It may have been 90 degrees last night but that didn't stop Leo from weighing in on Mark Ryden's latest foray into the past "The Gay 90's West."
There's not one person I know who hasn't said at one time or another, "I wish I lived in another time." Mark Ryden decided long ago not to just yearn for it, but live it, in his own artistic way.
Read MoreI can’t stop watching this preview for artist Mark Ryden’s new exhibition, The Gay Nineties West, opening tomorrow night at the Kohn Gallery in Hollywood. His creaky creepy calliope diorama, Memory Lane, is mesmerizing and filled with artifacts from the entire 20th century celebrating the end of the 19th. Insert a penny and the contraption lights up and plays the 1892 hit Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two) as wagons filled with all manner of surreal creatures parades by. The gallery is selling a new recording of the song, performed by a chorus including Katy Perry, Danny Elfman, and Mark Mothersbaugh, to benefit Little Kids Rock. Like the artwork, the song is familiar and far-off, simple and baroque, comforting and queasy. I love it, and it’s already sold.
Michael Kohn is a busy man. For the past year, the onetime art critic and magazine editor whose Kohn Gallery has been a mainstay on the Los Angeles art scene since the ‘80s has been prepping for the opening of his new and improved space. After 14 years at the corner of Beverly and Crescent Heights, he decamped for a larger venue on Highland near Beverly.
Read MoreThe painter Mark Ryden made his name creating distinctive, cartoonish record sleeve art, most notably for Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous” album, Aerosmith’s “Love in an Elevator” single, and records by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Tyler the Creator.
Read MoreLos Angeles-based artist Mark Ryden expands his singular melding of high and low art, cerebral meditation and pop-culture camp with "The Gay 90s: West," a new exhibition at the Kohn Gallery in L.A. that's a continuation of "The Gay 90s: Olde Tyme Art Show," which took place at New York's Kasmin Gallery in 2010.
Read MorePop Art painter Mark Ryden's new show "The Gay 90s" opening Saturday, May 3 at the Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, features plenty of weird cameos from Abraham Lincoln, strange phantasmagoric scenes with raw meat, and his signature oval-eyed little girls. One of the little girls, a smaller painting in the back of the gallery, depicts Katy Perry.
Read MoreIn the inaugural exhibition Mark Ryden, underscores his aesthetic forays into cultural kitsch through his exploration of the lost but not forgotten “Gay 90s”. Employing the visual trappings of the formally idealized 1890s in America—women dressed in satin skirts with large bows, large wheeled bicycles, Main St. USA, vaudevillian stages—Ryden recreates scenes from this marginalized slice of pop culture.
Read MoreThe macabre and kitsch meet in the work of Mark Ryden‘s new exhibit, The Gay Nineties West. The pop-surrealist artist will be the first talent exhibited at the brand new location of the 12,000 sq. ft Kohn Gallery space, which hosts its grand opening this Saturday. With the space’s inaugural exhibit, Ryden explores the theme of the “Gay ’90s,” a term coined during the roaring ’20s and harkening to the “simpler times” at the end of the 19th century.
Read MoreMark Ryden: The Gay 90s - West | Kohn Gallery announces the inaugural exhibition of its new, expansive 12,000-square foot space with new work by Los Angeles-based, Pop-Surrealist artist Mark Ryden. Ryden underscores his aesthetic forays into cultural kitsch through his exploration of the lost but not forgotten "Gay 90s." Employing the visual trappings of the formally idealized 1890s in America -- women dressed in satin skirts with large bows, large wheeled bicycles, Main St. USA, vaudevillian stages -- Ryden recreates scenes from this marginalized slice of pop culture.
Read MoreNEW YORK, NY.- The Kohn Gallery announced its move to Highland Avenue in Hollywood and a new 12,000 square foot gallery, opening May 3, 2014. The new building provides an immense exhibition space with 22-foot ceilings, allowing for impressive shows on a monumental scale. This design incorporates massive glass windows along Highland Avenue and extensive skylights to wash the gallery with natural light. This formidable space includes state of the art media rooms for film, video and sound installation, as well as a special projects room.
The new gallery's impressive architectural impact is due to a collaboration between Michael Kohn and Lester Tobias of Tobias Architecture, a Los Angeles based architect who worked in Frank Gehry’s offices before establishing his own practice. This is the second gallery design for Michael Kohn by Tobias, who designed his former gallery space in Santa Monica in 1990.
The move to Highland Avenue in Hollywood represents an important step in Michael Kohn's history within Los Angeles' art scene. Kohn's new space opens the door for an ever-stronger dedication to presenting museum-quality exhibitions that showcase his dual interests in art history and contemporary art. The gallery will also use this new space to underscore its important program of representing historical artists and Estates from California such as Bruce Conner, Wallace Berman and Joe Goode. Presenting work that is personally intriguing as well as challenging, Kohn will continue his reputation for intelligent curatorial projects and a keen eye for adding new talent to his roster in this large new space. Always with an eye for the future,
Michael Kohn will mount bold exhibitions by established and emerging artists to expand its presence in Los Angeles and throughout the international art world. Michael Kohn, a Los Angeles native, received his B.F.A. in Art History from UCLA and an M.A. in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. While in New York, Kohn was a contemporary art critic for Art & Auction, Arts Magazine, and the U.S. editor for Flash Art Magazine from 1983 – 85. During this time he also interned at the Guggenheim Museum and was a T.A. in the Department of Art History, NYU.
Los Angeles’s Kohn Gallery is moving to Highland Avenue in Hollywood. The new, 12,000-square-foot space, which boasts 22-foot high ceilings to better display large-scale works and exhibitions, opens May 3, 2014.
Read MoreLos Angeles's Kohn Gallery is doubling its footprint and moving to a new location in Hollywood, an area that proprietor Michael Kohn says is quickly developing.
Read MoreFans of Mark Ryden on the West Coast have been anxiously awaiting the postponed solo that they have been anticipating since the Los Angeles-based artist’s showing in New York in 2010 (covered).
Read MoreInfluential Pop Surrealist pioneer Mark Ryden has a solo show coming up on May 3 at Michael Kohn Gallery in LA. “The Gay 90s: West” is a continuation of Ryden’s Gay 90s series (the works on paper from which were recently featured in Hi-Fructose Vol. 28).
Read MoreOne could argue that no contemporary topic has more urgency and complexity than that of the interaction between humans and the natural environment. Whether considering contemporary political policy or theories of geologic time, the question of how this moment in human history will come to terms with its existence in the larger world, literally and figuratively, is prominent across academic disciplines and various media discourses. Time, Space & Matter: Five Installations Exploring Natural Phenomena, curated by Betty Ann Brown at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, enters into this discussion, according to the introductory text for the exhibition, by “re-situating [sic] commenting on, and giving new form to environmental processes and the various histories of human interaction with them.”
Read MoreThe Michael Kohn Gallery is pleased to announce its plans for a move to Highland Avenue in Hollywood and a new 10,000 square foot gallery, opening spring, 2014. The new building will provide an immense exhibition space with 22 foot ceilings, that will allow for impressive shows on a monumental scale.
Read MoreOne of two short films Bruce Conner made for Brian Eno and David Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts—itself a defining work of assemblage—MEA CULPA (1981) comes near the end of Conner's active filmmaking career.
Read MorePhotography by Michael Friberg
WERE YOU TO RUN into Mark Parker, Nike's NKE +0.09% CEO, on the company's pristine Beaverton, Oregon, campus, you might mistake him for one of the 21 PhDs who work in the athletic powerhouse's top-secret research lab.
Read MoreJoe Goode’s five-decade-strong oeuvre started in the ’60s with his now iconic milk bottle paintings securing him a place in the pantheon of pop art. Over the years, Goode has melded traditional and nontraditional media with a diversity of references that includes everything from his Midwestern roots to life in L.A., Atget, and classic English still lives. Reached over the phone in his L.A. studio following a photo shoot with Hedi Slimane, the youthful septuagenarian freely muses about gambling, the benefits of acrylic versus oil, and how long it took him to see through his own art.
Read MoreSimmons and Burke have mashed and montaged digital data for a half-dozen years, working like naturalists to comb the web for denatured specimens of media and pop culture. The prosaic glut of data at their (and our) disposal is both their subject and their raw material. They are maximalists, collecting, cataloguing and combining culled imagery in prints of dazzling slickness.
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