Leonardo DiCaprio has become something of an auction fixture lately, attending major sales dressed in jeans and a baseball cap. Now, the star of "The Great Gatsby" has asked Christie's to help him pull off an auction of his own—to raise money for the environment.
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 MoreThe annual Armory Show in New York City is part museum, part gallery. With traditional and unconventional art on display from all over the world, it is a magnet for art lovers and art collectors. WSJ's Kelsey Hubbard was given a tour of the many unique works on site, from audio collages to video projections.
Read MoreFor "Pacific Standard Time," the Getty-organized, season-long initiative, museums throughout Southern California largely staged thematic overviews. Meanwhile, dozens of galleries have fleshed out the storyline with shows focusing on individual artists seminal to the period, often highlighting lesser-known aspects of their work. This show of Joe Goode's "Nighttime" (or "Black") series from 1977–78 was among the stellar examples. The charcoal powder drawings and oil paintings on both paper and canvas embody the most vigorous characteristics of Goode's 50-year oeuvre, and they hadn't been shown in two decades.
Read MoreFor Mark Ryden, nostalgia is more than a panacea, a gentle salve that soothes the raw edges of modern existence — it is the very lifeblood of art. When he sits down to paint, he is surrounded by a jumble of wonderful old toys, books and peculiar artifacts that whisper to him in their myriad voices, sparking distant memories and forging strange connections.
Read MoreOriginally taught by the legendary British pop artist Richard Hamilton, Ferry has, throughout his career, maintained his founding interest in art and visual culture. As one of the few musicians to be interviewed at length by the leading international journal of contemporary art, 'Frieze', Ferry has spoken of the very close relationship between his passion for fine art and his artistic ambitions as a singer, composer and performer.
Read MoreBeginning Thursday, October 20th, singer Bryan Ferry - yes, the dapper, suave and oh-so-elegant frontman of the British rock band Roxy Music - will showcase his photographic works at The Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles.
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 MoreFriday night, The Michael Kohn Gallery -- in collaboration with the Southern California collaborative retrospective Pacific Standard Time -- welcomes guests to the opening of Nighttime, 1977-78 by Conceptual artist Joe Goode. Often thought of as dark, post-modern and deeply meditative, this body of work has not been seen in over twenty years. Gallery owner Michael Kohn calls it, "extraordinarily hypnotic."
Read MoreAmidst the crowded opening for MOCA's sprawling The Artist's Museum, of all the gossipy conversations and encounters with social network "friends" that took place, the one that got me most excited was the one that Jim and I had about a new work of art that had yet to be released.
Read MoreAttention amateur butchers, meat lovers and hungry aesthetes: At the Paul Kasmin Gallery, the artist Mark Ryden is doing wonders with off cuts at his new show, “The Gay ’90s: Olde Tyme Art Show.” The paintings of a Gibson girl riding a bicycle built for two with Jesus and a brooding beauty in period finery are spooky and lovely, but it’s his meatier images that steal the show — a wispy girl in a gown of hams, hindquarters and sausages, or Abraham Lincoln grinding fresh chuck for a tea-drinking demoiselle. Surreally delicious.
Read MoreMark Ryden’s paintings of wide-eyed Victorian children, Abraham Lincoln, and grade-A beef wed lowbrow culture with highbrow surrealism. VIEW OUR GALLERY.
Sweet Wishes, an animated short by Mark Ryden and his wife, Marion Peck, offers a succinct insight into the 47-year-old artist’s surreal aesthetic.
Read MoreSpirit is a land of high, white peaks and glittering jewel-like lakes and flowers. Life is sparse and sounds travel great distances."- The Dalai Lama
The above is a quote offered up by painter Mark Ryden when asked about the meaning behind his current exhibition, The Snow Yak Show, which opened in February at Tokyo's Tomio Koyama Gallery, and featured an array of work set in a mystical snow encrusted land populated by ghostly pale moon children and highly uncanny yet benevolent creatures.
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.
Read MoreAs artists’ biographies go, those of Wallace Berman and Richard Prince could hardly be more different. Berman, who died at 50 in 1976, the victim of a drunken driver, was a kind of Beat guru flying just below the radar, showing his work in only one conventional gallery exhibition during his lifetime and popping into rare view in strange places: a cameo in “Easy Rider”; the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” where his face is wedged next to Tony Curtis’s, just below Jung’s.
Read MoreThe Valkyrie landed at André Schlechtriem Gallery on a recent Saturday evening to bear a new star, Rosa Loy, into the firmament: Rachel Feinstein, riding her hot new show at Boesky; Lisa Yuskavage, who penned Rosa’s catalogue essay; Pattie Cronin, just awarded a Tiffany grant; Jane Kaplowitz, who hosted the after-party; and Deborah Kass, gleefully clutching a photo of her iconic creation Double Yentl, autographed that afternoon by both Hillary and Chelsea Clinton at a Sheraton Hotel fundraiser in midtown.
Read MoreThe opening reception for Mark Ryden’s new exhibition, “The Tree Show” at Michael Kohn Gallery, was six hours long. If you glanced at the invitation beforehand, you might have thought this was a misprint. Six hours? Two is customary. Three is generous. Six, you might be forgiven for concluding, falls somewhere between pointless and pretentious. But then you would be seriously underestimating both the breadth and the fervor of Ryden’s fan base. In fact, the extension was merely practical.
Read MoreTime is forever. Love is the goal. Art is what you are, not what you do. Many young artists and poets in California in the 1950s and ’60s felt and lived this way. And a traveling band of them, trailing a cloud of marijuana-fragrant air, has arrived at the Grey Art Gallery in “Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle.”
Read MoreRosa Loy seems to be one of the few hot young Leipzig painters who is not a man -- a pleasant change of pace -- and the canvases in her first solo show in New York exude an easy command. Still, they bear an undue resemblance to those of the best-known artist of the Leipzig group, Neo Rauch, who happens to be her husband and studiomate. The similarities include stylized quasi-illustrational figures, retro fashions, disorienting settings and rich, complementary color schemes.
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