As a painter, Mark Innerst is an intimist of spectacle. The closely held visual language of quiet French domestic scenes — think Édouard Vuillard or Pierre Bonnard — is relocated into the modern, usually urban American public sphere, where it blows up into a showy pageantry of anonymous pomp and circumstance.
Read MoreIn many ways, painter Mark Innerst could be considered a contemporary modernist. His works align with American painters like Charles Sheeler and Joseph Stella that were active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who celebrated cities and industrial societies.
Read MoreLike a huge butcher’s mallet, a slab of silvery architecture seems poised to crush a multilevel aggregation of urban commuters, cowering in a bluish, semi-dark tunnel. This painting, “Strata,” shows a rare intersection between the two principle worlds of painter Mark Innerst, who is showing 28 new works at the Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles.
Read MoreIn the 1980s, a decade when artists commonly appropriated styles or imagery from earlier art historical periods, Mark Innerst became known for beautifully crafted natural and urban landscape paintings that gave new life to the American tradition of the romantic sublime.
Read MoreFew artists capture the awe and beauty of the built environment like Mark Innerst. His gleaming, vertiginous skyscrapers, sometimes abstracted into pure shape and color, reflect a love for both painting and urban life reminiscent of the affection paid to nature in more traditional landscape painting.
Read MoreMost of us might respond to the idea of a nuclear attack by diving under a nearby table. But ever since the first mushroom cloud entered our consciousness, many artists have taken a far more considered approach to the notion of human-triggered annihilation.
Read MoreA touching show by the late American artist Bruce Conner in an unfinished church is a highlight of the city's burgeoning art scene.
Read MoreAffiliated with California’s neosurrealist assemblage scene from the 1950s onwards but a mystic-minded outrider even there, Bruce Conner was determinedly elusive in life.
Read More“Bruce Conner: Out of Body” at Bellas Artes Projects, Outpost, Makati and Bagac, Bataan
Read MoreBELLAS ARTES PROJECTS IS PLEASED TO PRESENT BRUCE CONNER: OUT OF BODY, THE FIRST MAJOR PRESENTATION OF THE ICONIC AMERICAN ARTIST BRUCE CONNER (1933–2008) IN SOUTHEAST ASIA.
Read MoreWhen he was 90 years old, preparing for a 2016 exhibition of new work, Ed Moses zipped across the courtyard of his Los Angeles art studio in a paint-spattered wheelchair and stained Birkenstocks. The artist, who was still working every day, jerked his chair to a stop at a row of enormous canvases, the fresh paint drying in the sun.
Read MoreIn 2016, on the occasion of his first East Coast retrospective, at Albertz Benda gallery in New York, the Los Angeles-based artist Ed Moses told ARTnews, “When I catch onto something, I push it a little bit, and sometimes I get lucky. I say, ‘Wow, how did you make that?’ If it has the wow factor, I’m OK.” Judging by the critical reception of his work over the course of a long career, many of Moses’s paintings did, indeed, have that wow factor.
Read More“A group exhibition featuring seventeen contemporary artists who are revolutionizing the way we visualize conventional gender as exclusively male or female. Through painting, a medium that has traditionally embraced this binary, these artists are pushing the genre in new, unprecedented directions, challenging the ways in which paintings can be used to deconstruct and rewrite conventional notions of personal identity. The exhibition highlights the inter-blending of traditional and figurative abstraction as the foundation for more fluid and inclusive expressions of identity, engendering a new visual pronoun.”
Read MoreARTILLERY BEST IN SHOW 2017
Moving well past a theme dominant in recent contemporary fine (and popular) art, Friedman’s brilliantly curated (and gorgeous) show of painting saw us through to a deeper, more complex and nuanced—and richly generative—consideration of identity in the 21st century
What are the contours of gender? Is there a range of conditions that determine gender along a curve or spectrum we can visualize or somehow represent, measure or analyze? Is there a focal point we can identify that will turn it in one direction or another?
Read MoreEngender, a group exhibition curated by Joshua Friedman at Michael Kohn Gallery, represents an amalgam of familiar visual tropes, albeit shattered ones. Ideas about identity, sexuality and personal choice are brought to the fore in this stunning line up that includes the likes of Nicole Eisenman, Hernan Bas, Jansson Stegner and many others.
Read MoreThe construct of what makes us male and female is perhaps one of the most obdurate that we as a society face. More often than not, in our need to make comfortable our understanding of things not simply defined, we seek to classify in extremes, simplifying what should be a delightful spectrum into simplistic, unthreatening terms of black and white.
Read MoreBefore Kohn had fully installed its exhibition of paintings that address the fluidity of gender, collectors had already bought 70% of its contents. Of the 17 artists in the show, buyers came hungry for the names Loie Hollowell, Jesse Mockrin, Tschabalala Self, Jansson Stegner, Emily Mae Smith and Christina Quarles.
Read MoreAs Hollywood continues to reckon with widespread allegations of sexual assault and toxic masculinity, L.A.’s art scene has offered some solace in the form of the binary-smashing exhibit “Engender.” The show, which opened at Kohn Gallery this weekend, attracted a tide of progressive arts patrons, including actress and survivor Rose McGowan, who is currently leading the charge against Harvey Weinstein and gendered power dynamics in the industry.
Read More“Engender” is a group exhibition featuring seventeen contemporary artists who are revolutionizing the way one visualizes conventional gender as exclusively male or female. Through painting, a medium that has traditionally embraced this binary, these artists are pushing the genre in new, unprecedented directions, challenging the ways in which paintings can be used to deconstruct and rewrite conventional notions of personal identity.
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