On a plaque at the Watts Towers Art Center, adjacent to the iconic spires built by Simon Rodia, is a quote by the institution’s late co-founder, the renowned artist Noah Purifoy: “Creativity can be an act of living, a way of life, and a formula for doing the right thing.” The phrase, as well as Purifoy himself, has inspired Acts of Living, the sixth iteration of the Hammer Museum’s contemporary art biennial, Made in L.A. — and the first since the UCLA building was expanded this year thanks to a capital campaign that counted Marcy Carsey and Darren Star among its top contributors.
Read MoreOn Friday, I checked out the newest exhibition at Kohn Gallery in Hollywood. “Un Nuevo Manglar” by Puerto Rican artist Ricardo Cabret reimagines his digital art into physical paintings
Read MoreThe Puerto Rican painter and computer engineer allows his two spheres of practice to inform one another, yielding intricately gridded canvases that both reveal and shed a soft light on the entanglements between man and machine.
Read MoreWorking in the lineage of artists such as Dorothea Tanning and Lee Bontecou whose dream-like works meld the natural and fictional, Brooklyn-based artist Alicia Adamerovichtransfigures key aspects of her lived experience into surreal scenes that explore the inner self. Adamerovich grounds her practice in the introspective, often drawing until she feels a “specific complexity of emotions.”
Read MoreKohn Gallery is delighted to announce Ilana Savdie's upcoming solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibition opens July 2023 and will be on view until October 2023.
Read MoreIn Alia Ahmad’s debut solo exhibition in the United States, “من الحلم .. . روضة (A meadow…from a dream),” on view at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles through January 14, 2023, a kaleidoscope of color invokes a sense of magnetism. Born in Saudi Arabia’s capital city, Riyadh—which is located on a desert plateau in the center of the country—Ahmad draws inspiration from her home’s diverse cityscape for her large-scale tableaus.
Read MoreThe evening of November 7, 2018, Lita Albuquerque had plans to see a performance of Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha” at the L.A. Opera with her husband, Carey Peck. He offered to make a night of it with a downtown staycation. “We never do that,” Albuquerque says. “At first, I said, ‘Oh, no, I’m too busy.’ But then I thought, ‘I’m being a real ass.’ ”
Read MoreThe title of the film conveys the dual meaning of the word—as both an accounting and a reverberant or explosive signal, echo or announcement of an event—and the film carries its full freight. The actual fragments of live radio broadcast transmissions that comprise the soundtrack are an accompaniment as much as reportage in the conventional sense.
Read MoreThrough deft use of texture, the Brooklyn painter renders her own experiences—privacy, vulnerability, and liberation among them—in meditative portraits of women asserting bodily autonomy and existing on their own terms.
Read MoreIlana Savdie: Entrañadas at Kohn Gallery. With hot-colored, electrifying paintings, Savdie’s large-scale works actualize tension as a state of being. Humanoid forms are suspended beyond normative order to narrate the displacement of power through invasion, control, and defiance.
Read MoreOn view at Kohn Gallery in Hollywood is a posthumous exhibition of paintings by the influential LA abstractionist Ed Moses, who passed away in 2018 at the age of 91. Working prolifically until just two weeks before his death, Moses was a notable member of the “Cool School” artists and made work that was constantly experimental, pushing the boundaries of what paint and abstraction can do.
Read MoreFeaturing works by: Martha Alf, who has a gift for giving life, beauty, and often personality to mundane objects with her use of light, colour and space, Sharon Ellis, whose works demonstrate an evocative approach to landscape painting, by touching upon the sublimity of the wild with rich hues, dramatic light sources and marked proportions.
Read MoreWhat does it mean to live in a utopia of our own design? How can opposing ideas or bodies occupy the same space, where binary qualities are bound together to create a translation of form that is whole and yet wholly singular?
Read MoreLos Angeles based artist Kate Barbee is not afraid to unabashedly explore the intimate escapism associated with the trials and tribulations of young adulthood in her work. Her vivid large-scale paintings play with an expansive color palette that delineate abstract dreamy figures amidst the presence of mixed media like waxes, scraps of quilts, and other textiles.
Read MoreWhen Sophia Narrett traded in her paint tubes for embroidery thread, she never looked back. The switch happened while the New York artist was completing an MFA in painting at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design and found herself experimenting with thread. “I fell in love with the process right from the start,” she says. The medium has certainly worked for her: Last year, Narrett was named the winner of Galerie’s Emerging Artist Award and received the $10,000 prize by Galerie’s editors and a jury of art-world luminaries, who reviewed over 400 artist portfolios.
Read MoreART: Caroline Kent: A Sudden Appearance of the Sun and Sophia Narrett: Soul Kiss at Kohn Gallery. Interested in a reevaluation of abstract painting, Kent’s practice is founded on notions of language and textual translation.
Read Moremyselves is an opportunity to see and be seen by the artwork of emerging and mid-career artists as they probe into the architecture of identity. Featuring traditional painters, textile artists, mixed media artists, and photographers, Joshua Friedman has curated a broad foundation of unique makers to explore the shape-shifting theme of identity.
Read MoreAs far as anyone can know or prove, homebrewed existentialism is blossoming indoors—a philosophical trend as invisible as the poison in the air that prompted it. Like mold spores in a shower stall, a scentless gas leak, or this lingering unseeable virus, the pandemic has revealed ourselves to ourselves, whether we know it or not. The self likes it indoors. It’s why we have skulls.
Read MoreHow does an artist shape and portray their identity? Curator Joshua Friedman explores the question in myselves, a group exhibition at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles until October 31. The group show features work from 25 contemporary artists, including Amoako Boafo, Heidi Hahn, Bruce Conner, Loie Hollowell, Jesse Mockrin, Xiuching Tsay, and Naotaka Hiro.
Read MoreContemporary painting is usually characterized by the specific stylistic orientation of an artist; however, it is not that rare that one’s artistic practice is a mix of different formal and conceptual persuasions. Take for instance the Israeli born, New York-based artist Nir Hod, who manages to express himself through both figuration and abstraction.
Read More
