There’s something different about Jarvis Boyland’s work. Walking the exhibition rooms of Los Angeles’ Kohn Gallery — where Boyland’s “On Hold:” exhibit is on view through Thursday, May 23 — I was arrested by his portraits of Black queer men. Though simple and straightforward, there’s a complexity in the color story, particularly in his subject’s skin tones. They were rich and nuanced and complex, both imagined and realistic, and unlike any paintings I’ve come into contact with.
Read MoreDiva painting might be its own notable genre, given such exceptional practitioners as Kurt Kauper and Marilyn Minter. Their work doesn’t merely show as vivid, dramatic subject matter an array of imperious opera singers, fashion models, Hollywood icons at home or sex-tape-style celebrities-in-the-making. Instead, it forthrightly asserts that, in an era in which any form of art-making is possible, painting is a diva too.
Read MoreHeidi Hahn (b. 1982, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Hahn received her MFA from Yale University in 2014, and her BFA from Cooper Union in 2006. She is an acting Professor of Painting and Drawing at Alfred University, NY and has been the recipient of several awards, residencies, and fellowships, including the Jerome Foundation Grant; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Residency, Madison, ME; and the Fine Arts Work Center Residency, Provincetown, MA, among others.
Read MoreChanel Chiffon Thomas’ self-portrait, “Colossians 3:9” shows the artist as a split being. Thomas strikes a stately pose, arms akimbo, staring straight at the viewer, as if daring you to meet their eye. One half of their body is dressed in pants, while the other wears a satiny fuchsia dress, the draped fabric hanging off the canvas. Their bare chest is rendered in contrasting planes using Thomas’ signature embroidery thread. The twenty-eight-year-old artist, who identifies as queer, is constantly investigating how they want to identify and present themselves to the world. This oversized painting shown in their January solo show at Goldfinch Gallery takes that internal questioning and puts it on display.
Read MoreBurn Out in Shredded Heaven is the first solo exhibition in Los Angeles by New York-based artist and painter Heidi Hahn at Kohn Gallery. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Hahn creates introspective paintings that engage with the female body.
Read MoreBoyland’s most outstanding pieces focus on intimate portraits of queer, black men in the comfort of domestic settings, free from the prejudices which follow them throughout their life. Although relaxed, by deconstructing their anxieties, the men are inherently defiant in their abode. On Saturday, April 6th, Kohn Gallery opened On Hold:, an exhibition, which, in conjunction with NY-based artist Heidi Hahn's stellar show, Burn Out in Shredded Heaven, continues on until May 23rd. Flaunt had the lovely opportunity to chat with Boyland on his experiences growing up in the South, the inspiration behind his work, and the power behind portraiture.
Read More“If you’re interested in experimental art and Jewish mysticism, you need to go out and investigate Wally Berman’s work. But you’ll have to do some digging to get to it,” said late legendary Beat poet David Meltzer, concluding what turned out to be our last conversation. The weight of that moment stayed with me for the past two years, before an opportunity to follow through presented itself: I heard about an upcoming memoir by Wallace Berman’s son, Tosh, and arranged a meeting. Before long, I’ve come to realize just how right Meltzer was. As it happens, I now also understand the mischievous smirk that accompanied his comment.
Read MoreJarvis Boyland came of age in the era of marriage equality but also of tragedies like the Pulse nightclub shooting and high-profile cases of police brutality. So if you sense a certain anxiety underpinning the Memphis-born 24-year-old’s dream-like depictions of black queer home life, you aren’t imagining it. “I’m into the staging of the domestic and what these scenes of leisure can evoke,” he says. His 2017 painting Feels Like We Only Go Backwards (Pulse) captures such a moment, at once quotidian and miraculous. “Pulse is me awakening to the possibilities of building a life with a queer partner in Chicago — something I couldn’t do in the South.”
Read MoreChanel Chiffon Thomas’s exhibition at Goldfinch, “Fractured Reality,” featured eight bold assemblages in which thick sinews of embroidery are joined with found fabric, painted canvas, and other mediums to create portraits and genre scenes. Based on her personal archive of family photographs, the works depict figures primarily engaged in mundane moments of interaction in domestic interiors: a woman barbering a young man, for instance, or a man and child sitting at a kitchen table.
Read MoreGallerist Josh Friedman told me that by midday, three institutions (including Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center and the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami) had already purchased the bright, large-scale paintings of young Philadelphia-based artist Jonathan Lyndon Chase.
Read MoreArt world insiders, collectors, and advisors packed into a crowded Armory Show VIP preview morning on Wednesday, milling about and perusing the nearly 200 booths set up by dealers from 33 countries for the fair’s 25th anniversary edition.
Read MoreWalking into Chicago’s Goldfinch Projects gallery space, a cluster of paintings greet and orient viewers in the interior of a Black family’s home: an infant sleeping on the chest of a resting father, a smiling mother and her two children, a little Black boy and his father seated at the kitchen table
Read MoreGuadalajara, Mexico-based artist Gonzalo Lebrija is represented by Los Angeles’ Kohn Gallery as of last November; Veladuras Nocturnas is his first solo exhibition there, and the show spans all three of its exhibition spaces.
Read MoreLita Albuquerque knelt down to get closer to the ground. The land has long doubled as her muse and her canvas: She drew constellations into Egypt's Giza Plateau, she mimicked the night sky on a lake bed in the Mojave Desert, she aligned spheres to stars in space while in Antarctica on the summer solstice — 99 orbs in her signature ultramarine, a vibrant hue hearkening to the Tunisian skies of her childhood.
Read MoreAfter signing on with Kohn last fall, Mexican artist Lebrija makes his debut at the gallery this year with an ambitious exhibition. On view are paintings from the artist’s signature Veladuras series, which feature layers of muted semi-transparent paint that form prismatic abstractions, as well as a new sculptural work and film installation. Lebrija is not quite as well-known to American audiences as he is in his home country, but hat may be changing soon.
Read MoreIt is difficult to categorize the boundary-breaking, multi-media trajectory of American artist Bruce Conner (1933 – 2008). Constant change and a wide-roving, obsessive curiosity are perhaps two constants in Conner’s work, which ranges from assemblage to drawing, painting and sculpture to conceptual art and experimental film.
Read MoreGonzalo Lebrija is one of Mexico's most renowned contemporary artists. Across a connective thematic thread examining the porous borders between life and death, dreams and phenomena, mind and body, eye and spirit, Lebrija practices in a fluid continuum of materials including but not limited to painting, sculpture and video — examples of all of which will be on view at his exhibition opening this weekend at Kohn Gallery in Hollywood.
Read MoreIn Leipzig-based painter Rosa Loy’s phantasmagoric compositions, the industrious, rosy-cheeked women of socialist realism are recast in Kafkaesque mise-en-scènes, in which they farm human-faced heads of lettuce, feed lollipops to Harpies wearing headbands, and recline on couches in poses of analysands more than odalisques.
Read MorePropaganda and art are often thought of as opposites: The former rehashing cliches to serve the powers that be, and the latter inspiring individuals to believe they are in the presence of something special — a unique human expression, unlike anything else in the world.
Read MoreThe women in Rosa Loy’s dreamlike figurative paintings have always been engaged in something significant: just don’t ask the artist what it all means. In a new show at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, the member of the so-called New Leipzig School is happy for her paintings to lead to a little confusion. Words by Katya Tylevich
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