As a nine year old elementary school student, meeting his dad’s colleague Marcel Duchamp was an eye opener for author Tosh Berman. “When I told the teacher,” Berman explains, “she asked ‘what did you do over the weekend?’ and I said I went to this art show at a big museum in Pasadena, and I met this French man, and she knew what I was talking about. I don’t think she was an art fan, but I think she read about it in a newspaper and stuff.”
Read MoreWallace Berman had an almost shaman-like impact on people. Private to the point of paranoia, he avoided interviews or having his own photograph taken, though he repeatedly photographed his wife and son. In 1976, he was killed in a car crash with a drunk driver in Topanga on his 50th birthday.
Read MoreDelirious times demand delirious art, or so this exhibition proposes. The years between 1950 and 1980 were beset by upheaval. Around the globe, military conflict proliferated and social and political unrest flared.
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 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 MoreKohn Gallery recently staged “American Aleph,” a retrospective of the influential West Coast artist Wallace Berman (1926–1976). Mostly self-taught, Berman fueled his output with improvisation and irreverent DIY methods.
Read MoreArtist. Visionary. Hipster. Mystic. Voracious consumer and conduit of modern culture. Wallace Berman immersed himself in all these guises, with a selftaught fervor and disarming sincerity. To those who know his artwork, he remains a uniquely prescient and compelling figure, even 50 years after his death in 1976, from a tragic accident caused by a drunk driver on the eve of his 50th birthday.
Read MoreAmerican art had been drawing from Sunday newspaper funnies in various ways long before Roy Lichtenstein’s painted comic books panels Popped onto the gallery scene. In 1950s New York, Robert Rauschenberg affixed Moon Mullins, Gasoline Alley, and Terry and the Pirates onto his paintings and assemblages, recontextualizing them with coded signals about his closeted desires.
Read MoreJoin us this time for a special episode dedicated to the influential Los Angeles artist Wallace Berman (1926-1976). Our guests are Hollywood gallerist Michael Kohn, who walks us through the retrospective exhibition “Wallace Berman—American Aleph,” on view at Kohn Gallery through June 25, 2016, and the artist’s son, the author and publisher Tosh Berman, talking about his father’s craft and character, and his importance in the mid-century West Coast cultural scene.
Read MoreThis show is on the radio so if you are listening, even reading, you may know about the existence of that life transforming invention, the transistor radio. Small and portable, it meant that you could listen to the ball games as they happened.
Read MoreAt Kohn Gallery, “Wallace Berman: American Aleph” paints an intimate picture of the legendary artist who was at the center of the scene when Los Angeles came into its artistic own.
Read MoreKohn Gallery is presenting Wallace Berman—American Aleph, the artist’s first comprehensive Los Angeles retrospective in almost four decades. Commemorating the 40th anniversary of Berman’s accidental death at age 50, the exhibition surveys the entire oeuvre of this seminal American artist from the late 1940s until 1976.
Read MoreFrom 1957 to 1961, Wallace Berman lived in the Marin County township of Larkspur, California, where he took over an abandoned house on Madera Creek and turned it into Semina, a private gallery space where he would host one-day art exhibitions featuring his own work (and those of his contemporaries).
Read MoreBerman, “American Aleph,” at Kohn Gallery. This is the first comprehensive Los Angeles retrospective for the pioneering Southern California assemblage artist in roughly four decades. The artist, who was also the publisher of the influential arts and literary magazine Semina, had an international influence.
Read MoreWallace Berman was a seminal figure in the post-war Los Angeles art scene, having made his solo LA debut at the legendary Ferus Gallery in 1957. Despite his crucial role at the intersection of assemblage, collage, mysticism, and poetry, he has not had a proper retrospective almost since his death 40 years ago.
Read MoreFor a brief few weeks around the close of 2014, it felt as if you could divide your acquaintances into two groups: those who were listening to Serial and those who were not. Devotees of this spin-off from the popular podcast This American Life soaked up the insistent, questioning voice of investigative journalist Sarah Koenig as she unpicked the frayed ends of a true-life murder case. But, beyond the fascinating, disturbing facts it forensically investigated, Serial’s enormous popularity suggested that the spoken word might have become the ‘new rock and roll’.
Read MoreMysticism isn’t new to art, having prompted (among other things) the emergence of pure abstraction into the Modernist lexicon more than a century ago. At Michael Kohn Gallery, a group exhibition of about 30 paintings, sculptures, video, prints and mixed media works from the past 50 years by 14 artists shows that it’s alive and well today — albeit with a suitably altered consciousness.
Read MoreThis landmark exhibition brings two seminal yet under-studied Los Angeles artists into close conversation for the very first time. Berman and Heinecken bridged modernist and emerging post-modernist trends by ushering in the use of photography as a key element of contemporary avant-garde art. Their works are explored within the unique cultural context of 1960s and 1970s Southern California, as it fueled and amplified their highly original creative approaches.
Read MoreA first round of press releases announced the lineup for this show, guest-curated by Kristine McKenna, as a trio to include two late West Coast artists represented by the Michael Kohn Gallery (Wallace Berman and Bruce Conner), a bankable New York artist (Richard Prince), and one common denominator: The oeuvres of all three involve lots of images of women. With Conner now removed from the equation, this marketing strategy/curatorial premise seems stripped. Conner, who had some of the romance and funk of Berman and also the sometimes-odd combination of coolness and indulgence of Prince, could have been the bridge in this exhibition. Without his presence, the show offers less an arc of sensibility than a comparison of two artists’ forays into imagery of women, and becomes a study in how two rather different artists have examined the ways in which culture inscribes itself onto women’s bodies and persons, and how the artists go about such inscription, too. As such, it remains worth catching before it closes on March 7.
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