Lita Albuquerque’s performance piece An Elongated Now, involving hundreds of volunteer performers dressed in white, takes place on Main Beach and may be viewed from various vantage points on the beach and along the cliffs.
Read MoreWatching the recent digital restoration of Bruce Conner’s thirty-six-minute film Crossroads, 1976, which depicts 1946 footage of the first underwater atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll, is a vertiginous experience of telescoping back in time. Conner obtained this government-shot film from the U.S. National Archives and with minimal interventions (editing and, most notably, the addition of music), turned it into a resonant meditation on the apocalyptic sublime, rendering the familiar nuclear mushroom cloud strange again. The mushroom cloud is one of Conner’s signature images, appearing in A Movie, 1958, and briefly in Cosmic Ray, 1961, as well as in his collage works and drawings, some of which are also on display here.
Read MoreIn October 2013, Esther Kim Varet, director of the Venice Beach–based gallery Various Small Fires, placed a bid on 812 North Highland Avenue in Hollywood, a more than 5,000-square-foot lot containing a temple-like Art Deco edifice. The listing had gone up the night before, and Kim placed one of the first offers—by that afternoon, there were seven others bidders.
“It’s a landgrab right now,” Varet said of the situation in Hollywood. It was once “tranny-hooker corner,” she joked, but over the last few years, the neighborhood has established itself as a gallery district with North Highland Avenue recast as its main drag. Regen Projects claims to have spearheaded the eastward shift in 2012, when the business moved just blocks from Overduin & Co. andKohn Gallery, and was soon followed by new venues like Hannah Hoffman. Within the last year alone, a number of emerging galleries have migrated closer to the Hollywood Hills; David Kordansky moved nearby in September, Various Small Fires opened on Highland in October, and LAXART will officially open again in January 2015 on Santa Monica Boulevard.
Read MoreIn 2006, Lita Albuquerque planted 99 fiberglass spheres onto a surface of ice, arranging them as if they were points on a star map, for a project now known as Stellar Axis. Even though the large-scale work received international acclaim, it's unlikely you or anyone you know were able to see these works up close and personally. That's because Stellar Axis took place in Antarctica. Albuquerque and a team of artists and scientists went to the icy continent to create a “reverse sky,” a mirror of the South Pole's night sky on ice. Now, however, four photos of Albuquerque's groundbreaking installation is on view at Kohn Gallery so viewers will have a chance to experience her project through photography.
Read MoreWhen Stanley Kubrick made the blistering 1964 satire “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” one main target was the John Birch Society.
In the screenplay, the group’s Cold War hysteria about fluoride in drinking water being a Communist plot to poison Americans triggers a nuclear holocaust.
Read MoreJoe Goode traces half a century of selected works by one of America’s most innovative yet under-recognized painters. Often identified with Southern California pop art, Goode ultimately transcends this classification, creating bodies of work with influences ranging from Midwestern iconography and environmental destruction to pop culture and the sublime.
Read MoreAt least 70,000 people are expected to descend on Miami Beach for four days of partying, viewing and art buying at Art Basel Miami Beach. But why does this fair matter so much? And what are art fairs doing to the experience -- and business -- of art? Is the art world mostly producing “inoffensive tchotchkes for billionaires?”
DnA got some answers, from L.A. gallerists Tim Blum (Blum & Poe), Michael Kohn (Kohn Gallery) and Mieke Marple (Night Gallery), and critics Shana Nys Dambrot and Carolina Miranda.
Joe Goode
December 4, 2014 - January 10, 2015
2012 Peden Street
Houston, TX 77019
There is one in LA who has long been concerned with creating installations in the landscape and conducting relevant works of performance art: Lita Albuquerque. There are now two opportunities to see her more recent work.
At Kohn Gallery, a selection of large photographs document her ambitious 2006 project called Stellar Axis. This is also the subject of a seriously gorgeous new book by Skira/Rizzoli, published with the Nevada Museum of Art, which presents the exhibition of her work through January 4, 2015.
Read MoreThis November in London, the international contemporary art exhibition ‘Here Today…’explores the current state of our environment through diverse perspectives and media: painting, installation, wallpaper, sound, video, dance, music, sculpture and photography.
Read MoreIn 2006 Los Angeles conceptual artist Lita Albuquerque ventured to the South Pole and created the extraordinary Stellar Axis land art installation, arranging 99 blue fiberglass spheres of varying size in the Antarctic snow to reflect the configuration of stars in the night sky. “Light Carries Information,” a new show at the Kohn Gallery, features four large photographs of details from this unique work as well as a wordless eight-minute video presenting Stellar Axis in its geographic context.
Read MoreIt begins with one explosion. And then another. And another. Mushroom clouds emerge from under the ocean, expand over the horizon, and churn up the environment in violent upheaval. For more than half an hour, at ever slower speeds, the explosions continue for a work of art that is as hypnotic as it is devastating.
Read MoreOn November 18th, UCLAs Melnitz Movies will celebrate artist Bruce Conner’s birthday by inviting renowned restorationist Ross Lipman (UCLA Film & Television Archive) to present his multimedia lecture on the production of Conner’s 1976 film Crossroads, first seen last year at MoMA.
Read MoreBruce Conner’s best-known film, “Crossroads” (1976), pulls a pivotal moment of history into the art world, using declassified footage of the first underwater atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean in 1946. Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles is hosting a retrospective of Conner’s work in the context of this magnum opus, offering screenings of the classic film alongside drawings by Conner that contemplate destruction and rebirth.
Read MoreJoe Goode traces half a century of selected works by one of America’s most innovative yet under-recognized painters. Often identified with Southern California pop art, Goode ultimately transcends this classification, creating bodies of work with influences ranging from Midwestern iconography and environmental destruction to pop culture and the sublime.
Goode first gained international recognition following his inclusion in Walter Hopps’s seminal exhibition New Painting of Common Objects, organized at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962. That same year, a key example of Goode’s milk bottle painting series appeared on the cover of Artforum; another commences CAM’s exhibition. In Purple (1961), Goode positions a milk bottle in front of a domineering monochrome canvas, both of which have been applied with layers of purple oil paint. The usually transparent—but now paint-encrusted—bottle foregrounds Goode’s concept of seeing through the picture plane, allowing the viewer to contemplate their own personal and cultural associations within, and through, Goode’s pictorial spaces.
In addition, the exhibition features representative works from several of the artist’s other series, including bodies of work created in large part through acts of destruction. In his Torn Cloud series (1967–76), Goode often uses razor blades to slash through compositions of illusionistic skies, forming jagged clouds. He then layers excised canvases on top of each other to allow viewers to peer through their torn surfaces. Goode’s performative surface violations increase in intensity with his introduction of firearms in the Environmental Impact series (1978–83). In these works, Goode literally draws with shotgun pellets, using a shotgun to blast through the monochromatic surface of the canvas. The bullets pierce and abrade the surface, forming seemingly chance compositions.
Tornado Triptych (1992), a monumental sumi ink painting, calls upon the lived Midwestern experience as source for the work’s iconography. Goode’s tornado paintings depict the progression of formidable natural forces, combining the visual liquidity of ink with nature’s raw energy in an uneasy relationship between beauty and violence. In his more recent body of work, titled Flat Screen Nature (2012–current), Goode uses an industrial hand saw to cut through sheets of painted fiberglass, creating allegorical landscapes of jagged edges and menacing peripheries; the artist’s visual vocabulary comes full circle to represent our environment’s vulnerable sky, land, and sea.
Joe Goode demonstrates how depictions of the sublime can speak to contentious American issues ranging from environmental vandalism to the Second Amendment. CAM’s presentation repositions Goode’s critical importance through an in-depth investigation of his concept of beauty through destruction as intrinsically tied to a Midwestern regional sensibility—milk bottles, big sky, tornadoes, and shot guns, for example—that has never before been explored in depth. In conjunction with the exhibition, CAM will publish a catalog on the artist’s work with an exhibition history and bibliography, a foreword by CAM Executive Director Lisa Melandri, and critical essays by Chief Curator Jeffrey Uslip and art historian Thomas Crow.
Joe Goode (b. 1937, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma) lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (2014); Texas Gallery, Houston (2002, 2004, 2010, 2012); Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York (2009); and Manny Silverman Gallery, Los Angeles (2001, 2005). Goode’s work is included in numerous major museum collections, including the Saint Louis Art Museum; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Smithsonian Institution; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Joe Goode is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Jeffrey Uslip, Chief Curator.
This exhibition is generously supported by Eve Stelle and Peter Gelles and Joan and Mitch Markow.
Dennis Hopper credited Bruce Conner with inventing the music video, and Bruce Jenkins, the former director of the Harvard Film Archive, once wrote, “what the Cubists wreaked on painting . . . Conner inflicted on cinema itself.” For every iconoclastic film that the renegade West Coast artist made before his death in 2008, there are sculptures, collages, paintings, and drawings, too. Simply put, if you’re not yet familiar with Conner’s work, now’s the time for an introduction—well ahead of the retrospective that MoMA and SFMoMA are rumored to be jointly planning for next year.
Read MoreLos Angeles’ Kohn Gallery is now representing artist Lita Albuquerque.
Lita Albuquerque is an American installation, environmental artist, painter and sculptor. Born in California, she has been a part of the Light and Space movement, renowned for her ephemeral installations and Land Art pieces. She has been commissioned to create public art around the world at locations including the Washington Memorial and the Great Pyramids, she also represented the US at the Sixth International Cairo Biennale where she took the top prize.
Michael Kohn is hold an exhibition dedicated to the artist, due to open 15 November 2014. The show will focus on Albuquerque’s “Stellar Axis: Antarctica” project from 2006, which saw her lay out 99 blue spheres across the South Pole, mirroring the sky above, in what was the first large-scale work made in Antarctica. The gallery show will feature photographs, film, objects and archive materials from the piece.
LA’s Kohn Gallery has just announced that it has added artist Lita Alburquerque to its roster. Best known for her work in the Light and Space and Land Art movements, Albuquerque has most recently shown at the Sixth International Cairo Biennale (where she took the top prize) and the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time festival.
Read More
