At one point in the bright, mantric hour-long performance ritual which christened Lita Albuquerque’s current sculptural installation hEARTH at the Sunnylands Center & Gardens in Rancho Mirage, a throaty clarion chant rang out across the great lawn, staccato: Got to, got to, got to, got to listen to the silence. Why did you come here? Why do you listen? What does it say to you? In many ways, these are the foundational questions and the essential directive of the entire Desert X affair.
Read MoreReality and fantasy don’t collide in Mark Ryden’s art so much as they are equal halves of a more natural and dreamlike world.
Read MoreMark Ryden is on something of a sugar high. Backstage at Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Center for the Arts, the painter giddily navigates a luscious candyland of his own creation — something he’s now seeing fully realized, onstage, for the first time.
Read MoreA Viennese pastry shop, dancing sweets, a little boy who overindulges and a revolution by the lower pastry orders. An almost unknown Richard Strauss score. Décor and costumes by the pop-surrealist artist Mark Ryden. And a great title: “‘Whipped Cream’! It’s really wonderful,” Alexei Ratmansky said of his full-length work for American Ballet Theater after a long day of rehearsal last week.
Read MoreEverything had to be reinvented for the 2017 Whitney Biennial — the first to take place in the new riverside home of the Whitney Museum. But then, this leading showcase of contemporary American art feels refreshed in other ways, too.
Read MorePALM SPRINGS, Calif. — Roaming off-road through sandy, rock-studded terrain in view of mountain peaks and windmill farms, a six-wheeled rover about the size of a milk crate backed up and sped away from its creator.
Read MoreAfter 33 years at LA Louver, seminal pop artist Tony Berlant has moved across Los Angeles to Kohn Gallery, in a change that reinforces the gallery’s strategy of supporting artists who helped shape the Californian and West Coast aesthetic.
Read MoreThis piece brings us closer to the work of the American artist Bruce Conner, currently considered one of the most important artists of the American underground scene of the second half of the 20th century. The exhibition, which can be seen in the Reina Sofía Museum from February 21 to May 22, brings together about 250 works made in different media: film and video, painting, assemblage, drawing, engraving, collage,
Read MoreWith her gaze turned skyward, Light and Space artist Lita Albuquerque draws inspiration from the cosmos.
Read MoreSo much art wants to move you. Lita Albuquerque’s art, on the other hand, wants to ground you, align you to the cosmos, and connect you to a world bigger and deeper than the one you know.
Read MoreThe Prix Pictet aims to harness the power of photography – all genres of photography – to draw global attention to issues of sustainability, especially those concerning the environment.
Read MoreThe desert has long exercised its fascination over the minds of artists, architects, musicians, writers, and other explorers of landscape and soul. From the theological cast of the Biblical desert wilderness to the secular observations of Joan Didions Holy Water, it is a place of scarcity, of stark contrasts, crude survival, mystery and transformation.
Read More"BRUCE CONNER: IT'S ALL TRUE" (Museum of Modern Art, New York) MOMA delivered for Conner with this staggering retrospective that underscored the reciprocity between his moving-image and static work by giving seven films optimun projection within the 250-piece exhibition.
Read MoreBruce Conner (1933, McPherson, Kansas - 2008, San Francisco) is one of the most pre-eminent American artists from the second half of the twentieth century. This exhibition, the first to present his work in Spain, brings together more than 250 works which span his fifty-year career.
Read MoreMark Ryden will have a major restrospective of his work exhibited in Málaga, Spain at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga.
Read MoreI’ve always remembered a story my father used to tell me, about how my mother was arrested in North Beach, San Francisco in the late 1950’s for walking barefoot in public. “Howl”, City Lights Books, and Lenny Bruce were often mentioned in the same conversations. Those were days when society and government heavily censored people - their writing, speech, music, public activity, and art - primarily out of fear, fear of anything different or non-conformist.
Read MoreRealist. Surrealist. Hippie. Punk. Bruce Conner (1933-2008) was all of these and more. A Bay Area pioneer in experimental film, collage, photography, conceptual works, and paintings, Conner challenged the limitations of medium, genre, and style, constantly breaking new ground.
Read MoreIn an onstage conversation Wednesday, Oct. 26, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where Directors’ Circle donors were previewing “Bruce Conner: It’s All True,” it was emphasized that Conner, “the quintessential artist’s artist” by museum director Neal Benezra’s description, was a man of paradox.
Read MoreHe made an art film about the Kennedy assassination and delicate, meditative paintings based on inkblots and autumn leaves. His haunting assemblages, like those of a viscerally rotting “COUCH” or a mutilated and gauze-shrouded “CHILD” bound in a high chair, hold an undimmed charge more than a half century after they were made. So do his photographs of San Francisco’s burgeoning punk rock scene of the 1970s and ’80s. Female nudes proliferate in his art. Mushroom clouds of nuclear bombs are forever blooming — one from the neck of a headless man in a collage.
Read MoreAre you stuck in the Waiting Place but are not quite sure what the future may hold in store? If this makes you feel uneasy, you may take some comfort in Heidi Hahn’s second solo exhibition at Jack Hanley, titled “The Future is Elsewhere (If it Breaks Your Heart).” Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
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