had already moved to embrace painting rather than the ceramics that had captured his earlier attention. The salient influence of his friends and studio-mates Peter Voulkos and Ken Price would nevertheless endure throughout his career, especially in his interests in variegated surface textures and translucent, layered pigmentation.

But as of 1965, Bengston was still a professional motorcycle racer, and his inspiration to create paintings using distressed sheet steel and automotive enamel paint was a literal, direct translation of the visual excitement he felt interacting with those materials. Wielding an array of tools, he bent, dented, poked, punctured, creased, and rippled his metal; sprayed, splattered, stenciled, and poured his enamels, and sealed his surfaces with another medium inclusive of the counterculture -- the polyester resin used on surfboards. Modernism was concerned with the language of cultural shorthand and the narrative significance of chosen materials. West Coast artists in particular were enamored of phenomenological expressions of light and movement. In the “Dentos” Bengston merged both modes of inquiry into single works of immense visual appeal and individual character. The range of personality he was able to achieve with a small kit of materials is itself a wonder -- from exuberant Abstract Expressionism, to meditative and refined color fields, auric central-image pictorialism, mystical mandala-like patterning, cosmic and geological metonymical naturalism, bright and splashy artificial tangy tartness, and earthy radiance. Across the eclectic aesthetic languages, viewing the collection of about 20 “Dentos” all together deeply reveals the truly materialist inspiration for the series, which Bengston pursued for about five years. Billy Al Bengston, Dentos, installation view, courtesy of Parrasch Heijnen Gallery

Apparently, he had first called the series “Canto Indentos,” which is roughly meaning dented songs, or perhaps it’s more like damaged poetry, and certainly there are shades of Dante in that title, which echo in the overall motif of layering and nesting conceptual and compositional structures -- and in the idea of undertaking dangerous adventures in pursuit of a beautiful woman and a deeper knowledge of life. Both of which resonate with Bengston on a personal level as well as a creative one. Aside from the material inventiveness and the engaging spectacle of their reflective, energetic physique, the most surprising thing about the “Dentos” is their freshness. These paintings demonstrate a vivacity that is so contagious, one almost forgets they were made over 40 years ago in the context of West Coast late Modernism; as they could convincingly be hot off the block, examples of repurposed, post-industrial upcycling and the infusion of poetry into a conversation about masculine energy in abstraction.

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by Leah Ollman

At the gallery Parrasch Heijnen, Julia Haft-Candell presents a humble, deeply affecting effort to navigate “the absurd excess of the universe," as poet Jack Gilbert called it — the "endless, endless of going on." A show titled “the infinite” has two bodies of work by the Los Angeles artist, one an offshoot and something of a foil to the other. Five ceramic pieces, each titled "Weight," sit on a single broad pedestal. Then on one of the gallery's walls, 24 "Infinity" works, also in clay, rest on wedge-shaped shelves, neatly aligned in three long rows. The installation is striking and helps draw out themes of likeness and difference, continuity and opposition. The "Weight" pieces barely rise above raw matter. Each is a craggy tumult, a modestly scaled mineral event and a chronicle of Haft-Candell's grip and squeeze. "Weight (Pink, White, Black)" plays on our perceptions of mass and density. Its dark half reads as burnt and anchor-heavy, while its pale side looks light as chalk. All of the pieces are insistently gravity-bound, physical facts arrayed on the horizontal plane of the mortal here and now. The "Infinity" sculptures possess their own tangible beauty. They face us as a wall of sketched-out ideas, variants on the looping mathematical symbol, itself an abstraction. The figure eight appears not only in its familiar, sideways orientation but also upright, with extra loops or with twisted, loose ends. HaftCandell assigns a single motif to each sculpture — wave, arch, chain, eye, weave, knot, braid — and repeats it across the surface, carving away the clay around it in the manner of a woodcut. The images read bone-white against black, the contrast stark and gratifying.

Haft-Candell's earlier work, stream-of-consciousness configurations incorporating fabric, paper, ink, wood, rebar, cement and paper along with clay, encouraged the eye to move restlessly among optical snares. These new sculptures retain a similar sense of informality and irregularity, but they have a new coherence.

Haft-Candell even supplies us with a glossary of terms and symbols, an illustrated guide to the archetypes she employs. All of the symbols derive from the essential forms of dash and torus, or line and ring. Though the dash connotes the masculine and torus the feminine, the binary dissolves as the forms combine and mutate. What Haft-Candell returns to again and again in her definitions is an overriding relationship of interdependency and fluidity that pertains within the infinite. Tapping into a broader cultural current celebrating intersectionality, Haft-Candell endows her sculptures with the power to affirm a social proposition, an ideal of coexistence.

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by Annabel Osberg

In timeless spirit and simple form, Julia Haft-Candell’s ceramic sculptures recall the mystical austerity of primeval petroglyphs, carved totems and cave paintings. Yet their painted embellishments and surface textures are unmistakably modern, evoking graphic novel line drawings, rough roadbeds and industrial scraps. Displayed at Parrasch Heijnen on individual wall shelves in rows of three by eight, pieces in her “Infinity” series consist of variations on lazy eight, pretzel and knot morphologies. Each is adorned by surface patterns of repeated motifs whose meanings are enumerated in a glossary provided by the gallery. Counterpointing their urbanity on a pedestal across the room, the lumpy masses of her “Weights” series resemble volcanic rocks and paint-spattered concrete chunks left over from construction sites. Indeed, these were hewn from “Infinity” series by-products. Haft-Candell’s ethos recalls male greats Ken Price and Peter Voulkos, and a Roger Herman installation partly inspired this show’s setup; but a subtle feminism underlies her glossary’s ruminations on hermaphroditism and gender norms. During a recent gallery talk, Haft-Candell offered students this advice once given her by a teacher: Create the work that you’d want to produce if you knew death were imminent. Her installation appears as a tiny cross-section of something that could go on forever; but its limitedness is a reminder of every individual’s finitude

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by Mat Gleason

After seeing its fabulous Peter Alexander sculpture retrospective last Summer, Parrasch Heijnen Gallery is on my “must visit” gallery list. The current solo exhibition Julia Haft-Candell: The Infinite is an example of the virtuosity that this gallery maintains. An exhibition comprised of new ceramic work, the show is divided into three neat sections beginning with a stunning take on the infinite. Alone in the first gallery and dramatically viewed from an elevated platform at the gallery’s entrance, one descends to approach Wall Infinity: Weave where spectacle meets reverence. What starts off as a reductive symbol slowly transforms into something more complex, stretching indeed toward the infinite. An assemblage of small porcelain plates forms the sign for infinity, but underglazed onto the symbol is a meandering weave pattern that neither begins nor finishes on the object. Infinity indeed. Much of what the artist is attempting in this show is to create forms that assert ambiguity (a paradox in itself, really). The infinity symbol contains lines that come and go, it is assembled (impressively) as a series of separate small plates, roughly matching at each edge to continue the form. Avoiding that holy grail quest for perfection that slays so many reductive artists, Haft-Candell gives everything she makes a textured, handled touch.

In the second room, a larger space at Parrasch Heijnen, the artist presents two quite different bodies of work. On the North wall are twenty-four shelves containing a rather loopy array of black & white ceramic constructions. Each harkens to one of a few simple, primal shapes, imperfectly repeated here. An accompanying newsprint zine assembled by the artist goes through the litany of these forms and the details behind each of their glyph-like patterning. Each of these sculptures are masterpieces of the unresolved, functionless vessels with symbology and form merged on surface and in essence. One has to summon the poetic to deal with the absurd, and the rhythms of these undulating pieces inspire more than prose. Contrasting to the evidence of their all-too-human formation is the clean presentation from Parrasch Heijnen, installing individual precise trapezoidal shelves to accommodate the artist’s visionary impulses. Part three of the exhibit features a large platform holding five sculptures each titled Weight. These mounds of clay sitting as primary forces have vague splashes of chroma in the otherwise black & white show. And yet the color simply neutralizes the earthen tones of the clay, a subtle delivery of the message of nuance which resonates throughout this show. An association of these works with Peter Voulkos is inevitable, while her twenty four works against the wall seem formal heirs to Ken Price. It is no accident then that Haft-Candell is showing with Parrasch Heijnen whose website lists the late Price and Voulkos as their gallery artists. Both of these giants have had well-received shows at the Los Angeles space despite it having been open less than two years.

Considering the presence of these two masters of the clay medium, Haft-Candell holds her own. In one modest exhibition she has a few major accomplishments: First, she establishes a wild pictographic language (applied with underglazing on black clay); she works to consistently make the enigmatic tangible in all her finished pieces, which finally makes even the reductive dichotomy of black & white into something more cryptic.

Julia Haft-Candell is among the leading ceramic artists of her generation - this exhibit is the right art in the right place at the right time.

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by Alexandra Pechman

A glossary that accompanies this exhibition opens with lines from Ursula K. Le Guin’s introduction to her 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness: “I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.” Julia Haft-Candell’s thirty sculptures similarly operate as a collection of playful hypocrisies, suggesting that the gray area between binaries is more productive terrain than any stable point. From the “Infinity” series (all works 2017), twenty-four of the symbols, in black clay, rough and burnt-looking, appear in a tight grid of plinths on one gallery wall. The artist observes a strict palette of black and white, and the presentation is similarly meticulous and clinical, offsetting pretzel-like loops, tripled chains, and complicated knots. Each sculpture bears a distinct, tactile pattern, including waves, combs, and arches, which Haft-Candell poetically elaborates on in her glossary. As a counterpoint, the ceramics series “Weights” is arranged on a large platform on the opposite side of the room. Done in pinks, reds, grays, and browns, the “weights” are mossy and sludgy, like renderings of bits of another planet. She details the mythological significance of each shape in her pamphlet, and ascribes historically gendered readings to them. Defining the infinity symbol as masculine and feminine, or a visualization of androgyny, she notes: “Its definition is not fixed, but constantly changing and multiple, embodied in one concept.” Contradictions such as order and disorder, eternity and the here and now, are cleverly coated over the artist’s intention. Here, Le Guin’s Darkness, which describes a world of ambisexual inhabitants, underscores sculptures that toy with their identities through layers of meaning.

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by Jennifer S. Li

From the starting point of a knot — a deceptively simple form with a rich history in craft and commerce, on land and at sea — ceramicist Julia Haft-Candell developed the idea of “the infinite,” which acts as both title and concept for her latest show at LA’s Parrasch Heijnen Gallery. Ranging from nascent whorls to fully formed lemniscates, Haft-Candell’s concept of “the infinite” unfolds over more than two dozen black clay sculptures. These loops are punctuated with whimsical iconography that Haft-Candell developed and hand-painted — “the eye,” “the weave,” “the scales,” “the comb,” and more, drawn from mythology, history, and her own experiences — all of which are explained in an impressive, illustrated glossary that accompanies the exhibition. Infinity: Burst, for example, is decorated with a smattering of geometric shapes, which the artist says is indicative of her creative output, stress, or excitement: “A mayhem or scatter of shapes that came from a burst of excitement. I often can’t find appropriate words to express excitement, or the feeling of being overwhelmed, frazzled and excited simultaneously.” Many of the other patterns, such as “the chain” and “the knot” help to establish the idea of infinity as feminine and masculine, a recycling of energy, unfixed and ever-changing. Opposite the loop sculptures are craggy, intriguing lumps, the descendants of Peter Voulkos’ avant-garde, boundary-breaking work or Ken Price’s pioneering oddities. These pieces, which Haft-Candell calls “Weights,” are made using the leftover bits of clay from the infinity sculptures, literally closing the loop on these sculptures in a nowaste cycle.

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by Aaron Horst

Parrasch Heijnen has staged their current exhibition, Forrest Bess | Joan Snyder, as a Kieslowskian conversation across time, and space. The exhibition is staged in a pared-down manner, quietly courting the delicate pleasure of looking—a method of display and curation that L.A.’s more recent blockbuster spaces would do well to imitate. Both Bess and Snyder traffic in shapes and impressions long unanchored from their sources—images lacking in scale as much as in readily identifiable content. Human figuration enters the frame only occasionally in Bess’s work here (and, arguably, not at all in Snyder’s), and then as something of a distraction. The figures in an untitled work from 1946, as well as the chimerical symbolism of The Noble Carbunkle (c. 1960) suggest a temporality and element of narrative absent the mysterious formality of the bulk of Bess’s works on display. Bess is totemic where Snyder is phenomenological. Both render reverently, and fleetingly, foregrounding the work of the hand and the time it takes to manifest. Snyder in particular conjures hypnotic near associations which overlap and settle into one another, as in the flow of water over a horizontal canopy in Waterfall/Gold Band (1967). Bess’s Untitled No. 6(1957) and Untitled No. 18 (1952) are coy with suggested scale (peach or sun in the former, mountains or dung heaps in the latter), mining a formal ambiguity that paves the way for formal contemplation. The conceit behind Snyder and Bess’ pairing at Parrasch Heijnen centers on the ostensible speaking of each artist’s work to the other’s across time, space, and the gallery’s two rooms. The mere suggestion of the uncanny is often enough to call it into being, and Snyder and Bess’ tender work is suggestive above all—the uncanny complement, or ordinary coincidence, of a shared formal language of abstraction.

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by Sarah P. Hanson

By the close of play on Wednesday, dealers were tired but happy, reporting that the first wave of VIP collectors—many of them fresh off the Venice-Kassel-Münster circuit—had arrived engaged and prepared to spend handsomely. Hauser & Wirth declared Tuesday its most successful first day ever at Art Basel, having placed a 1970 oil by Philip Guston for $15m and an untitled painting by Eva Hesse with a Chinese museum for $2.5m, among a dozen early sales. Acquavella Galleries speedily unloaded a large Basquiat from the key year of 1982 for an asking price of $18m. Lévy Gorvy sealed the deal on a Sigmar Polke (lauded by the Polke aficionado Alexander Rotter of Christie’s as “spectacular”) for $12m yesterday. Although the rebound of eight-figure sales in a fair context is notable, activity was hardly limited to the top end. “We could have sold this five times over,” says Susanne Vielmetter of a domestic-sized version of Andrea Bowers’s cardboard protest-sign collages, which was quickly snapped up by a collector on Tuesday for $65,000. Tom Dingle, a senior director at Thomas Dane gallery, who sold a painting by Marisa Merz from his all-female stand for $350,000, says: “Collectors here can be looking to spend at different levels from, say, $20,000 to $450,000.” Any difficulty the auction houses have had over the past year in sourcing consignments was reflected inversely in the array of top-tier secondary material on offer at Art Basel. But the sales outlook was a bit more mixed for what the Galerie St Etienne co-director Jane Kallir termed “classical Modernism” of the German Expressionist variety. “I find it’s off to a slower start,” she says. “We’ve sold a number of things at lower price points, but people are not going to impulse buy a $1m painting.” “It is quiet,” says Gilbert Lloyd of Marlborough, “but the jets are still landing.”

Many dealers were profiting from their artists’ visibility this spring. Daniel Buchholz had sold several abstract C-prints by Wolfgang Tillmans, whose Tate Modern show has just closed and whose retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler has just opened, at €60,000 apiece, as well as a painting by Anne Imhof featuring the artist Eliza Douglas menaced by a Molotov cocktail (à la Faust, her Venice Golden Lion-winning performance piece), acquired by a New York-based collector for €55,000. Peter Freeman, which represents Franz Erhard Walther, placed an important 1980s interactive fabric wall piece that the director Jayne Johnson described as “like relational aesthetics before that existed”. Works recontextualised from artists’ estates proved catnip to buyers in search of a bankable discovery. An unusual joint exhibition of works by Hans Hartung—co-presented by Perrotin and Simon Lee—was met with enthusiasm, according to Perrotin’s Matthew Wilkin, while another solo-artist presentation, of intriguingly spare late works by Milton Avery at Victoria Miro, resulted in early sales. So, too, for established conceptual and abstract artists better known on one side of the Atlantic or the other. Dorsey Waxter, of Van Doren Waxter, who is introducing canvases by the late US painter Harvey Quaytman to a European audience, says: “There’s definitely a curiosity around geometric abstraction.”

Perhaps the strongest measure of the depth of the current market is the attention paid to lesser known names of the 20th century who are being reappraised. In the Feature section devoted to solo presentations of older artists, Parrasch Heijnen is presenting sculptures and drawings by the nonagenarian artist Tony DeLap, whose work is being reappraised as an inspiration to his students, including Bruce Nauman and John McCracken. DeLap’s 1960s sculptures, with elements of Minimalism, Op Art and Finish Fetish, were on hold for museums in the range of $40,000 to $50,000. “His influence is dramatic even though people don’t know his name,” Franklin Parrasch says. Similarly, cibachrome prints by the sculptor-photographer Barbara Kasten (to whom Tillmans has acknowledged a debt) on display at Kadel Willborn got “a very good response from artists as well as collectors”, Moritz Willborn says. Half of these New York City Constructs, made between 1982 and 1986, had been placed on hold, at prices ranging from $15,000 to $40,000. “The market is very strong, but there’s no question that there’s uncertainty,” says Nicholas Acquavella of Acquavella Galleries. Still, given the imperative for freshness and quality that the Basel audience demands, “You’d have to have a pretty rough external environment to not have a solid fair,” he says.

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by Anna Louie Sussman

The original Art Basel draws the art world’s denizens each summer to its namesake, a historic Swiss city straddling the Rhine. Its 48th edition, kicking off next week, comes during a particularly exciting period for cosmopolitan art lovers: Documenta 14 is taking place in Kassel, Germany, and Athens, Greece, and the Venice Biennale runs through the summer. Into this fray come 291 of the world’s top galleries from 35 countries, with works on display from over 4,000 artists. Seventeen of those galleries are exhibiting at Art Basel in Basel for the first time. Here are 12 to watch.

After many years participating in Liste, Hopkinson Mossman makes its debut at Art Basel in Basel with Berlin-based artist Oscar Enberg, whose presentation in the Statements sector will feature a film and sculpture examining the Australian opal-mining town of Coober Pedy.

“Enberg is working in the exploitative tradition of visitors to the town—a town shaped by prospectors, colonizers, and the uneasy assimilation of non-native cultures and economic interests,” says gallery director Danae Mossman.

The presentation is in step with the Auckland, New Zealand-based gallery’s mission of inviting international dialogue into its home country, while simultaneously promoting prominent contemporary artists from New Zealand and Australia.

“New Zealanders are very engaged, and very outward-looking,” says Mossman. “You have to be—we are a small island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.”

The gallery is a favorite of Melbourne-based curator and scholar Jan Bryant, who says one of the gallery’s strengths is combining its artists “in unpredictable ways.”

“There are always new effects to be found, and in turn their artists come to you in new ways, no matter how familiar you thought you were with them," Bryant says.

In its 20-plus-year existence, San Francisco gallery Jenkins Johnson has gathered an impressive roster of mid-career artists including Julian Opie and Lalla Essaydi, while promoting the careers of emerging artists such as Sadie Barnette, Omar Victor Diop, Annie Kevans, and Mohau Modisakeng, who is representing South Africa in the current edition of the Venice Biennale.

Owner Karen Jenkins-Johnson is using her Art Basel in Basel debut to present three artists whose social critiques on issues such as violence, marginalized communities, and civil rights feel especially topical right now.

Her booth within Art Basel in Basel’s Feature section will exhibit photographs of the Civil Rights movement by the polymath Gordon Parks, including I AM YOU—a portfolio of 12 little-known works.

“The current struggles in the U.S. and throughout the world for racial equality, freedom of religion, open immigration, women’s rights, and LGBTQ equality echo the activism portrayed in Parks’s photographs,” Jenkins-Johnson says.

As part of Art Basel in Basel’s Film section, the gallery will additionally present Modisakeng’s To Move Mountains (2015), which Jenkins-Johnson calls “a meditation on violence, directly addressing the brutality directed at the black labor force in South Africa,” and We All We Got (2014), by 2016 Guggenheim Fellow Carlos Javier Ortiz, which portrays individuals affected by gun violence.

Antenna Space founder Simon Wang says his initial mission was simply “to show my friends,” artists from China and elsewhere including Yu Honglei, Li Ming, Nadim Abbas, Xu Qu, and Guan Xiao. The gallery was launched in 2013 and is based in M50, the Shanghai contemporary arts district sited in a formerly industrial neighborhood.

Wang, who has shown at Art Basel in Hong Kong since 2013, will present two of the gallery’s artists for his first appearance at Art Basel in Basel. Guan’s newest work, Air Freshener, Spray, is an ecosystem with a light-box background and materials including artificial plants, projector machines and vehicle exhaust pipes. It builds on earlier works Sunset and Sunrise, which Wang describes as “atmospheric situations created for stimulating synthetic feelings.”

In the Parcours section of works presented around the city of Basel in public spaces, artist Wu Tsang will produce a performance piece, The Secret Life of Things is Open, an installation in the exclusive private Club de Bâle of films, sound and text from her collaboration with the theorist and poet Fred Moten that will become a portal to performances happening throughout the week and on Saturday evening for Parcours Night. Her appearance at Art Basel in Basel anticipates her September solo exhibition at Antenna Space.

Gypsum Gallery, which operates out of a converted 1920s-era apartment in Cairo’s Garden City neighborhood, was launched in 2013 by curator and gallery director Aleya Hamza to bring the region’s cutting-edge work into the commercial realm.

Hamza, who trained at London’s Goldsmith College, has been affiliated with several other Cairo art institutions, but saw room for a for-profit gallery that would help foster “the progressive and investigative art practices that in the region of the Middle East had been associated with the non-profits,” she says.

The work by Cairo-based artist Maha Maamoun that Hamza will present at Art Basel in Basel’s Statements sector is emblematic of her program, which she says is “built on an in-depth engagement with sociopolitical, cultural, and formal questions.”

Called The Subduer, Maamoun’s project stems from a trip to one of the many public notary offices in Egypt. “In these offices, citizens, state functionaries and legal and bureaucratic processes strain on a daily basis to continue functioning with and against each other,” Hamza explains. “In the midst of these tense relationships, or maybe because of them, prayers abound.”

Using her cellphone, Maamoun secretly recorded images of these prayers found in various notary offices, written on “a slew of soiled and aging sheets of paper” and “informally pinned or taped on the walls,” in Hamza’s words. The resulting photographic installation and accompanying publication portrays Maamoun’s “personal story slamming against the bureaucratic machine and its idiosyncrasies,” while also representing “a collective fascination with religious representations,” Hamza says.

Chapter NY began in 2013 as a weekend-only project space on the Lower East Side, in a 175-square-foot space smaller than many American closets. In fall 2016, the gallery moved to a larger location in the same neighborhood, but maintained its focus on “intimate exhibitions and projects as a means to understand the diverse development of artistic practice,” according to director Nicole Russo.

Lumi Tan, a curator at The Kitchen, says the gallery’s newer space has allowed its ambitious programming to unfurl, “while maintaining an intimate scale.”

That program includes artists such as Mira Dancy, Willa Nasatir, and Adam Gordon. But Russo also makes a point to experiment with artists she doesn’t directly represent, giving the space over to Keltie Ferris for her “Body Prints” paintings, or to Anicka Yi, who used the gallery to record the first episode of her “Lonely Samurai” podcast series.

For her booth in Art Basel in Basel’s Statements section, Russo will present a new work by Sam Anderson, Antarctica (2017). An installation of clay figures on a series of semicircular risers, it “draws both familiar and peripheral types to center, forming a psychological excavation of identity and role-playing,” says Russo.

Anderson, who was, fittingly, also the first artist Russo showed at Chapter NY, currently has a solo exhibition at New York’s SculptureCenter and will open a solo show at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, Germany, at the end of June.

This Bologna-based gallery was founded in 2010 with a focus on Conceptual and Minimalist artists, mostly from the 1960s and 1970s, whose work co-founders Alessandro Pasotti and Fabrizio Padovani felt was underappreciated.

“There are artists who have preferred to work in seclusion, far from the spotlight, or have been forced to do so because their work was not understood,” says Padovani, noting that the current environment allows for greater recontextualization of these artists’ practices.

That mission is particularly important in an era of “amnesia,” says Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of London’s Serpentine Galleries. By showing pioneering artists such as Irma Blank, Paolo Icaro, and Franco Vaccari “in a sustained and profound way,” he says, the gallery achieves “what Eric Hobsbawm called ‘an urgent protest against forgetting.’”

In Art Basel in Basel’s Feature section, P420 will present Croatian artist Goran Trbuljak’s first four solo shows, which ran between 1971 to 1981. The first show had no actual work in it, with Trbuljak merely writing on the poster for the exhibition, “I don’t want to show anything new and original.”

“From the start of his career, Trbuljak has been averse to the production or even the conception of any work of art, focusing exclusively on the mechanisms of the art system, the dynamics through which an artist can gain a reputation,” says Pasotti.

The gallery is also presenting a re-enactment of Trbuljak’s 1977 show at Venice’s Galleria del Cavallino in Art Basel Unlimited, a show that investigated the power relations between artists and their galleries, as well as Turinese artist Icaro’s Foresta metallica, a large-scale installation created in 1967 in his SoHo studio and exhibited here publicly for the first time.

Located in Beijing’s 798 Art District, Magician Space was founded in 2008 by artist Qu Kejie, with Pan Baohui. The gallery fosters an intentionally intimate scale in the industrial area, and was designed by Qu himself.

“Our exhibitions remain focused on challenging the ideas of the artist and its connection with the audience,” says curatorial director Billy Tang. It was initially used it as a project space where local artists could show work at a remove from the pressures created by the country’s fast-growing commercial art market.

The gallery’s emphasis has been on China’s emerging and experimental artists, providing an early platform for newer artists such as Li Ran, Liu Yefu, and Yao Qingmei, but it also highlights figures who have contributed significantly to the historical development of contemporary art in China, such as Liu Chuang, Li Jinghu, and Liang Wei. Tang says the gallery also maintains a “commitment to introducing new critical positions to China by cultivating a dialogue with…international artists and practitioners,” such as Keren Cytter, James Richards, and Timur Si-Qin.

For its debut in Art Basel in Basel’s Statements section, Magician Space will show a new series of sculptures and paintings by the young Beijing-based artist Wang Shang, who is also a certified gemologist with a jewelry line, and who trained as a curator at Royal College of Art. His installations of stainless steel mountains and “scholar rocks” adapt the classical Chinese rock garden and warp it “from a transcendental space of meditation into a contemporary interpretation, full of contested meanings that clash together,” says Tang.

“His installation for the fair will have a quality of a landscape that can channel the flow of people walking through it,” he adds. “Imagine the installation as a setting of a post-Anthropocene landscape…we are curious about how that experience will interact with the setting of the art fair.”

Emanuel Layr, who founded his eponymous Vienna-based gallery six years ago, and has previously shown at Liste, will mark his inaugural Art Basel in Basel outing with an architectural video installation by Cécile B. Evans, a recent addition to his roster.

Titled Amos’ World, the 2017 piece imagines a television show set in a socially progressive housing estate. Amos, an architect, watches the utopian community he has designed degenerate over the course of the episodes.

“Fissures in this carefully constructed network reveal a breakdown of person-to-person and person-to-infrastructure power dynamics as the audience themselves look on from units nested within an architectural construction built to echo the one on screen,” says Layr.

The past year has been one of expansion for Layr, with artists such as Gaylen Gerber, Lena Henke, and Anna-Sophie Berger joining the program, and with the gallery opening an outpost in Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood.

Henke will participate in Art Basel Parcours, a curated selection of public artworks scattered around the small Swiss city. Her rubber and sand sculptures will be located in a garden along the Rhine, and a surrealist bronze sculpture of New York City will be at the Pfalz, a central square.

Galeria Dawid Radziszewski opened in Warsaw in 2013, but Radziszewski and the bulk of the artists he represents date from the mid-1980s; many of them are artists he’s known since they were students together. The works he shows go back even further in their references, exploring Polish art movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which has spurred further research into Polish subcultures, such as the new age movement and the Polish hippie scene, which Radziszewski says was “not as cool as the United States’s scene yet nevertheless quite exotic.” He noted many of his artists are engaged with music and sound-based events, including the Warsaw Autumn Festival. The gallery has an international scope too, having shown artists such as David Horvitz and Șerban Savu.

For its debut at an Art Basel fair, the gallery will present a performance by Joanna Piotrowska. Working in the medium for the first time (she usually hews to photography and film), Piotrowska has choreographed a piece inspired by self-defense manuals, which will be enacted by amateur performers in the fair’s Statements section.

“She translates everyday gestures and conventional movement practices, such as self-defense, into new scenarios, lending them an almost caricature-like quality,” says Radziszewski. “The resulting photography acts as a performance documentation, rather than a documentary image.”

The chance to present at Basel represents a great opportunity for his gallery, Radziszewski confirms.

“We do it for fame and money, obviously.”

For over two decades, Athens-based Kalfayan Galleries has been a pioneer of Greece’s contemporary art scene. Its roster includes artists from across Greece, the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa, “acting as a bridge between Eastern and Western visual culture,” says Roupen Kalfayan, who co-owns the gallery with his brother, Arsen Kalfayan.

For its first appearance at Art Basel in Basel, Kalfayan has chosen a hometown favorite, the post-war Greek artist Vlassis Caniaris (1928-2011), whose work is showing in this summer’s documenta 14 in Athens. The Basel installation will feature a selection of works, including Caniaris’s installation for the 1988 Venice Biennale, What's North, What's South? (Children and Testimony).

“As an active witness to history, Caniaris developed an artistic vocabulary that was put to the service of a committed political and social message,” says Kalfayan. “From 1959 onwards, he developed a personal idiom known as concrete realism, reminiscent of Arte Povera. His work comments on immigration, socio-political turmoil and issues of identity in a world that is in constant flux, issues that are “highly relevant to the current global situation.”

CANADA opened in New York in 2000 in the basement of a Tribeca building with the goal of supporting emerging artists and promoting the work of more established artists that gallery partners Phil Grauer, Sarah Braman, Suzanne Butler, and Wallace Whitney felt had been overlooked.

They envisioned a “weird clubhouse” populated by artists including Katherine Bernhardt, Matt Connors, Marcus Jahmal, Xylor Jane, Joanna Malinowska, and Michael Williams, all of whom will take part in CANADA’s debut presentation in Art Basel in Basel’s Galleries sector.

Grauer says that this framing helps the gallery, now based on the Lower East Side, be more “invested in art as an instrument for change” and notes that this ethos extends to the staff, nearly every member of which is a working artist themselves.

That spirit has attracted fans such as London collector Ken Rowe, who recalls first hearing about CANADA from British artists who yearned to work with the gallery. At first, he recalls thinking that it “sounded too cool for me.”

“Then I met Phil at Frieze and realized how wrong I was,” Rowe says. “Collecting art for me has always been about discovery and my most satisfying periods of collecting have involved close collaboration with galleries which have integrity and intelligence at their core. My experience with CANADA has led to one of those all-too-rare relationships."

Barely 18 months after opening its doors in January 2016, Los Angeles’s Parrasch Heijnen will make its first appearance at Art Basel with a survey exhibition of early drawings and sculptures by American artist Tony DeLap.

DeLap, an 89-year-old artist whose drawings and sculptures at Art Basel investigate “themes of perception and the nature of transformation,” was critically acclaimed in the mid-1960s and 1970s, explains co-founder Franklin Parrasch, and hails from the same generation as other prominent American minimalists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt. DeLap’s early advocates included the painter Agnes Martin, who Parrasch says encouraged her own gallerists, Robert Elkon and Nicholas Wilder, to support DeLap’s career.

Heijnen is thankful for his gallery’s “tremendous opportunity” to participate in Basel, one that he says will help provide “a spotlight” for his program, which includes largely West Coast artists that he says “have only recently begun to receive the attention they are due.”

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by David Pagel

At Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, “Forrest Bess/Joan Snyder” brings together works by two very different artists to accomplish somewhat different goals: 1) to point out exactly what’s going on in the work of each painter, and 2) to tug Bess’ art out from under the shadow of his life story, which is heartwrenching. In the first gallery hang 10 little paintings that Snyder (born 1940) made in 1967 and 1968 on pages unceremoniously torn from a spiral sketchbook. In the second gallery hang 14 compact oils that Bess (1911-1977) painted on canvas and Masonite in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. The compare-and-contrast exercise pays off in spades. The works by Snyder and Bess have lots in common. Both are intimate. Both are ambitious. And both are abstract but not purely so. Hints of imagery occasionally appear, along with the suggestion of spatial depth. Scale is ambiguous — shifting fromcellular to cosmic, and back. Color counts for both artists — particularly when solid chunks of pink and blue, red and black, or brown and white grind together. Compositions, riven by internal tensions, keep harmony and resolution out of the picture.And that’s where the greatest contrasts come into focus.

Snyder’s works on paper, made of spray paint, pastel, pencil, charcoal and marking pens, suggest that no single material — or approach to mark-making — has the capacity to capture the complexity of reality. Her elusive abstractions make a virtue of keeping one’s options open. Bess’ rock-solid compositions move in the opposite direction. One foot is firmly planted in the reality we see with our eyes, while the other is firmly planted in the reality our souls sense. His blunt compositions strive to hold both together.

Some, like “Mandala,” “Untitled (Pink Moon)” and “The Noble Carbunkle” succeed, making it seem that square pegs sometimes fit in round holes. Others, like “Family Group,” “Untitled No. 6” and “Untitled (Rainbow With Arc)” intimate that the world is out of sync with itself — and that there may be no hope for repair, much less redemption.

These are among Bess’ most potent works. The emotions they embody resonate against his biography, which includes dropping out of college, having a psychological breakdown that ended his World War II service, pursuing a hermit-like existence on the Gulf Coast of Texas and undergoing DIY surgery on his genitals in the belief that it might make him a more well-rounded human.

“Forrest Bess/Joan Snyder” gives art its due, neither glossing over the context from which it came nor letting history tell the whole story. That makes room for viewers, each of us invited to interpret the art for ourselves.

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by Elena Platonova

Frieze Art Fair is now over. 200 galleries from 30 countries vied for collectors’ attention in an airy white tent on NYC’s Randall’s Island. With such an overwhelming multitude of artworks to take in and select from, one-person gallery booths presented a respite for an overstimulated eye. Two separate sections of the fair—Frame and Spotlight—featured exclusively solo projects. But a number of galleries in the Main section chose to showcase a single artist’s oeuvre, an approach yielded a number of benefits. One strong voice is more likely to linger in viewers’ memories than a stream of syncopated sounds in a group presentation. In the case of well-known names, this strategy seems to increase the number of sales by allocating more wall space for crowd-pleasing inventory. A single-person booth can also be a savvy way to promote a lesserknown artist—think a mini one-man gallery exhibition with tens of thousands of visitors from around the globe passing through. Here are five galleries that reaped the benefits of a one-person presentation:

Dieter Krieg at Galerie Klaus Gerrit Friese

German artist Dieter Krieg (1937-2005) forged a unique blend of Pop Art, German and Abstract Expressionism by rendering food, mass-produced household products and, yes, animals, using vigorous gestures with an intensity bordering on religious fervor. Well-respected in his home country both for his art and his influential teaching at the Dusseldorf Arts Academy, Krieg was featured in several important group shows abroad, but he did not receive due recognition outside of his native Germany. Krieg passed away in 2005 and Berlin dealer Klaus Gerrit Friese, who runs the artist’s estate, is intent on bringing him into the international spotlight posthumously.

John Currin at Gagosian Gallery

John Currin (b. 1962), one of the breadwinners for the heavyweight Gagosian Gallery, does not need an introduction. His paintings regularly fetch high-record prices at auction and his tongue-in-cheek, often risqué portraits harking back to Old Masters are part of our collective consciousness. Dedicating an entire primelocation booth to the artist’s works on paper proved a winning strategy for Gagosian: the crowds around the walls with rows of Currin’s drawings and etchings do not wane and the flow of Instagram images of the booth was incessant. Many of the best portraits in dialogue with the Renaissance and Roccoco artists or appropriating 20th-century representational clichés were sold or are not for sale, making the available works even more desirable.

Ursula Schulz-Dornburg at Gallery Luisotti

Documenting the ephemeral and the disappearing with means that are both systematic and detached (conceptual grid, repetition and focus on inanimate objects) is a forte of German octogenarian Ursula Schulz-Dornburg (b. 1938). Her black-and-white photographic views of Armenian bus stops, Mesopotamian landscapes right before the Iran-Iraq war and a moving ray of light in a millenniumold pilgrimage site are featured in the Spotlight section booth of Santa Monica’s Gallery Luisotti. The Financial Times recently published an overview of the artist’s circuitous career, featuring each of the series on view at Frieze and naming American conceptual artists, particularly Ed Ruscha, and Land art as her major influences. What is truly unique about Schulz-Dornburg’s work is her spot-on intuition about capturing the landmarks in peril, such as ancient sites of Palmyra before the Syrian war or lonely Soviet-era bus stops in Armenia, reminiscent of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s work, but with an air of tenderness and mystery that is truly her own. At below $5,000, the Bus Stops (1997-2011) presented a rare opportunity to acquire critically acclaimed works by an established artist with an assured vision, at an affordable price.

Keith Sonnier at Pace Gallery

Another market behemoth, Pace Gallery, opted for a solo presentation of sculptures by post-minimalist Keith Sonnier (b. 1941), whose elaborate constructions including neon, mirrors and wire are instantly and comfortingly recognizable, setting the long-living light-art pioneer apart from the younger creators of cookie-cutter neon slogans, ubiquitous at the fair and elsewhere. The booth, provided a captivating photo opportunity for many, features early sculptures by Sonnier alongside his two recent series. Pace’s choice to present work solely by Sonnier at Frieze might be a two-pronged strategy: to keep themomentous interest in the artist’s work, following his recent solo exhibitions at Tate Modern, Galerie Forseblom in Finland and at Pace’s own Midtown space; and to serve as a conversation starter about the gallery’s recently-opened show by Leo Villareal, also working with the medium of light.

Tony DeLap at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery

Parrasch Heijnen from Los Angeles employed fittingly minimalist means—only four works are featured on the three available walls—to present an overlooked early minimalist pioneer from the Bay Area, Tony DeLap (b. 1927). DeLap’s meticulously crafted monochromatic sculptures—painted canvasses wrapped around wooden supports—exude meditative serenity, prompting the viewers to pause to properly take them in, despite the roaming crowds, the fair fatigue and the fear of missing out, unavoidable during Frieze week. Like the aforementioned Dieter Krieg, DeLap exerted a major influence as a mentor, teaching such West Coast minimalist visionaries as John McCracken and James Turrell. Considering the critical recognition and popular acclaim of last year’s LACMA exhibition of another rigorous minimalist, John McLaughlin, one could hope that the art market’s obsession with brand names is a passing malaise and that solo presentations at art fairs will increasingly lead to one-person museum shows, not just the other way around.

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by Monica Khemsurov

We typically think of Frieze New York as a kind of palate cleanser for the epic feast that is design week, something that provides us with a dose of pure visual enjoyment before all of our real work begins. This year, of course, half of design week migrated backwards to align with Collective Design, clogging Frieze week with dozens of industry parties and exhibitions (epic roundup post coming tomorrow), but even so, Frieze — consistently one of the prettiest art fairs around — felt like a welcome pause. We spent a day meandering through presentations by more than 200 galleries from 30 countries, and our favorite works are highlighted below.

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by Julia Halperin

Frieze New York was once considered a destination for works of art so new that the paint on them might still be dripping. But the fair—and the market—has changed. Frieze’s sixth edition, which opened to VIPs on Thursday and opens to the public today, is packed with work from the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. Rediscovery is the name of the game: Many of these works are by artists in their 80s and 90s who have yet to receive a monographic museum show in the US.

As the dealer Franklin Parrasch puts it, “The energy of collecting is in revision.” When the market is jittery—and the political climate is turbulent—dealers and collectors would rather plumb history to find an overlooked artist with a solid pedigree than take a gamble on a 22-year-old MFA student. “Insecurity reverts eyes to reflect upon history,” Parrasch says. During the VIP preview, the Los Angeles-based gallery Parrasch Heijnen sold two of the four works on view at their solo booth dedicated to Tony DeLap, a pioneer of West Coast Minimalism who turns 90 this year ($38,000–$80,000). Back in the 1960s, DeLap was well on his way to art stardom: His work was included in the legendary “Primary Structures” exhibition at the Jewish Museum and the “Responsive Eye” show at the Museum of Modern Art. (In fact, the now-better-known Southern California Minimalist John McCracken was DeLap’s teaching assistant at U.C. Irvine.) But after DeLap’s gallery closed and tastes changed in the 1980s, he fell from favor. “Dealers die, people forget—it could have happened to a lot of artists we consider household names today, if the circumstances were different,” Parrasch says.

Indeed, DeLap isn’t the only artist old enough to remember the Truman administration who is now getting renewed exposure at Frieze. At Venus Gallery, assemblages by the artist William T. Wiley—who taught Bruce Nauman at U.C. Davis and was included in Harald Szeeman’s influential “When Attitudes Become Form” exhibition in 1969—hangs alongside work by better-known contemporaries like Robert Rauschenberg and Jack Goldstein.

One of the largest works at the fair is Alfred Leslie’s 24-foot-wide painting of residents from Youngstown, Ohio, from 1977–78, priced at $1.4 million at Bruce Silverstein. The artist, who began as an Abstract Expressionist, turned to figuration in the early 1960s before losing much of his work in a studio fire in 1966. “He was rejected by the Ab Ex world, rejected by the photorealists, and he wasn’t playing the game,” Silverstein says. That seems to be changing now: A portrait by Leslie (who also co-directed the cult film “Pull My Daisy”) was recently included in the “Human Interest” exhibition at the Whitney Museum, and Silverstein says other institutions are circling. Younger galleries at the fair are also looking to capitalize on overlooked older work. In the Frame section, which hosts galleries less than eight years old, Walden of Buenos Aires is showing drawings from the 1970s by the late Mexican-born, Amsterdam-based artist Ulises Carrión, who was in touch with the Fluxus community in Europe and Conceptual artists in Latin America ($15,000–$30,000).

In the Focus section, dedicated to galleries founded after 2004, Simone Subal is showing paintings and drawings by Kiki Kogelnik, a Vienna-born, New York-based feminist Pop artist who was friends with Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein ($15,000–$130,000). “They never took her work that seriously because she was a woman,” Subal says. The gallery sold several works during the VIP preview. Notably, both Frieze stand prizes went to booths focused on art of the past: Subal’s stand and P.P.O.W.‘s presentation of ’80s art. And the Brooklyn Museum acquired a painting from 1971 by Virginia Jaramillo during the VIP preview, thanks to the inaugural Frieze Brooklyn Museum Fund. Hales Gallery is presenting a solo booth of Jaramillo’s work, which is also included in the Brooklyn Museum’s “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85.” Yet galleries remain more willing than some institutions to take a chance on a new discovery. “Museums have to weigh limited acquisition budgets and storage,” says Toby Kamps, the curator of Modern and contemporary art at the Menil Collection in Houston, who organized the fair’s Spotlight section of art from the 20th century. “Some museums are interested in alternative streams of Modernism, and others say, ‘We have to focus on existing through-lines in our collection.’”

How Did These Artists Get Overlooked?

Some work from the 1960s and ’70s was not widely seen in its own time because the artists “just weren’t interested in the idea of an audience,” Kamps says. Some artists had other occupations: Thomas Kovachevich, whose work is at Calicoon Fine Arts, is a retired physician, while Barbara Chase Riboud, whose bronze, steel, and fabric sculptures are at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, is best known as a poet and novelist. (Two of her sculptures, priced around $150,000, sold during the VIP preview.)

Other artists were simply left behind due to changing tastes. The Supports/Surfaces movement—a group of French artists who sought to free painting from the confines of canvas in the late 1960s and early ’70s—has gained wider market and institutional recognition in recent years, but only after a long period of inertia. “Dealers in France abandoned them in the ‘80s to show American artists,” says François Ceysson of Ceysson & Bénétière. (How times have changed—the gallery will now bring Supports/Surfaces to America through its first New York outpost, which opens this weekend.) At Frieze, the gallery sold four paintings by Claude Viallat (whose prices range from €10,000 to €500,000) to US collectors and a 1976 assemblage by Bernard Pagès to the collection of art storage developer Steven Guttman. Some explanations for why an artist has been overlooked are more personal. Masatoshi Masanobu, one of the founding members of the Japanese Gutai movement, has not shown in the US for more than 50 years because his children were not interested in giving him international exposure, according to Boris Vervoordt of Vervoordt Gallery. Masanobu was not included in the major exhibition of Gutai at the Guggenheim Museum in 2013, and it took 10 years for the gallery to secure the estate. His solo booth at Frieze includes paintings made between 1958–67 and priced between €55,000–€200,000; the gallery had sold four by Thursday afternoon. Despite the buzz surrounding these recovered talents, experts say collectors should proceed with caution. Sometimes, artists have been forgotten for a reason. “Opportunities are out there, but it’s not like you’re finding gold nuggets in the road—you have to dig for the bone and really look at why the market is the way it is,” says the art advisor Todd Levin, director of the Levin Art Group. Rediscoveries worth pursuing “are rare,” says the dealer Christopher Heijnen, “but something that I think will always happen.”

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by Andy Campbell

On the way to see Charles Ross’s first solo show in Los Angeles, I drove past one of the city’s many parks. There were shirtless men running, families strolling, and sunbathers lying on the grass—a picnic or a joint (or both!) near at hand. This scene provided a strangely apropos leadin to the artist’s body of work, which, while abjuring any recreational activities under the sun, makes much of the science of sunlight.

Almost half the works that make up this exhibition are from Ross’s long-running series “Solar Burns,” 1971–. These drawings—Ross has referred to them as “portraits of light”—index the changing conditions of sunlight via a magnifying device that burns a path onto prepared wooden panels. While the burns mark time (137 Burns by Minutes Through Seconds to Null, 2015) and cosmological events (HSSB [Human Size Solar Burn] 6/21/16, Summer Solstice, 2016), Ross’s “Explosion Drawings,” 1980–, depict the schematic operations of varying sources of light, akin to something you might see in a physics textbook. But these works, completed by using dynamite, fuses, and a rainbow of colored pigments, appear more exuberant than didactic. Spooky Action at a Distance III, 2016, represents luminescent waves entering and being refracted through a broad circle. A smaller, darker, eclipse-like form in the bottom-right corner of the drawing counterbalances the otherwise colorful work, providing a much-needed visual corrective to the sun worshippers at play only blocks away.

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by Catherine Wagley

Charles Ross’ Tapered Column (2004), made of clear acrylic, stands near the back of Parrasch Heijnen’s largest gallery. Ross, who has been making such columns since the 1960s, filled this one with a liquid that affects a viewer’s optical experience. Walk around the column while looking through it, and you’ll experience the room in a few different ways. From one angle, the overhead lights turn into rainbows, and Ross’ solar-burn paintings, made using sunlight and a lens to burn shapes into canvases, begin to blur. From another, all the work comes into perfect focus. It’s sort of like viewing an exhibition through a specially crafted kaleidoscope, only more comical and unwieldy: walking in circles around a pristine object in a white-walled gallery, trying to get the best, weirdest glimpse.

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Parrasch Heijnen Gallery is pleased to announce Love Is a Many Splendored Thing, a two-artist, cross-generational exhibition of new sculpture by British artist Jesse Wine (b.1983) and historic works by the late California ceramist Peter Voulkos (1924 – 2002). This collaboration engages ten new ceramic sculptures by Wine in conversation with five important works by Voulkos dating from 1956 – 1980. The exhibition will run from January 27th through March 4th. An opening reception will be held on January 27th from 6-8pm. Together these sculptures reveal a modernist sense of lyricism that runs throughout the oeuvre of both artists. Voulkos’ work in this show comprises three iconic “Stack” pieces, an early “cut out” vessel, and a groundbreaking deconstructed vessel from 1956.

Working in a variety of tropes and idioms, Wine engages in a range of imagery using his medium of choice — clay — as an homage to the poetics of Voulkos’ ceramic forms. A conduit for shared ideals and pursuits, the work transcends generational separations and embraces the core sentiments found within the two artists’ varied visions.

One of Wine’s works in this show, for example, constructs a narrative alluding to the mythology of Voulkos’ oeuvre and charisma. The guitar body with a supporting human limb makes a “musician” to which a dismembered leg dances, romanticizing Voulkos’ passion as an accomplished Flamenco guitarist. Within this approach, Wine also adopts Voulkos’ well-known “Rocking Pot” form, recreating it, writ large. To Wine, this is the most radical sculpture Voulkos made, an Abstract Expressionist application that simultaneously borrowed from an Asian architectural style and upended a utilitarian approach to ceramics. Wine’s shifting approach to making art is an examination of identity and what it means to have, or not to have, a signature style. This echos Voulkos’ pedagogical mantra “No rules. No rules,” and draws upon ideas of self-expression, freeing oneself from recognized process or style, and developing a unique language. Love Is a Many Splendored Thing was the title of a lost early Voulkos work. No documentation exists, other than the title. Jesse Wine was born in Chester, UK. He received his BA from the Camberwell College of the Arts in 2007, and his MA from the Royal College of Art, London in 2010. Wine currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His work has recently been included in British Art Show 8, Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds & Inverleith House, Edinburgh, and in solo exhibitions at Mary Mary, Glasgow, Limoncello, London, Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York, Soy Capitan, Berlin and, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead.

Peter Voulkos was born in Bozeman, Montana. After serving in the United States Army during the Second World War, Voulkos studied painting and printmaking at Montana State College and received his MFA from the California College of the Arts and Crafts, Oakland. Voulkos began his teaching career in 1953 at Black Mountain College, Asheville, NC. In 1954 he moved to Los Angeles where he founded the ceramics department at Otis College of Art and Design then called the Los Angeles County Art Institute. His work resides in various public collections including, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Currently his early work is the is the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York.

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by Casey Lesser

Artists and artisans working with ceramics have steadily contributed to the art world for centuries. From prehistoric pottery to ancient Greek amphoras, from the rise of porcelain in Asia and Europe to the Arts and Crafts movement in England and the U.S., ceramic traditions have long fascinated artists and infiltrated their practices. In the contemporary art world, this was never more clear than in 2014, when ceramics arguably achieved peak popularity. At the Whitney Biennial that year, the ceramics of Sterling Ruby and Shio Kusaka were featured prominently; the de Purys curated a show of leading ceramic artists at Venus Over Manhattan; and at major fairs like Frieze and Art Basel, galleries punctuated their presentations with pots by Dan McCarthy and Takuro Kuwata, and the figurative sculptures of Rachel Kneebone and Klara Kristalova.

It was within this context that older living artists who have long championed the medium, like Betty Woodman, Ken Price, Arlene Schechet, and Ron Nagle, saw a resurgence; and younger artists like Jesse Wine, Rose Eken, Elizabeth Jaeger, and Jennie Jieun Lee found a market. And while the trend has tapered off somewhat, enthusiasm for ceramics remains strong and artists working in the medium continue to maintain a steady foothold in art-world venues. “Ceramics is a medium that, with every passing decade, becomes easier for the untrained to manipulate—more rampant, versatile, and demystified, and perhaps more worthy of a clarified position within the wider history of sculpture,” says the British ceramist Aaron Angell, who set up a pottery studio in London in 2014 to teach fellow artists. “I feel that fired clay deserves better than to be indelibly colored by allusions to (not) being useful, the foggy world of craft, or the masturbatory hermetics of the master potter,” he adds. And he’s by no means alone. Countless artists today are shifting the perception of ceramics, ensuring that whether taking the shape of a functional vessel or an explosive sculpture, the art form receives its due respect and recognition. Below, we share the work of 20 living ceramic artists, as they each share why they’re passionate about clay.

Julia Haft-Candell

B. 1982, OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA • LIVES AND WORKS IN LOS ANGELES

Haft-Candell approaches clay with humor and an eye for problem-solving, creating sculptural work that tests the malleability and strength of the medium, through giant knots or pretzel forms, or asymmetrical blobs finished with layers of translucent glazes. She’ll often fire a glazed work multiple times to achieve a precise depth of color. “With ceramics I can draw and paint in three dimensions, and create glazes with colors and surfaces unlike any other medium,” says Haft-Candell. She is currently included in a two-person show at Interface Gallery in Oakland, and this fall she’ll have a solo show with Parrasch Heijnen Gallery in Los Angeles.

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Abstract paintings have the potential to be intelligently evocative, surprisingly narrative, and meditatively decorative. Sadly, these hanging fields often tend to become aimless green screens for people to project whatever they want onto them. Unlike the common static practice derived from within the isolated studio, Yui Yaegashi delivers mature pictures with humble direction and expansive tranquility. In her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Fixed Point Observation at Parrasch Heijnen, Yaegashi presents a dozen miniature slow-burners, fluctuating between soft and subdued planar works to fertile bursts of color and mildly neurotic brushwork. From one to the next, there is a broadly discernible reverence for an assortment of heroic minimalists without ever overstepping. In the simple pastel charm of Ground Work No. 3, Yaegashi channels the seamless structures of Agnes Martin. In Ultramarine + Monochrome Tint Cool No. 1 and Beige, she samples Blinky Palermo’s playfully erudite New York riffs for her own ambient purposes. And in Exchange, she respectfully crops what could be a classic David Reed composition and invites all to get lost deeper in her own personal translations. The contained logic of each ample rectangle (all works 2016) is supplemental to the thematically consistent serenity. On the whole, Yaegashi reveals a calm confidence and measured patience that together strive towards displaying a sophisticated awareness, acknowledging the fact that shortcuts cheapen the endgame. She is slowly and steadily engendering her own voice in an eternal clamor. Perhaps the most eloquent and emblematic example here is the ironically titled White Line—the most colorful piece in the show. With visceral strokes, layered at various speeds and consistencies, Yaegashi takes a welcome detour off the heavily beaten road of geometry, and somehow manages to massage a mellow intellect back into the canvas. Abstraction can be as selfish or as generous as the painter chooses it to be, and Yaegashi proves she recognizes the viewer can only receive as much as the artist is willing to offer.

Yui Yaegashi: Fixed Point Observation runs through January 21, 2017 at Parrasch Heijnen (1326 South Boyle Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90023).

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by David Pagel

At a time when those who shout loudest seem to get more attention than those who speak softly, it’s refreshing to come across Yui Yaegashi’s whisper of an exhibition at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery.

Titled “Fixed Point Observation,” the Tokyo-based painter’s first solo show in Los Angeles fills the large rectangular space with the kind of silence that lets you know something important is taking place. The soundless stillness that spills from Yaegashi’s intimate abstractions has nothing to do with the silent authority of solemn situations or sacred spaces. It has, on the contrary, everything to do with those fleeting moments when you see something beautiful and your breath catches — not so long that you get lightheaded, but just long enough to notice that you are in the presence of something special. Yui Yaegashi's “White Line,” 2016, oil on canvas, 4.7 inches by 9 inches. (Parrasch Heijnen Gallery.) Part of the pleasure is that it is unexpected. The elusive beauty embodied by Yaegashi’s paintings comes in canvases that are tiny, as small as 7¼ inches by 5 inches. Installed with a lot of bare wall between them, her 12 abstractions make the gallery seem cavernous. You have to stand very close to each painting to see its subtle shifts in texture, color, luminosity, translucence and depth. Every brushstroke matters. Sometimes Yaegashi uses only one color. But the direction she has dragged her paintbrush has created a surface that appears to be woven, its overlapping elements forming a complex pattern so granular that it seems to be made up of microclimates.

At other times, she paints over previous compositions, leaving only slivers of what once existed. At still others, she establishes patterns that change as your eye glides across them, creating gentle visual turbulence. So refined is Yaegashi’s paint-handling that the marks made by the individual bristles of her brush matter in ways rarely seen. Casually elegant — and unselfconsciously gorgeous — her understated paintings strike just the right balance between restraint and abandon. Even better, they draw viewers into the action, their modest dimensions pulling the rug out from under the idea that bigger is better and loudest is best.

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by David Pagel

Right now, in the United States, people who shout the loudest seem to get the most attention, even winning arguments in which they have no business of being contenders. Those who speak softly, and often appreciate the complexities of life, have little voice, their words drowned out by the hullabaloo of what passes for public discourse today. That’s why it’s so refreshing to come across Yui Yaegashi’s whisper of an exhibition at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery in downtown Los Angeles. Her show is silent. There is no noise. No distractions. Nothing to force your hand. Or to make you jump to conclusions. Of course, art exhibitions are almost always quiet affairs, their augustly displayed works accompanied by the hushed tones we often find in libraries, temples, and cemeteries. In such serious social spaces, visitors show respect by keeping our mouths shut. In contrast, the silence you find in Fixed Point Observation by Yaegashi (born in Chiba, Japan, in 1985) is different. Palpable and sensuous, it has nothing to do with the authority of officialdom, with the solemnity of history, or with the mores and manners of traditional public life. On the contrary, the Tokyo-based painter’s first solo show in Los Angeles (and only her second one outside of Japan, where she has had two solo exhibitions), fills the large rectangular space with the kind of silence that lets you know something unexpected is taking place. The soundless stillness that spills from Yaegashi’s intimate abstractions is fluid and freeing. It feels that way, first of all, because it seems to appeal to you and to you alone—in a way that makes it intimate, not personal, and radically different from the silence that comes with any kind of subjugation, willful or otherwise. That is a particular kind of quiet. It asks not for restraint or control. Individuals are neither compelled to subjugate our own inner impulses—to control our own bodies—nor are we expected to bow down before any kind of external authority, welcoming dominion that extends above and beyond us. Instead, we are invited to imagine that our experience of the paintings before us is singular, legitimate not because it loops us into a larger social discourse, but because it is valuable in its own right and on its own terms. The experience of Yaegashi’s paintings matters not because it brings us knowledge or introduces us to information with which we are unfamiliar, but because it makes room for something different: awareness, insight, and revelation, as well as the understanding of what it means to be in touch with a world that is both perfectly ordinary and profoundly mysterious.

Second, Yaegashi’s becalming installation feels expansive and empowering because her abstractions are animated by a kind of openness that, once sensed, is impossible to ignore, to dismiss, or to disparage, much less to live without. Her works elicit a type of attentiveness that heightens perception, attuning visitors to nuances that cannot be discerned when we are following rules or going along with whatever we have become familiar with. The kind of quiet Yaegashi’s twelve tiny canvases make palpable and present has, on the contrary, everything to do with those fleeting moments when you see something beautiful and your breath catches—not so long that you get light-headed, but just long enough to notice that you are in the presence of something special. Stimulating our senses, her supple works enliven us to the finer things in life, which, it turns out, are not expensive collectibles or rare masterpieces but otherwise incidental details: the subtle shifts in light, texture, and shape that can be seen in paint brushed on canvas or on the surfaces of objects all around us, whenever we look closely at the bark of trees, the wings of insects, the wood grain of weathered walls, as well as the reflections that shimmer in puddles and the patterns made when moisture freezes on windows after winter nights when the conditions are just right.

Part of the pleasure that unfolds in Fixed Point Observation derives from its unexpectedness, along with the immediacy with which it rushes forth. Neither predictable nor rational, that pleasure comes unbidden, rarely when you pursue it, and always on its own terms. It happens right in front of your eyes, a one-on-one affair that can be shared with others only in retrospect. That, I think, is the point of the exhibition’s title: Each of Yaegashi’s canvases is so small, ranging in size from 7¼ by 5 inches to 7½ by 13 inches, that there is only enough space for one person to see one at any one time. That is a “fixed point” of “observation.” The popular but ill-grounded idea—that viewers are more acutely engaged by a work of art when we have to walk around it and observe it from multiple perspective— is dispensed with by Yaegashi’s abstract paintings. One location—and lots of time—is all you need to see everything, every time, over and over again.

Installed with lots of bare wall between them, Yaegashi’s canvases make the gallery seem cavernous, significantly bigger than it would feel with no art in it. That expansiveness intensifies the impact of the minimal gestures the artist has made, each of which has resulted in subtle shifts in texture, color, luminosity, translucence, and depth. Every brushstroke, every color choice, and every element of every composition matters. That’s because of the care Yaegashi has taken, both to paint herself out of the picture and to leave clear evidence of the rather simple decisions she has made: this color and no other, this viscosity not that one, this volume of paint, loaded, just so, on a brush just this wide, which was moved in just this way, it bristles, selected for their stiffness, leaving a pattern unlike any other. There is nothing flamboyant or extravagant about any of the materials Yaegashi has used, nor is there anything like virtuoso painterly pyrotechnics put on display. Instead, she proceeds plainly, selecting a handful of colors, deciding on a simple composition, and then going to work, following her plans matter of factly—without fanfare or drama, bombast or pretense. Sometimes, Yaegashi uses only one color, often a faint beige or light gray, deep blue, or midnight black. What matters in such canvases as Mi-Tata, Untitled, Press, and Ultramarine + Monochrome Tint Cool No. 1 is the direction she has dragged her paintbrush, creating surfaces that appear to be woven, their overlapping elements forming a complex pattern so granular that it seems to be made up of micro-climates. At other times, she chooses one, two, or three colors and arranges them like bricks in a wall. Such paintings as Exchange, Ground Work No.3, Brush No. 15 of Sekaido, Knife + Brush×2 and a pair of Untitled paintings draw the eye toward the thin linear spaces between Yaegashi’s solid blocks of color, where a wall’s mortar would hold together the rows and/or columns of bricks. But rather than cementing her compositions into place, Yaegashi uses these parts of her paintings to loosen the structure, to unfix the systems, to open up some breathing. That is where—and how—she shows herself to be a nooks and-crannies artist, a painter who believes that that best things happen in the gaps, at those points in a structure or those places in a system that are less regimented than the overall composition.

The two remaining paintings, White Line and Ultramarine + Monochrome Tint Cool No.1, open up even more space. The former, which stands out because it includes more colors than can be found in all the rest of the paintings put together, is freer and looser—more carefree and fun—than any of the other canvases. The latter, in contrast, is the most calm, cool, and collected of Yaegashi’s twelve paintings. Its paired colors meet each other with more composure and ease than any of the colors in any of the other paintings. Decisiveness and playfulness sit side by side. Like all of the works in the artist’s casually elegant and unselfconsciously gorgeous exhibition, they strike just the right balance between restraint and abandon. Even better, they draw visitors into the action, their modest dimensions pulling the rug out from under the idea that bigger is better and loudest is best.

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By Aaron Peasley

Visiting the sparse, sun-drenched Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, studio of Jesse Wine, a British artist who works predominantly in clay, feels a bit like poring over a kind of late-capitalist archaeological dig. Thick rust-colored tiles, assembled in grids on tables, serve as bases for his new large-scale ceramic works. There are disembodied limbs rising ominously; elegant abstract forms that reference 20th century modernist sculpture; and a single Reebok Classic sneaker, a recurring motif of the artist’s.

Since graduating from London’s Royal College of Art in 2010, Wine has grown widely celebrated for his sculptures’ sly wit and introspective observations on human behavior. Less than a year after relocating to New York City, the 33-year-old artist also seems to be tuning in to the social and political currents fomenting on both sides of the Atlantic. “I don’t really identify as a political artist,” he says. “But my new work has become somewhat politicized by the events of this year and the extreme rhetoric we’re hearing.” Wine, who is currently preparing for a solo exhibition at Los Angeles’s Parrasch Heijnen Gallery in the spring, employs the vernacular of familiarity—household vessels, food, sneakers—to create striking and often dystopian totems. A pair of oversized hands, glazed to look like an ancient relic and sliced off at the wrist, symbolizes a kind of evolutionary regression on account of their anatomical defects. “There are no opposable thumbs,” he points out. “These are the very things that set us apart as a human species, and to remove them is a way of suggesting that we are not behaving like humans at this moment. We don’t seem to have learned from our recent past.”

Another work, somewhat reminiscent of the late American artist Ken Price, employs a series of abstract, otherworldly forms to depict human legs traversing through a morasslike terrain. The work’s bright-orange and gray palette further emphasizes the notion of disorder. “The ground that we’re walking through today is so unfamiliar,” Wine says. “Take Brexit. Everyone is second-guessing the way forward.” Not that Wine is only trading in clear-cut social metaphors. Some of the artist’s highly idiosyncratic pieces reference seminal artists such as Barbara Hepworth and Giorgio de Chirico, while also offering wry, open-ended, and often lyrical observations on contemporary culture. “Clay is a very emotional material,” Wine says. He’s careful to make a clear distinction between his ceramic work and its typical associations with the craft of pottery. “Calling me a ceramicist is a complete misinterpretation of the work,” he asserts. “It actually just doesn’t matter that the work is made out of clay; it’s not a conceptually important decision for me. This medium allows me to make work that feels very generous and open.

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by Peter Frank

Its New York and Los Angeles scenes notwithstanding, the late-1950s early-60s Beat movement was based in San Francisco. It had a literary home at City Lights Books in North Beach and an artistic one at "Painterland," the multi-studio complex in the Fillmore District. It was at Painterland that Bruce Conner established the Rat Bastard Protective Association. Under this playful moniker gathered most of the artists working in the complex, and a broad swath of their friends besides. In fact, by time the Association formed, painting wasn't the only, or even the dominant, practice in Painterland. Conner and others in his cohort were rapidly moving from painting to assemblage, excited by the expressive potential "found objects" afforded.

As the stunning exhibition – worthy of a small museum – at Landing demonstrated, some Rat Bastard artists went wholly over into pasted papers and Rat Bastard Protective Association. The Landing, Los Angeles cobbled-together objects, while others kept painting but took a more and more extravagant attitude toward putting pigment on support, often combining scraps and discards into their paints to give their textures - and, more importantly, their imagery - an abject quality. The Landing exhibition also showed how important drawing remained, even to the most devoted assemblage aficionados: something about paper, as surface and as stuff, provoked the Rat Bastard Protectivists into productive paroxysm. Perhaps their friendships with Beat poets such as Michael McClure gave them a jones for the page itself. Perhaps their sensitivity to the news of the times made them see their own art as a kind of newspaper of the soul. To be sure, the Landing show featured great painting and sculpture by Carlos Villa, Wally Hedrick, Joan Brown, Robert Branaman, Manuel Neri and the under-remembered Alvin Light. But it's the drawing and the assembling, realized by the likes of Jean Comer (Bruce's wise), Wallace Berman, and George Herms, as well as several of the painters and sculptors, that gave the show its meaning and character.

Painterland was a magnet for very gifted people, but Bruce Conner was the genius at its heart. His vision was so broad, ambitious and complex, and his world view so incisive and ornery, that out of necessity he became, as was said of Picasso, "pathologically inventive." "Bruce Conner: It's All True" clarifies Conner's voluble, mischievous, anxious, angry, verbal, visual and musical sensibility, almost to the point of confusion. But it's a giddy, enlightening confusion, an adventure not simply into someone's head but into worlds of experience, whether it's the Cold War, the Punk Scene or psychedelia. Assemblage was perfect for Conner, a way of breaking down and rebuilding the world; but after he gave up the practice in the mid-60s (deeming it too popular), he maintained the bricoleur attitude and sense of adventure, com ing up with maze-like drawings, photogravure collages, ink-blot washes, body-sized photograms, rock-and-roll photography and myriad other devices and gambits. For instance, the survey includes documents from Conner's 1967 run for San Francisco's Board of Supervisors.

Meanwhile, in LA, Kohn Gallery currently devotes itself (until mid-Jan wary) to a single work of Conner's, "A Movie." Conner was one of America's great underground filmmakers, ignore or less inventing the found-footage film with this 12-minute 1958 masterpiece. It's one of three films shown at critical junctures in the museum retrospective, but here the gallery's main room has been converted into an austere movie theater in which “A Movie" shows continually (as originally intended). Conner's hyper-montaged imagery jumps from bathos to pathos in the blink of a jump cut, but themes of destruction and elation quickly emerge, choreographed and moved along by the Pines of Rome soundtrack. (Respighi's tone poem, Conner sensed, was movie music avant la lettre.) It's one of the most ecstatic and profound artworks in any medium to come out of the Beat era.

Conner's friend and fellow Painterlandian Jay DeFeo is best known for her painting The Rose, which took her the better part of a decade to make and weighs nearly a ton (and whose removal from her studio is the subject of another Conner film). But she was a brilliant painter – and photographer and collagist – for her entire career. Her paintings on paper shown at Marc Selwyn were produced after an extended trip to Japan, two years before her untimely death at 60, and show DeFeo at the top of her game. The modestly sized, gray-scale paintings - actually rendered in a variety of media - have at once a gravitas and a muscularity to them, and seem sometimes to portray a struggling force, while at others, a force at contemplative rest. Lighter areas glow as pockets within darker. Fittingly, DeFeo called these her Samurai series, as they have the centered energy of the fabled Japanese warriors.

As the "Rat Bastard" roster reflects, DeFeo was one of a number of women prominent in the postwar Bay Area scene and now recognized as of the same level of importance as their male peers. Deborah Remington was not a Painterland per son, but her commitment to gestural painting and, especially, to the mysteries of imagery equaled those of her Beat friends - and, if anything, came to surpass them. There are a lot of sketches and studies for Remington's work from all periods in this traveling mini-survey, and it is fascinating to see her early abstract expressionist vocabulary crystallize into a strange, glowing kind of organic geometricism the likes of which have not occurred otherwise in modern art. Several large works on paper from the 1960s and 70s - which anchored the Los Angeles display - approximate the impact of the paintings, but almost everything in the selection, even many of the early ab-ex works, has that glistening, inexplicable allure. If Bruce Conner was a genius because he couldn't stop investigating and inventing, Deborah Remington was one because she had to make images no one else could have imagined, much less made.

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by George Melrod

Light and shadows. Unless you’re a photographer, or Edward Hopper, those would seem to define the sort of elusive ephemeral phenomena that is nearly impossible to pin down. So it’s a testament to his dedication that James Case-Leal’s art is based around doing just that. Dallas-born and New Yorkbased, Case-Leal has no direct ties to the Southern California-based Light and Space movement, but his laborintensive, object-oriented paintings—a term one must use here loosely—do point outward into the realm of perceptual experience, enough to suggest an affinity. The fact that he received his MFA from Columbia with a focus on sculpture and new genres gives additional clues to his approach, which uses painting as a sort of armature and laboratory to examine, and attempt to recreate, optical phenomena. To get a sense of their object-hood, a checklist of the materials used in one of his works might be in order; a typical list includes “cotton, pva, pigment: carbon, ash, lead carbonate, and stolen IKB” (International Klein Blue). Like all the pieces in this quietly mesmerizing show, the work in question, Plant Shadow (Daemonorops Draco) ii, (2016), ostensibly depicts the shadows of some form of leafy greenery, or equally, the dappled spray of light that seeps from between the fronds. But, taken further: Case-Leal attempts to depict the (highly subtle) neurological phenomenon of prismatic haloes that form around the edges in between the light and the shadow, adding colors, an effect generated not even in the human retina, but in the brain itself. It’s not something that you’d notice every day; thus, CaseLeal’s goal could be called a quixotic attempt at highlighting and valorizing a form of looking so subtle and instinctive we forget to do it. Paradoxically, these ineffable nuances are rendered through a massively labor-intensive process, which involves building up and sanding down multiple layers of paint, almost like a sculptural plane. Indeed, examining each canvas from the side reveals the thickness of his application; beneath the pale gray and white surfaces, the gallerist discloses that a panoply of brilliant colors has been applied and covered up. The resulting voyage into phenomenology remains almost beyond the viewer’s perception, but following the artist on his quest provides a stimulating endeavor: an often radiant reminder that seeing lies somewhere between nature and culture, involving optics, experience, intention, interpretation, and perhaps, a leap of faith.

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by Larry Wilcox

Even when his works extend over two metres high, as his monolithic wedges do, Peter Alexander’s sculptures always have a jewel-box quality. He is an object-maker of the highest order, and one often finds oneself entranced by the effects he produces using resin and urethane. A work like 5/6/16 (Lime Green Box) (2016) glows to the point of losing its edges. It is unbelievably and totally green, a colour buzzing so intensely that is takes over the room. Right next to it is Rose Window (1969), pale and translucent, bringing the light in and gathering it up. What emanated in the green box now becomes absorptive in the pink one. An Alexander exhibition always affords these perceptual movements, and his small survey at Parrasch Heijnen in Los Angeles is no different. Focusing on sculpture, the exhibition offers the most well-known slice of Alexander’s work. It is a series of small encounters, beautifully installed and just enough of Alexander’s work to give an insight into the whole of his career. One need not see Alexander’s paintings of landscapes (which he made for decades) to know he is going for sky and air. It is all there in the plastic.

Like so many others in Southern California during the 1960s, Alexander found his voice in polyester resin. It is common to read interviews from that period with artists being surprised to discover that others were doing what they were doing—casting resin and working with its fascinating properties. Resin was commonly used for surfboards, but artists found it a pliable material for exploring a range of metaphors about California. Light and space artists, as a group, represent the many facets of California during the 1960s. With one foot in hedonism and the other in industry, resin casters are as easily scientists as hippies; they can speak to aerospace engineering as well as hot rods.

In Alexander’s work one sees a range of resin’s properties. Pink Block (1967) sees to encapsulate perfectly its fascinating properties. A cube base topped with a wedge, it is a marine layer Santa Monica morning contained in plastic, paradoxically hazy and crisp at once. Both liquid and solid, it is atmospheric, born of weather and sky and mist and rain, and early light on a surfboard. It is also unapologetically consumable, certain of its pleasures and unashamed by delight. LA-based art critic Christopher Knight once wrote that Alexander helped originate ‘the Pop wing of Light and Space art’, and this observation proves astute over time. Over the run of his 50-year career, Alexander never seemed interested in finding a philosophical grounding for his work like Bob Irwin. He did not look to science and engineering like Larry Bell of DeWain Valentine. Nor did he seek to channel mysticism like John McCracken. Instead, he is a selfdescribed Romantic, ready to fold the splendour of the Southern California atmosphere into sculpture and painting. There is certainly a Pop-like affirmation to Alexander; he follows his pleasures and his pleasures are colour and light.

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by Janelle Zara

This fifty-year survey of Peter Alexander’s resin works demonstrates how immaculately a synthetic material can distill natural phenomena into discrete objects—tall, vertical colored wedges that fade into transparency pay homage to the lightening of deep bodies of water near the surface, while the nebulous, yellow-and-purple gradations inside a translucent cube evoke a sunset over a stormy sea, as in the aptly titled Small Cloud Box, 1966. With the show’s earliest pieces dating back to the mid-1960s, at the heart of Alexander’s special effects is the Southern California legacy of Light and Space. In the slickness and clarity of their surfaces, his simple geometric solids use reflection, iridescence, color, and distortion to radiate their own light, often in rosy shades of pink and gold. They play with our perceptions, obfuscating such basic physical properties as density and shape. The gradual thinning at the edges of simple wall-mounted works is so subtle that they appear to blur into a surreal haze, the kind that leads to a lot of squinting and eye rubbing. Two pieces, 5/6/16 (Lime Green Box), 2016, and 9/16/14 (Flo Yellow Tablet), 2014, seem to diverge from these natural references to explore newly formulated urethanes in electric colors with an uncanny ability to absorb light. This matte, opaque cube and wedge are so densely pigmented that they absorb the visibility of their own edges, and all the eye registers are blocks of color in space, geometric black holes, or creamy mint green and neon yellow. While much has changed in LA since the beginning of the artist’s career, the primordial resonance of these works, even in his oldest pieces, endures, much like with the cinematically sunny skies they've been modeled after.

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by David Pagel

The magical mysteries of color strut their shape-shifting stuff in “Peter Alexander, Sculpture 1966- 2016: A Career Survey” at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery in Boyle Heights, where the exhibition is a garden of earthly delights. Its 21 pieces meld simple shapes and complex colors to give beauty a real kick. Many of the colors that spill from Alexander’s sharply focused sculptures are not what anyone would call natural: matte chartreuse, frosted crème de menthe, rosy-eyeglasses pink and flashing emergency-light red. Alexander’s palette conjures a world of hi-tech synthetics and sci-fi futurism. Such fabricated realities usually leave little room for humans. But other sculptures recall nature at its most dazzling: the night sky seen from beneath the surface of an illuminated swimming pool, icicles reflecting sunshine on a sub-zero afternoon and waves gently lapping a sandy beach — just before disappearing into the wet sand. The combination of outlandish artifice and grounded experience is startling. And it’s just the beginning. To walk around such sculptures as “Pink Block,” “Small Cloud Box” and “Pyramid” is to see space expand and contract, both within Alexander’s semi-translucent sculptures and outside of them, right where you’re standing.

To catch a glimpse of one sculpture in the surface of another is pretty trippy. If mirrors and windows had 3-D offspring, they might be the ill-bred second cousins of Alexander’s fantastic sculptures. Nothing if not seductive, they make ample room for viewers. Their forms recall tools (wedges and ramps), supplies (bricks and beams) and architecture (buildings and windows). The optics of sculpture never looked better. Chronologically, Alexander’s slices, chunks, bumps, wedges, beams and slabs of color fall into two short spans of time: Eleven date from 1966 to 1971, and 10 from 2013 to 2016. The first are made of polyester resin, which Alexander quit using in 1972 because it was a health hazard. For the next 35 years he made paintings on velvet, canvas and linen, always looking for ways to make light tangible. In 2007, he was commissioned to reconstruct one of his polyester resin sculptures that had been damaged in a Paris museum. He discovered that he could use urethane, which was safer. Since then, that has become his go-to material. It does lots of the things his early works do as well as some others. Works like “9/17/15 Big Red Puff,” “9/16/14 (Flo Yellow Tablet)” and “4/13/16 (Clear Leaner)” come from another part of the spectrum and bring different sensations with them. Some seem more liquid. Others more opaque. Still others more brittle, even crispy.

The energy generated between Alexander’s early works and new ones is urbane and uncanny, exceptionally sophisticated yet refreshingly unpretentious. Too civilized to make your head spin, Alexander’s sculptures still make your heart race. The imagination leaps.

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by Jennifer S. Li

It’s a sweltering hot day in downtown Los Angeles when I visit California Light and Space artist Peter Alexander’s career retrospective at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, but I feel immediately refreshed upon entering. It isn’t just the effect of the A/C, but also of Alexander’s geometric polyurethane sculptures, their glistening surfaces at once enticingly reflective and mysteriously opaque. Three attenuated, spear-shaped works gleam like giant icicles against the walls of the first gallery. Sculptures resembling popsicles, colorful ice cubes, or slabs of Jell-O fill the main space.

Like DeWain Valentine and other California Light and Space artists, Alexander’s work was shaped by a surfer lifestyle and a deep love for the sea, sun and blue skies of his native Los Angeles (the artist grew up in Newport Beach and is now based in Santa Monica). Harnessing the pliant yet sturdy characteristics of plastics including resin, polyurethane, and acrylic — relatively new materials when the artist began his practice as a UCLA student in the mid-1960s — Alexander mimics the undulating, ephemeral qualities of light, water, sky and space in solid objects. Small Cloud Box (1966), a translucent blue-grey polyester resin cube swirled with water vapor, for example, seems to achieve the impossible task of capturing a piece of the sky. The gradient hue of Pink Block (1967) looks startlingly similar to Los Angeles’s unique, pollution-baked sunsets. And some sculptures simply emanate an energy of their own, absorbing or reflecting ambient light to redefine the surrounding space and yield a new luminosity. Their slick, pristine, seemingly obsessive exterior polish also demonstrates why many of the California Light and Space artists were once categorized by the more dubious labels “Finish Fetish” or “LA Look.”

Whatever the moniker, there is no doubt about our obsession — see it before it closes on September 2!

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An informal conversation between LA editor, Amanda Quinn Olivar, and longtime family friend, artist Peter Alexander, on the occasion of his career-spanning survey at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery.

Peter Alexander is a Southern California artist whose work explores light and space. He has been widely exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide since the mid1960s and has received multiple honors and awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1980 and the California Art Award in 2014. His work resides in the permanent collections of numerous institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles), and the Museum of Modern Art (New York). We started talking on cell phones and the call was cut off. Peter was in the desert and I called him back from my landline:

Peter Alexander: Is that better?

Amanda Quinn Olivar: That’s better. Is that better for you?

PA: Yeah yeah… [pause] Yes, Dear.

PA/AQO [laughing together]

PA: Ask me the questions. I just read over them real quick. It’s hard to answer on paper and give a real answer without sounding sort of snooty.

AQO: You’re not snooty.

PA: Give me a question…

AQO: What drew you away from architecture into art?

PA: Control.

AQO: That’s not snooty. What is it about control in…?

PA: Well as an architect, it’s a service and you’re really dealing with a lot of other people’s expectations, money, rules, etc. But when you do what I do, you do it all yourself and it’s finished and then you let it go. Does that make sense?

AQO: It does. What architectural elements carried through into your artwork?

PA: Well, right angles, you know… flat surfaces.

AQO: When you decided to become an artist, was it a natural transition?

PA: Ah, well yeah, except for the fact that I was given permission because of what was going on at the time. Like what other artists, like Donald Judd and Larry Bell… you know they were using right angles and things. So, in a way they gave me permission to do it. So then I made these boxes that you could crawl into.

AQO: Your own universe…

PA: Yes! Like underwater…

AQO: Did I tell you when I saw your box at Pacific Standard Time, it was surrounded by young kids.

PA: [a hearty laugh] Oh really?

AQO: It was terrific. I couldn’t get near your piece because the kids were trying to figure it out. I could hear them talking; they were completely bewildered.

PA: Oh that’s wonderful! Thanks for telling me that.

AQO: Sure… That’s a good memory for me.

AQO: How does your relationship to surf and water translate into your work?

PA: The reason why I liked the resin was because it was like water. It doesn’t smell like it, you know and all that… but it looks like it. And you can solidify it. So the idea of being able to use water and having it take shapes and colors was really special.

AQO: What‘s the process and how long does it usually take? Does it depend on size?

PA: You mean to cure it… to make it solid?

AQO: Yes.

PA: It’s a chemical reaction between two parts and depending on size and stuff… If I wanted to make one of those boxes, like in the show [at LA’s Parrasch Heijnen gallery], it would kick off in about 3 hours.

AQO: Is the process with the new resin different?

PA: No, it’s the same because you have two parts, but the cure time is longer… There’s other things involved but not significant. It’s really the same, but it’s a much better material. A lot of the things, like those really thin edges that are in this show, you couldn’t do that with polyester. It would crack and break.

AQO: I remember a lot of those older pieces with thin edges... maybe not as thin as your new works.

PA: Well, the tragedy is, is that in order for me to make those older ones with thin edges, I had to mix what’s called a flexible resin in with the material… which was not a great idea, but it worked. I’m surprised they’re still alive.

AQO: They are alive and still beautiful.

PA: Yes.

[laughing together]

AQO: What’s the importance of color to your work? How do you choose the colors and is there a significance?

PA: It goes from crystalline to, um, kool-aid. That kind of range. And the crystalline is usually more the natural stuff or… more of the earth, and then the kool-aid is just because it’s a brilliant color. This material lends itself to amazing color density.

AQO: When you delve into the colors and mix them, is it an experiment in process?

PA: Always… every one is different.

AQO: Do colors repeat in the different forms you create? For example, in your boxes and bars?

PA: The dark bars that are on the walls [at Parrasch-Heijnen gallery]… do you remember those? Sometimes I’ll find a color when I make those that I’ll then translate into, let’s say… a box. So, to answer your question, I do use colors in more than one form, because the perception is completely different.

AQO: Do you consider your work as existing within any particular art movement?

PA: Oh sure… You know, it’s the, you know, the Light and Space, honey. That’s the key.

[laughing together]

PA: Yeah, I was part of that group and I was very much influenced by it. And… it’s inseparable. And it’s a real advantage too, because everybody kept raising the bar.

AQO: Well that group, who are your oldest friends, and ours… I guess you inspired each other, but who was the first person that moved you in that way and introduced you to Light and Space? Was it Larry [Bell]?

PA: Yeah, it would be Larry. I think. Yeah. He was doing things before I was and was active perhaps 5 years before I came on the scene. And what I got from him were these beautiful boxes, and I thought… My God, I bet I can cast a box. He gave me permission to cast a box. And my boxes were all different but, it was a box. And I like him enormously, as I’m sure you do too! [laughing]

AQO: Yes, I do! [laughing]. Love you both!

PA: [laughing]

AQO: …most of my life knowing you both!

PA: Pretty much… Isn’t it!

AQO: It’s crazy.

PA: It’s crazy, but it’s wonderful.

AQO: It really is.

AQO: So, you recently returned to working with resin, after years away. What did you do in the meantime?

PA: Well, I couldn’t use the original material, with polyester, because I got sick… and there were other things going on at the time and I wanted to learn to do pictures, something that was really… kind of dumb. So I started doing sunsets. That’s when I was building a house up in the Canyon, and in the evening we’d see the sunset over the water… you know, and I’d say to myself: Jesus, something could be done with that! You know. So, it was sort of a, it’s something to push against, because it’s such a cliché. But, how do you take that that cliché and re-enthuse it? But… and then it went on and on. I mean the velvets, for an example, it wasn’t because of the kitsch… It was because of the black. I tried to paint that black many times and I couldn’t do it. So I said, well fuck it, I’ll just go ahead on the velvet. The idea of velvet as kitsch is often asked because it’s the natural place to go. Not that I was immune to it… I mean, that was part of the challenge.

AQO: Well you do have the sense of humor for that.

[both laughing]

AQO: Your humor would go that direction, but it was because of the color then?

PA: Yeah, the black. And I’ll tell you why the black: because if you put something that shines on top of that velvet, you get the immediate sense of deep space… and there’s a big gap between whatever the black is and the shiny thing. You know what I mean? So in deep space there’s something that our bodies respond to. It’s not an intellectual thing… it’s not a cerebral thing… It’s physical. And I like doing things that are physical. I trust them more.

AQO: I love that explanation.

PA: [laughing] I thought you might.

AQO: And finally, but never really final: will you please relate a memory or two that impacted your life and/or career?

PA: [whispering] Oh God. That’s a tough one. I could say… I mean a very recent one is that fantastic review that David Pagel gave me in the [LA] Times, and it would be remarkable because if I had gotten that kind of review twenty years ago, I would have been absolutely ecstatic. But now… I mean it’s certainly better to have one like that than not, but it happens that you reach a point that you don’t really care that much, because you’re committed and involved in what you do and you’re not going to change, so… You know what I mean? That’s not a very good story though. I mean, I have to think about that… there’s no one story.

AQO: I know, there’s a lifetime.

PA: Yeah. I mean, I could talk about sailing off Mexico, you know...

AQO: Well, that must have a lot to do with your work and the sunsets…?

PA: Well, as a kid I grew up by the jetty in Newport Beach you know, on the peninsula there… and one of the memorable things that happened is that, in 1946, there was this, uh, comet that came across at night. And so the sky was falling. It was about two in the morning, and my parents woke my brother and me up saying: you’ve got to come outside. So I was sitting on these sand dunes outside the house, looking up at the sky, and I never forgot it. It was the most… it was absolutely indelible. And that’s why I love polka dots [laughing].

AQO: Peter, that’s a good story

PA: OK, you can use that one! And at the time I was, what… seven years old.

AQO: That’s a perfect ending. You knew it!

PA: It’s ‘cause you’re so sweet… I’m just answering your questions.

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by Honora Shea

Parrasch Heijnen Gallery in LA is hosting a career-surveying exhibition of Peter Alexander's ethereal resin sculptures.

At Parrasch Heijnen Gallery in LA this past Saturday, more than a few visitors craned their necks to look behind Peter Alexander’s resin sculptures, as if they were trying to figure out exactly where the stillness of light was coming from. There were tall wedges that rose from dark, solid bases into light, barely-there slivers and trapezoids in which the colour ranged from nearly transparent to inky in hue, all capturing the essence of that hazy, southern Californian amalgamation of sun, water and sky. The works in this retrospective are made of dyed resin, but their thrall originates from the immersive experience of surfing. Alexander began working with polyester resin, he says, when he noticed the clarity of the material while using it to glaze his surfboard as a young man. His early cube-shaped works, like the stunning Small Cloud Box (1966), are smooth on the surface, but dynamic and sometimes turbulent on the interior, encapsulating the feeling of looking out into the ocean and moving through the water. Trained as an architect, Alexander explains, 'The boxes I did in the 1960s were rooms. They were watery rooms that I would like to swim around in. That’s how I saw them.'

Alexander no longer surfs, and began working with the less-toxic urethane resin, instead of polyester resin, in 2005. The resulting sculptures, like 9/7/15 Big Red Puff (2015), a fiery red panel, are bolder in colour but more opaque than earlier works, emitting a deeper, quieter energy. Calmer, and more settled, but no less evocative.

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by David Pagel

Joan Snyder’s eight paintings at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery are a joy to behold. Tough and abuzz with enough visual energy to make your eyes wide with excitement, they look like they were fun to make. Even better, they’re fun to look at. Pleasure takes center stage in the New York painter’s mixed-media abstractions, each of which draws your eyes into a lively dance all its own. In the entryway hangs “Spring 1971.” The largest and oldest work in the exhibition, it alone makes a visit worthwhile. Composed of 15 horizontal lines, its orderly format is interrupted by numerous dots, dabs, drips and a handful of echoing curves. If a sheet of musical notation were hallucinating, this is what it might see. In the main gallery hangs “Womansong,” seven canvases Snyder has painted during the last year and a half. They are freer and meatier than “Spring 1971.” But the bones can be sensed beneath the spunky surfaces of the new paintings, where luscious colors, rambunctious brushwork and madcap collage give visitors plenty of room to roam. Sometimes your eyes rest on a glistening puddle of inky blue or ricochet off a decorous dollop of whip-creamy paint, into which a sprig of dried flowers has been stuck. At other times, they fly through atmospheric expanses of tangy colors, wash-boarding over the weave of raw canvas, pinballing around dense chunks of supersaturated colors and skittering into clotted smears of dirty brown, soiled yellow, gooey red and spectacular lavender. Messy drips, flick-of-the-wrist flourishes and vigorously rubbed-out clouds of color happily cohabitate with loose constellations of glass beads, lumps of clay, blobs of papier-mâché and smears of mud. You rarely get tired of looking at a painting by Snyder because each time you do, your eyes follow a different path. The magic intensifies the more time you spend with the paintings, which hold nothing back.

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by Jonathan Griffin

The New York-based painter Joan Snyder came to attention quite suddenly, in 1971, at the age of thirty-one, when she exhibited a body of work that she referred to as her ‘stroke paintings’. These large canvases, both abstract and expressionist, through ambivalent towards the orthodoxies of the masculine Abstract Expressionist movement, arranged discontinuous strokes of different colours on horizontal grids. Snyder’s Spring 1971 (1971), which introduces her exhibition at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, is a classic work from this pivotal moment in her career. Compared to the contemporary works that follow it in the main gallery, Spring 1971 is a difficult, jarring painting, and bracingly so. It is difficult because it refuses to cohere, or synthesise; like most of Snyder’s paintings from this period, each painterly incident – trowelled daubs of oil paint, pooling stains of thin acrylic, faint mists of sprayed enamel – arises unexpectedly and independently. Snyder – who may be a synaesthete – has long been inspired in her art by sound and music. With its horizontal bars, Spring 1971 is reminiscent of 1960s experimental graphic notations of composers such as Roman Haubenstock-Ramati or Cornelius Cardew. As a composition, it is discordant, arrhythmic and seemingly improvised. Snyder’s recent paintings in the exhibition retain some of those structural qualities, though their mood is quite different. In contrast to the rather cerebral painting from 1971, these seven works, dating from 2015 and 2016, are brimming with sensuous feeling, a consciousness of the body, of the artist’s heart, guts and womb, and are encrusted with material culled from the external world, including mud, dried flowers and glass beads. During the 1970s Snyder became increasingly involved with feminism. She has sustained an avowedly female aesthetic ever since. Heart of the Fugue (2016), a panoramic painting made from conjoined canvases, has at its centre a scratched heart symbol and poppy stalks tied with silk ribbon embedded in puddles of glossy white paint.

As a man, I am perhaps not fully licensed to say that many of Snyder’s indices of femininity – pastel colours, flowers, hearts, ribbons, etc – seem rather clichéd. If I were a woman I might resent having my gender so narrowly prescribed. Snyder does not use these signs lightly, however. For her, the dried flowers and seed heads that she cements to her canvases with thick paint or gloopy, transparent medium are profound symbols of germination, fruition and ultimate decay. Artists including Cy Twombly and Anselm Kiefer (both of whom are recalled here) have each used flowers to similar – though less overtly gendered – effect. Snyder’s fragmented paintings are never overbearing or hectoring, as Kiefer’s can often be. Instead she presents us with moments of formal experimentation or traces from her life experience, arranged with space between, allowing us to explore them on our own terms. To let one’s eye wander through the diaphanous Field of Berries (2016), for example, is to encounter all manner of unexpected gifts: veils of dripping, translucent acrylic; torn scraps of watercolour paper; crusty scabs of vivid, unmixed oil paint; twigs and clusters of tiny clay fruit.

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As the 44th presidency draws to a close, a steady trickle of retrospective articles have begun to explore Barack Obama’s time in the White House, several of which refer to his administration’s preferred principle of “soft power.” A concept coined by the political scientist Joseph Nye, soft power advocates the use of subtle persuasion rather than strong-armed coercion—via policies, politicking, and the media— to bring other worldviews into line with one’s own. Eight canvases recently on view at Parrasch Heijnen by Joan Snyder, an established New York painter and early feminist artist, deploy a similarly restrained and compelling maneuver.

Since Snyder (now in her 70s) uses a traditional medium, a bright multihued palette, and abundant references in her titles and materials to things coded female (the exhibition was titled Womansong), one could expect to encounter a room full of pictures that might traditionally have been written of as surface-level or critically undemanding. However, while Snyder’s paintings do offer moments of beauty and attraction, her heavily impastoed surfaces and abstracted traces of refuse add an element of repulsion that complicates any assumptions of easy-viewing or gendered forms. In so doing, the paintings utilize a soft, insinuating power that punches subtly but firmly. Take Lady (2015), for example. At a glance, the work’s layered, energetic composition and colorful, confetti-like flecks of paint convey an agreeable whimsy. Upon closer examination, the pink outline of a supine woman comes to the fore; so do the heads of large dried flowers that have been smashed into splotches of oil paint, which the artist lets trickle down the canvas. At the waist of the painting’s curvaceous body, strokes of minty green and vanilla mingle with black-brown, as if a fallen ice cream cone were melting into a muddy sludge across its midrif. Here, unseemly ingredients pollute both the work’s initial pastoral lightness and its ghostly image of busty, idealized womanhood, so pervasive in today’s advertising and Instagram culture.

Snyder likewise conjures—and then promptly quashes—the trappings of female prettiness in Heart of the Fugue (2016). Heart-shaped signs are scrawled into a central, reddishpurple form that doubles as a beating heart and vagina; and across the linen support, Snyder has affixed half a dozen bundles of flower stalks, tied together with pink silk ribbons. More daubs of Technicolor paint, many in pink, provide a loose grid that structures the otherwise free-flowing and organic-looking gestures. Anything but lovely, by contrast, are the periodic smears of brown pigment, which connote abject notions of decay, dirt, and even finger-painted excrement. These passages in Snyder’s work add a female-oriented twist to the exuberant, male-centered scatologies of her contemporary Paul McCarthy and, more recently, the female painter, Tala Madani. Themes such as landscape, the body, music, the brushstroke, and the grid have been recurring concerns within Snyder’s work since her career first took off in the late 1960s. Living in New York, fresh from a master’s program at Rutgers University, her work received early recognition: solo exhibitions in New York and San Francisco in 1971; a major article in Artforum that same year by curator Marcia Tucker; and inclusion in two of the Whitney Museum’s then-annual exhibitions. In this early period she was deep into her “stroke paintings,” canvases that examine and catalog a range of expansive brushstrokes and brusque dabs of paint. One example, Spring (1971), is installed at the entrance to Snyder’s recent exhibition, where it offers not only a chronological counterpoint to the more recent canvases, but also evidence of her long-standing treatment of paint at once as a material, a language, and a skin of its own. The positioning of historical and contemporary works together is especially well-suited to Snyder’s cyclical return to particular motifs and pictorial strategies. Between these temporal poles of early and late career, the artist has followed a mantra of “more, not less”—a conscious departure from the 1960s dicta of late-modernist criticism and Minimalism alike.

Rejecting fatness and opticality on the one hand, and the concept of a self-contained, depersonalized object on the other, Snyder instead infused her abstract paintings with collaged materials, bodily traces, and narrative suggestion, just as the feminist art movement was beginning to gain steam. Unlike many of her feminist peers, including Judy Chicago, Faith Ringgold, and Martha Rosler, Snyder did not delve into alternative

media such as performance, installation, or video. Rather, she stood steadfastly by painting, working to dislodge its largely masculine associations with authorial gesture and power. At different points in each subsequent decade, Snyder’s canvases have veered towards an overabundant accretion of material and text (…)

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by Catherine Wagley

An iconic feminist painter shows new work at a new Boyle Heights gallery, and it's the last week to see crowded family scenes and a portrait of a mystical, bearded bro in another downtown show.

Messy impulses

Dried plant life covered in paint bulges off canvases in Joan Snyder’s show "Womansong" at Parrasch Heijnen. Round marks, orange drips and thin, swirling lines coexist equally.

Snyder’s paintings have no clear center. Bright colors, like blues and neon greens, share space with earthy, dirty browns. Snyder, who has been working since the 1960s and championed other women artists early on, has rebelled against art’s high-mindedness all along. The paintings are intentionally messy things, idiosyncratic, non-hierarchical marriages of refined and guttural impulses.

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by Amy Marie Slocum

We speak to the established Expressionist painter on the eve of her Los Angeles exhibition “At the time my idea was studying the anatomy of a stroke, isolating them and using them almost like creating a symphony or a piece of music. My whole idea was to have more, not less in a painting.” So says Joan Snyder, the septuagenarian painter from New York whose show Womansong is currently on view at Parrasch Heijnen.

Snyder burst into the art scene in New York in the ‘60s with a series of pieces called ‘stroke paintings’ which were brush strokes of varying sizes and colors arranged on a grid. Although the art world at the time was dominated by minimalists like Rothko, Snyder considered herself more of an expressionist, reexamining the brush stroke and telling a narrative with the paint. Womansong will include a previously unseen piece from that era, as well as a new series, which the artist says was created in a burst of creativity over the course of the last fall and winter. I spoke to Snyder on the phone on the eve of the opening of Womansong.

What is your definition of expressionism?

I think it’s someone who expresses a certain amount of emotion in a painting, letting it all hang out in some ways. The opposite would be cool, or impersonal or minimal maybe.

Going back to minimalism, do you feel that you took something from that, or was your work, for lack of a better term, a reaction to it?

Well I think I did take something from it, Brice Marden was well known at the time and I liked his work. There’s always something to take from other work, it’s not that I didn’t think people like Rothko were not great artists, but to me, it wasn’t enough, I was looking for more than that. It was also the beginning of the women’s art world in the ‘70s; women were doing something different, we had stories to tell. Our forbearers were not minimalists, or abstract expressionists, there was a language that we were using that was very new in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s.

In the mid-’70s your work changed quite a bit, you started layering more, and creating these sort of sculptures almost.

The work did change in the mid-’70s, pretty radically actually, from the stroke paintings. People used to refer to them as ‘lyrical abstraction’ and I always hated that term. One painting that made it change very radically and that was a painting called “The Storm” which the Guggenheim owns now. What happened to me is that I was a young artist and I became very well known very quickly, and it was very difficult because I was suddenly collecting people in my life like butterflies, and also I had a long list of collectors who wanted these stroke paintings, there was a waiting list, and this was in 1973/’74. I then moved to a farm in Pennsylvania with my now former husband Larry Fink. What it was, is that I made a stroke painting, and every time I made something beautiful with the paint, I covered it up with mud color, browns and reddish browns and blacks, and it was a kind of grid of these dark colors, with a little of the stroke painting showing through. What that was about is that I felt so over-exposed in the art world and that painting was covering it all up. Then I became a feminist.

How has your relationship to painting changed over the course of your career? Is it easier or harder to pick up the brush now?

You know, it’s not harder. Miraculously, with the set of paintings that is going to be shown at Parrasch Heijnen, to me it’s always a shock [to see them] it’s like, ‘did I really do that?’

The last show I did, in May at Franklin Parrasch in New York, was three years of work that was really about a certain kind of mourning, and suffering and agony. It always ends up being beautiful, but it really ends up being heavy duty stuff that was going on in my life an in my work. Then came the summer where I didn’t work that much, and then the fall and the winter, where suddenly I was making the paintings that you are going to see in this show, and they were so light, and so not-heavy. It was almost like going back to the stroke paintings idea, but bringing with it all the landscape ideas. In answer to your question, no one was more surprised than me by what came out of that winter. I feel like I still have a lot of ideas.

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by Suzanne Hudson

The inaugural exhibition at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery was clearly the result of a herculean effort. Not for nothing was the show titled “Ken Price: A Career Survey, 1961–2008”; its ambition and temporal spread rivaled the artist’s 2012–13 touring show, which originated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. While the latter assembled considerably more objects than were on view here, this retrospective, economic in its selections, nevertheless demonstrated the fecundity of Price’s continual sculptural redefinitions, while hewing to the media in which his material and procedural experimentation took such exemplary form. (Franklin Parrasch, who curated the show, cherry-picked twenty-four works running the gamut from those exhibited in Price’s first outings at the Ferus Gallery in LA in the early 1960s to late pieces from the past decade, pointedly refraining from including a single work from the previous survey.) And while LACMA presented its show in chronological order, Parrasch eschewed a linear installation, instead outfitting the new space’s main room with four wide table-like plinths, each of which supported a set of small-scale ceramic sculptures that cut across the artist’s career in a lateral democracy. The groups included a mix of decades, and an emphasis on the range of Price’s oeuvre seemed very much the curatorial intention.

The front-left plinth alone offered a generous assortment: the iridescent S.D. Violet, 1967, with its irregularly protruding lozenge-like appearance; Untitled (Two Part Geometric), 1974, with its Bauhaus-esque primary palette and boxy geometry; the vibrant and jaggedly striated Untitled (Rock), 1984; the dappled Whisper, 1997, with its Möbius-strip-like continuity; and the totemic Deuce, 2004, its upright form melting into bulbous legs. Despite this heterogeneity, Price’s work was revealed to be productively recursive, with certain aspects manifesting more than once in varying guises. Three late-’60s cups—one with three legs, another with an emerald frog grasping its base, and a third with a snail poised to circumambulate it—together highlighted differentiation within a standardized format. More broadly, multiple blob-like, biomorphic sculptures looked as though they were arrested mid-seepage. Many of Price’s works harbor central cavities or voids. Color plays a primary role within these works. Whisper and Deuce both appear to be blanketed in pointillist atoms, although “blanketed” isn’t exactly right, because these sculptures are constituted by that treatment as much as they are draped by it. Indeed, Price posits more emphatically than most the relation between surface and form, and explores the ways in which color can reside on the surface or penetrate it, depending on the physical processes of firing.

For all their diversity, the works Parrasch selected were without exception ceramics. In this, the survey maintained the more recent historiographic emphasis on Price as a clay-based artist. It must be kept in mind, however, that Price’s chosen medium had in previous decades limited his work’s circulation and reception.

Price—like Peter Voulkos, with whom he studied—was an artist who made pottery within an expanding but very different art world than that of the present, a sphere wide enough to absorb work in all media. Yet the point here was less the obviation of distinctions between craft and fine art, codependent terms and moving targets anyhow, than the proposition that a focused logic could yield a potent range of outcomes through the mastery of obdurate stuff (as well as through the unforeseen exigencies arising from their making). Price was the subject of only one museum survey in his lifetime (at the Menil Collection in Houston in 1992), a fact all the more surprising in retrospect given how fresh his pieces appeared in this showing. Diminutive and fashioned out of earth, occult in their reference and campy in their embrace of a Technicolor world around them, these totems were once outliers. That time feels increasingly distant.

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by Jeffrey Grunthaner

Daniel Turner is emerging as a forceful presence on the contemporary art scene. A man of few but highly impactful words, his creative output is similarly minimal and precise. When he makes objects, they tend to reference recognizable forms, with eerily recognizable functions. A group of sculptures I saw at Team Gallery, in 2014, could be described as troughs, too diminutive and elongated to have an identifiable purpose. Precisely wrought, they felt both alluring and alien; they seemed to repel interaction at the same time as they invited it. Turner’s new sculptures, exhibiting at Parrasch-Heijnen in LA, look like large tinted windows, decontextualized enough so as to appear “window-like.” In the words of the press release, “the artist has developed two architectural scaled works in tempered glass. Consisting of several sheets of leaning glass stacked in two sections along the gallery wall, each sculpture forms a transparent achromatic scale.” Rectangular in shape, the fact that the works are collections, strategically placed together, coupled with the uniqueness of their size, distinguishes them from panes that one would think to look through. I’ve seen these sculptures in diminutive forms at Turner’s impressively empty, laboratory-like studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Imagining those smaller works become enlarged, I immediately thought of surveillance, of the glass towers that canopy Manhattan. Like the privatization of information, corporate architecture appears transparent, as though you could see inside it. Those buildings, however, bar outside viewers any clear vantage point. Standing behind the glass—enclosed by it—you can gaze out onto an entire city. From the outside, you can barely make out your own reflection.

On the occasion of Turner’s eponymous exhibition in L.A., he and and I spoke about his recent body of work, finally conducting our interview via email. What follows is from this email exchange, featuring Turner’s unedited responses.

Jeffrey Grunthaner: The works you’re showing at Parrasch-Heijnen, LA, resemble works you’ve exhibited previously with Franklin Parrasch in NY. Both bodies of work resemble windows, and are untitled. Are these new pieces continuations of the old? Does the same concept underlie both?

Daniel Turner: The material and idea for the pieces remain the same. Only the composition, scale, and coloring of the glass has shifted. The changes were fairly reserved, rather formal, nothing was manipulated.

JG: You mentioned to me that these works remind you of the weather. I think of “weather” as a kind of pressure ineluctably influencing the arrangement of daily life, like snow or the mild climate of spring. Can you elaborate on this remark?

DT: When I mentioned that the pieces reminded me of weather I'm thinking more in terms of painterly weather- variations of hue. The panes’ proximity to the wall presents itself less with social preoccupations or natural phenomena so I find them quite painterly, even while reflecting its surroundings.

JG: Glass seems like a peculiar medium to work with, in that it always bears a certain degree of transparency. Apart from intuition, could you tell me more about how you view the interplay between the function of a window (something you see out of, or through), and its placement in your sculptural work?

DT: Unfortunately it really is just intuition. There is no interesting back story about how I fell through a pane of glass. Of course the properties of glass are incredibly complex. Its uses are universal from surveillance to pharmaceutical handling. Glass is neutral, almost indifferent, all of which I find attractive. At some point you start to work with what holds your interest.

JG: In light of the minimalism of your exhibitions (which sometimes, if I’m not mistaken, have included only wall-rubbings, or traces of corrosion left on a floor), what do you hope to accomplish from your shows overall?

DT: The same thing we all want—a transaction worth the time, a heightened sense of awareness.

JG: Your sculptures distinguish themselves not only by their subtlety, but by the way they suggest industrial detritus. This aspect, though, is tempered by the way in which they present themselves:your sculptures are clean, polished, with little traces of the labor that went into making them. What is the relation between how you make a work, and the way in which it achieves its fully realized form?

DT: For the most part I work site specifically, meaning that the pieces are never fully resolved until the sculptures are placed.

JG: The works you’re exhibiting at Parrasch-Heijnen possess the ostensibly menacing aspect of corporate architecture. Were corporate buildings an inspiration for this body of work?

DT: Absolutely.

JG: I’m curious about who you’re looking at, and who you might cite as an influence for the works exhibited in this particular show, as well as influences on your work generally.

DT: Everyone from John Constable, to Mies van der Rohe; from Philip Glass, to Larry Bell.

JG: What materials do you prefer to work with? Is there anything specific about glass that especially interests you?

DT: I can’t say I prefer any material over another. What's important is how the material is handled in a particular context at a particular time.

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by Arthur Peña

The 8th Dallas Art Fair wrapped up over the weekend and with it came an exceptional gathering of international galleries and artists. I’m not so interested in picking top booths, name dropping who was in town for the parties or lingering on the Dallas Art Fair Foundation Acquisition Program, which provides the Dallas Museum of Art with $50,000 to acquire work by artists exhibited at the fair. Rather I wanted to give some quick thoughts on a group of selected paintings that stood out from the crowd. Some selections are consistent with what is being seen on the coasts and beyond but there were surprises and discoveries to be had.

90 year old Tony Delap’s two small pieces at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery were precarious and deftly witty. Well known in California for decades, his paintings kept refreshing themselves the more I looked. Superstar Nadia Ayari had two pieces at Taymour Grahne (her solo show Bricks just opened last month at the NYC gallery) that manage to tap into the abject quality of paint as she delicately pushes and builds her surface to a sumptuous saturation of color and touch. Fresh off their month long residency at Luis de Jesus in LA Josh Reames and José Lerma showed new works at Brand New Gallery. It’s obvious that not only has their years of friendship from the halls of SAIC deepened a kinship for each other’s approach to painting but also their time together in LA working on two large scale collaborative works provided them the opportunity to play off of each other’s aesthetic. Lerma in particular is making some of the freshest paintings around. All in all there were plenty of solid paintings to behold and I’m sure everyone in Dallas is well on their way to recovery from the whirlwind week.

Read more here.

Today’s show: A solo exhibition of Daniel Turner’s work is on view at Parrasch Heijnen in Los Angeles through Saturday, April 23. The New York–based artist presents two 14-by-7-foot sculptures made of several sheets of leaning glass.

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by David Pagel

If you missed "Ken Price: A Retrospective" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2012, you missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The magnificent survey was a joy to behold: Jampacked with masterpieces that Price made from 1959 to 2011, it made the case that Price was not only one of the most important artists to have come out of California but that he was one of the most important artists of the 20th century, period.

To get a taste of his genius, visit "Ken Price: A Career Survey, 1961-2008," the inaugural exhibition of Parrasch Heijnen Gallery. As thrilling to visit as the retrospective (which included about four times as many pieces), the Parrasch Heijnen survey zeroes in on the way Price's pieces play so well with one another. The LACMA retrospective did that by laying out the numerous bodies of work Price (1935- 2012) made over a half century. It did that chronologically. Here, a mix-and-match strategy is embraced. It's brilliant. Four hefty pedestals stand in the nicely proportioned main gallery. Each is about the size of a banquet table. Atop each rests four, five or seven modestly scaled ceramic sculptures. On one exemplary pedestal, each of its five pieces was made in a different decade and represents a distinct body of work. Together, "S.D. Violet" 1967, "Untitled (Two Part Geometric)" 1974, "Untitled (Rock)" 1984, "Whisper" 1997 and "Deuce" 2004 demonstrate the range and focus of Price's oeuvre. No two look alike. The contrasts work wonders. A visual symphony unfolds. Similar time-defying magic happens on the other three pedestals. Ablaze with more colors than can be found in the rainbow, the acrylic and lacquer surfaces of Price's pieces come in eye-popping combinations: Powdery pastels and tough metallic sheens share space with bright, shiny primaries, spunky secondary colors and to-hell-andback tertiaries. Their silhouettes and contours trace shapes and forms that are even wilder. Geometric perfection and cartoon goofiness rub shoulders. Sinuous curves, which are bulbous, swollen and sexy, cohabitate with craggy edges and jagged fragments, which recall geological formations.

A comical frog and a larger-than-life-size snail adorn a pair of functional cups. But most of Price's terrifically inventive works are abstract. Pods and blobs predominate, some suggesting sci-fi life forms and others resembling gelatinous masses that creep along, like slugs. Plump, 3-D drips could be the super-sized siblings of those in Jackson Pollock's paintings. Molten lava and melting ice cream also come to mind.

If Richard Diebenkorn had designed the surface of the earth, some of Price's sculptures look as if they were plucked from it. Others resemble tangles of snakes, piles of sausages or lumps of scat in a palette more gorgeous than nature's.

Profound generosity lies at the heart of Price's art. That sentiment is enhanced by this compact survey. None of its works was in the 2012 retrospective. None is for sale. All have been borrowed from private collections. Don't miss this show. Then go again.

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by Mary Woronov

Kenny Price’s objects are modest in size and endless in meaning, which is another way of saying they make you think and feel instead of just impressing you. At a recent career survey at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery’s inaugural LA show, the first piece you are confronted with is a hard pod-like object with an unnaturally vibrant orange surface, titled Orange (1964). On closer inspection there appears to be a struggling wooden-like object within the object, either trying to escape or in the process of being swallowed up. The first thing I felt was that a fake machine world was demolishing the natural world. Suddenly the wood-like object becomes human and the oceans fill with plastic and this tiny little sculpture fills me with dread and sorrow because I can’t save a small piece of wood.

Ken Price, Silver, 1961, acrylic and lacquer on fired ceramic with artist’s wood base, 12 x 13.5 x 18″, courtesy Parrasch Heijnen Gallery. We have all heard the saying “less is more.” Obviously this does not apply to money or power, but in poetry an entire idea hides in a few words and in art one image can engulf the viewer. For me, small is somehow more fascinating than big. Big is merely impressive and when the idea does not deserve the space, you begin to ignore it for your own protection, which is what I do when faced with a gigantic balloon dog. Small, however—and I do not mean miniatures—demands that you climb down to its level. So here we are at the next level. The adjacent sculpture, titled Silver (1961), looks like a lady’s handbag of polished steel and inside are strong steel bars from some prison, all curled up and forcing their way out. Of course, I think of my doctor father’s medical bag with all its instruments of death or the purse that my mother was forced to carry, which her virginity was constantly falling out of because that was her job way back in the ’50s.

These objects have something to say if you listen Don’t get me wrong, you might not feel these things but mysteriously you will feel something, because these objects have something to say if you listen. These small sculptures are made with such care and such passionate intent that you cannot help but let your imagination fly away before your brain can hit the delete button. There are other pieces like the tiny epic landscapes that you could fit in your hand. You wonder how something so small can seem so big and then you realize that your imagination is turning them into the land of another planet— not Earth, but the inside of your head. I still remember the first Price I saw—a painting of a small cup on a table. I still wonder, who left it there? What used to be in it and why did I care? Was it about loss, leaving and loneliness? Will an excavator dig up this cup one day and remember me? Thank you Mr. Price.

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by John Wogan

As far as neighborhood transformations go, it doesn’t get much more extreme than downtown Los Angeles, where the past several years have seen projects like the Ace Hotel, restaurants like Bestia and Otium, and cultural institutions like the Broadmuseum coming together to form one of the most dynamic urban areas in the country. The development is especially significant to the city’s gallery scene, which has exploded with the influx of artists priced out of New York, London, and Paris. Several galleries have followed them and chosen downtown for their L.A. outposts, lured by the neighborhood’s supply of old warehouses and ample space that can’t be matched in other cities. Here, a look at seven of our favorites that are worth a day of exploring.

Parrasch Heijnen Gallery

New York gallerist Franklin Parrasch collaborated with his west coast partner Chris Heijnen to open the 5,000-square-foot Parrasch Heijnenin January. The move was spurred by the increasing number of West Coast–based artists Parrasch’s NYC gallery exhibits, like sculptors Ken Price and Peter Alexander, and painter Billy Al Bengston. Artist Daniel Turner’s first L.A. exhibit runs through April 23. 1326 South Boyle Avenue; parrasch-heijnen.com

Venus Over Los Angeles

Gallerist Adam Lindemann opened Venus Over Los Angeles(pictured above), a sibling to New York’s Venus Over Manhattan, last spring. It spans two warehouses, totaling 14,500 square feet, to exhibit shows by artists including Dan Colen, Dan McCarthy, Katherine Bernhardt, and Marianne Vitale. Sculptor Elaine Cameron-Weir’s show, “Snake with Sexual Interest in Own Tail,” runs through April 30. 601 South Anderson Street; venusovermanhattan.com

Hauser Wirth & Schimmel

This month, Hauser & Wirth added a mammoth 116,000-square-foot gallery (located in a former flour mill that spans an entire city block) to its stable of five existing galleries in Zurich, London, Somerset, and New York (the “Schimmel” is Paul Schimmel, former chief curator of L.A.’s MOCA, who was instrumental in the opening of the new space). Annabelle Selldorf—a master at historic renovations—acted as consulting architect for the structure, originally built in 1929, while the primary architect was Evan Raabe of Creative Space. The opening show, “Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016,” runs through September 4. 901 East 3rd Street; hauserwirth.com

Maccarone

Gallerist Michele Maccarone opened her 50,000-square-foot L.A. outpost in September (adding to her two galleries in New York’s West Village) in a converted warehouse (pictured below), which was renovated by Jeff Allsbrook and Silvia Kuhle of local architecture and design firm Standard. Maccarone not only exhibits the work of artists like Nate Lowman, Alex Hubbard and Hanna Liden, but also contains artist studios as well. Light artist Keith Sonnier’s current show, “Portals,” runs through May 7. 300 South Mission Road; maccarone.net

Night Gallery Davida Nemeroff and Mieke Marple have created one of the edgiest galleries in the country, with a roster of up-and-coming talents like multimedia artist Rose Marcus, sculptor Sean Townley, and painter Christine Wang. The gallery—which moved from Lincoln Heights to its current space downtown in 2013—is also known as a social hub for the neighborhood’s art tribe, and hosts events like Night Comedy, a showcase for unconventional stand-up routines. 2276 East 16th Street; nightgallery.ca

356 Mission

New York gallerist Gavin Brown, Angeleno Wendy Yao (owner of influential downtown shop Ooga Booga) and painter Laura Owens teamed up to open 356 Mission (pictured below) in 2013 in yet another converted warehouse building, which shows work by writer/filmmaker/artist Gary Indiana and post-conceptual, multidisciplinary artist Seth Price. Painter Wayne Koestenbaum’s exhibit, “A Novel of Thank You and Other Paintings,” runs through May 8. 356 South Mission Road; 356mission.com

Wilding Cran

Husband-and-wife team Anthony Cran and Naomi deLuce Wilding’s Wilding Cran consists of a main gallery (where its core group of contemporary artists exhibit their work) and also a next-door spot called Unit B, meant as a creative project space for artists who Cran and deLuce Wilding may not represent, but whose work they admire and want to encourage. Mixed-media artist Christian Eckart’s show, “PostPost,” runs through March 26 in the main gallery.

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by Charlotte Jansen

An ambitious show – surveying a career that spans from 1961 to 2008 – deserves an equally lengthy incubation period. Franklin Parrasch, curator and co-director of Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, who last week inaugurated their new space in Los Angeles with a rare, expansive exhibition of works by beloved Californian artist Ken Price, has been thinking about it for two decades.

‘Sometime in the 1990s I once told Ken, "You know, I have an idea for a show that I’ll do one day." This came up in the context of discussing the inter-relationship of this work and how understanding any one piece is best approached with an exposure to many of Ken’s works from all periods of his career. I have had in mind specific pieces that I’ve known of over the years and imagined how they might inform each other if they were ever to meet up in one room.’

Parrasch then set about persuading the owners of the 24 sculptures presented in the exhibit to lend him their pieces. All of them agreed. It clearly means a great deal to Parrasch to be able to present the works in Price’s hometown of Los Angeles, where he was one of the originators of the city's art scene as it kicked off in the 1960s, as part of the ‘Finish Fetish’ movement of ceramicists. ‘One of the first people to preview the show was Ken’s longtime friend and fellow Angeleno, Peter Alexander. Peter came in and immediately responded to all the intensity and nuances in the work I was hoping the exhibition would reveal. This is the view of an artist and colleague – someone who was around Ken and who was certainly affected by him. I think having the show in proximity to the artists who knew Ken best – Peter, Billy Al Bengston, Tony DeLap – is what feeds the show with an energy it wouldn’t be able to absorb anywhere else.’

Long before the current taste for ceramics, Price was creating works that still look funkier than anything being made today. His clay works – biomorphic, architectural, erotic and psychotropic – gesture viscerally towards so many experiences, from the movement of surfing (something Price did every day for 15 years) to the synergy of Eastern and Mexican cultures in Southern California. It is something that is easily felt when you look at them, less so when expressed in words. Parrasch concurs. ‘I’ve always felt that Ken channeled some kind of atavistic source of energy. The best of his work connects on some kind of pre-human level.’

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by Maxwell Williams

In the months leading up to his retrospective at LACMA, Ken Price learned his show would travel to the Met. Price, spurned by New York institutions during his career, and struggling at the time with throat and tongue cancer, stopped his treatments to focus on mounting the best retrospective he could. The show, though Price wouldn’t live to see it open in L.A., was a resounding success on both coasts and in Dallas. It was a compelling narrative of redemption. Franklin Parrasch opened his new Boyle Heights venture, Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, with a microsurvey of Price’s works from 1961 to 2008. The show, the first in Southern California since LACMA’s to focus solely on Price’s work, performs like an aftershock of the retrospective: not as groundshakingly personal, but still able to jostle you. The works range from the mundane to the extraterrestrial: Rhodia (1989) appears rocklike with a geometric optical illusion cut into it; Orange (1964) is an orange alien egg bursting from the inside; Wizard (2003) and The Slouch (2005) represent the intumescent blobs of Price’s iconic later works. The works are parked ergonomically on belly-high platforms, approximately four or five objects to a plinth, allowing for crouch-free viewing. The intimacy of a gallery setting allows Price’s works to be admired quietly and their cosmic surfaces studied closely, as they were likely meant to be.

It’s hard to see why Price wasn’t given the respect of Irwin or Turrell until he died. His pieces radiate, glow, and thrum whatever their context. Even in Parrasch Heijnen’s pared-down exhibition, Price’s works demand attention—reaching beyond the slick baubles of his Finish Fetish colleagues’ work into something resembling the sexual artifacts of some undiscovered planet.

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by Alex Greenberger

Since 1986, Franklin Parrasch has owned six New York galleries, and the one he currently helms is on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. This January, Parrasch will expand his reach to include the West Coast, where he and Christopher Heijnen will open a gallery in Los Angeles. Their new space, Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, will be located at 1326 South Boyle Avenue, a freestanding 5,000-square-foot downtown building that used to be the site of a dinette and lunchroom for Sears employees. Parrasch found the space for his new gallery thanks to Heijnen, who has been handling Franklin Parrasch Gallery’s Los Angeles sales and circulation since 2012. (Heijnen also worked at the gallery between 2006 and 2010.) Once Heijnen mentioned to Parrasch that he wanted to open a gallery in downtown L.A., Parrasch flew out immediately. “He had a great deal of knowledge of real estate in that area and had been involved with several buildings, in terms of development of their spaces,” Parrasch said. A year-long search led them to their space, which will also have an outdoor sculpture garden and an area for parking. Opening a gallery in Los Angeles was a logical next step for Parrasch, whose New York gallery shows a number of Californian artists who became famous during the ’60s and ’70s, alongside the rise of Minimalism in New York. The emphasis of Parrasch Heijnen, Parrasch explained, “is to show the influence the Los Angeles movements have had on the younger generations of artists. We’ll be focusing a lot on younger artists who have a connection in some concrete, aesthetic way to other artists of historical importance from Los Angeles, like Ken Price, Peter Alexander, and [John] McCracken.” “Post–Mike Kelley,” he said, “a lot of things have happened that expanded the vocabulary of Los Angeles art. It’s been cyclical, and it’s been exciting, and it’s been historically fascinating. If you look at American culture, Los Angeles is a key critical point of growth and contribution.” Traveling to California for two decades has only reinforced this idea in Parrasch’s mind.

As Parrasch explained, Californian conceptual artist Michael Asher once called his New York gallery “Ken Price ‘R’ Us” because of its frequent shows of Price’s ceramic works. Fittingly, Parrasch Heijnen will open with an ambitious career survey of Price’s work. Sculptures that haven’t been shown since an important Price/Robert Irwin show at LACMA in 1968 will be on view, as well as others that Price considered to be landmark works in his career. “I think what we’re offering in the show is a vision of Ken Price’s entire career, what it means, what its aesthetic contribution is, and doing so with new material that can be reinterpreted,” Parrasch said. “The story of Ken Price is an incredibly complicated one. It’s often told and misinterpreted, and it’s one we’re now going to be addressing without the artist,” who died in 2012. “I think that’s actually going to allow for more candor.”

“What my gallery in New York has been about since the late ’80s is the impressions, the feelings that I’ve always found in Ken Price’s work, and I see it in others,” Parrasch continued. “What I wanted to do, specifically—and Chris has been with me long enough to share this vision—is to identify that feeling. That’s what the gallery will be focusing on.”

Parrasch made sure to note that Franklin Parrasch Gallery and Parrasch Heijnen are two “separate entities,” and that he will be dividing his time between them. He isn’t worried about doing business on both coasts simultaneously, though. “I’m going to be overextended,” he said. “That’s just the way I live. I don’t operate any other way—I need a lot of other distractions.”

Read more here.