Close to Home: Erica Deeman, Mark McKnight, Eva O’Leary, and Larry Sultan

March 2 – April 6, 2019

Opening Reception March 2, 6-9pm

Shulamit Nazarian is proud to present, Close to Home, a group exhibition of four photographers that mine their personal experiences–past and present–to express moments of intimacy within larger social and political structures. Engaging with the deep and complicated history of photographic portraiture, each artist renders his or her subjects in part as extensions of themselves, coded with personal and cultural references.

Pioneering photographer, Larry Sultan, seamlessly weaves fact and fiction, creating narrative possibilities that charge domestic familiarity with artifice. Sultan explores the deeply personal, while utilizing both documentary and staged photography to create surreal and psychological spaces that speak to intimacy and power within suburban family life – creating images often captured near the artist’s hometown in the San Fernando Valley.

Eva O’Leary has been producing photographs in and around her hometown of Central Pennsylvania, ironically nicknamed Happy Valley. Gaining access to college parties, dorm rooms, and proms and other social spaces of those in the midst of pivotal coming of age moments, O’Leary examines individual vulnerability in these transitional times. Her work explores intimate moments to deftly confront power dynamics as it falls along gendered lines, especially within the lives of adolescents.

Erica Deeman’s Brown series is a collection of medium format photographs that depict isolated men from the African diaspora, rendered shirtless in front of a brown backdrop that matches the color of the artist’s own skin. Injecting her own presence in the portrait of others,these deceptively straightforward imagesprovide a foil for the deleterious tropes of black male portraiture—particularly images affiliated with the practice of physiognomy and mug shots. Her subject’s gazes are quiet, vulnerable, and self-aware, carrying the power and weight of the photographic history and lineage that she is acutely referencing.

Mark McKnight’s black and white photographs depict the human figure and the landscape with congruence. Often rendering the bodies of queer friends and lovers, McKnight carefully depicts the effects of entropy on the human form and pairs it with similar scares found on architecture, urban spaces, and the landscape. Situated between documentary and the surreal, McKnight’s photographs imply an erotic, yet brutal psychological space, informed by his personal relationships.

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

Cristian Răduță’s animals march in droves. A Noah’s Ark of improvised genetic anomalies populate Nicodim Gallery like an emergency spawning ground, but no two are paired or exactly alike. Apelikenesses can be seen from one angle and a shuffle of animalian ciphers from the other. Răduță is their shepherd, bringing to each form a unique trembling glory. This harmonious pattern of origin stories—both raw and cooked—ludically swirl in the artist’s grand tale of a double helix. His creatures are echos of archetypes, songs from a golden record played deep in outer space.

We learn quickly that the primordial soup is not a pulsing mitosis gasping for air, but instead a Home Depot rich in opportunities, crude and visionary, like cast shadows on a cave wall, actualities of some alternate reality—a more real reality. In Răduță’s world, the metaphor becomes literal: a chair’s leg is a hominid’s leg; the gorilla’s sharp purple “pipe” is erected from a circumcised sink pipe. An intimate knowledge of these resources is not necessary, however. They are preverbal and intuitive. Naming them would somehow discourage their being, shaming them from the garden towards an unwanted conformity.

Răduță is a true bricoleur. His efforts have a cosmic intention to map the journey of DNA within a feedback loop of primitive sculptural forms. Răduță believes in the source animal, a being from which this rippling morphology birthed. S/he lives in the gallery in a state of divine dedifferentiation. A glittering patina of fresh flesh in that moment before God took the rib, compromising its transitory state. S/he is the one of oneness—the omnipotent maker. 

These specimens are becoming. To see their perfect imperfection is a gift for the eyes in search of seeing for the first time. They represent an awkwardly powerful stutter in the animal kingdom. Răduță has remembered the moment before language and made do using onomatopoeia instead of the dictionary. These creatures fall off the tip of the tongue and scatter. – per website.

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

I feel like people tend to look at a painting and think, “OK, one artist paints a painting.” As if the condition remains the same ten years ago, three years ago, and now. But . . . the way I create the work constantly evolves. Especially in the past few years, we’ve been able to use a lot of the 3-D modeling programs, so the way I can grasp and understand forms has drastically changed and evolved. . . . Artistic expression really has to do with technique, and how you can actually realize ideas.
—Takashi Murakami

Gagosian is pleased to present GYATEI², new works by Takashi Murakami, as the 2019 “Oscars show,” a much-anticipated annual fixture on the Los Angeles cultural calendar.

Drawing from traditional Japanese painting, sci-fi, anime, and pop culture, Murakami’s oeuvre comprises paintings, sculptures, films, and a stream of commercial products populated by mutating characters of his own creation. His iconoclastic individualism continues the nonconformist legacy of the Edo Eccentrics, a group of eighteenth-century Japanese artists who constructed a powerfully imaginative world filled with bizarre and emotive imagery.

The exhibition title comes from the Buddhist Hannya Shingyo (Heart Sutra), a popular sutra in Mahayana Buddhism. The incantation is often chanted by Zen groups before or after a meditation. At the conclusion of the sutra, the Avalokiteshvara, a popular and recognizable bodhisattva, turns and recites a mysterious mantra to one of the disciples. The mantra is often roughly translated as “gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond, enlightenment, svāhā.” This articulation has been diversely interpreted as a call to “go” attain enlightenment, as the cry of a baby reborn into an eternal true world, and as a curse.

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

The inaugural edition of Frieze Los Angeles brought together 70 of the most significant and forward-thinking contemporary galleries from across the city and around the world, alongside a curated program of talks, site-specific artists’ projects and film.

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

People

February 9–April 6, 2019925 North Orange Drive

More than fifty standing, sitting and hanging figurative sculptures will fill Jeffrey Deitch’s new Los Angeles gallery. The artists in the show span several generations from the 1980s to the present, with an emphasis on emerging talent.

All of the works in the exhibition reflect a contemporary approach to sculpture inspired by the innovations of Dada, Surrealism, Assemblage and by the influence of non- or meta- art sources like department store mannequins.

Only one work in the show is carved or modeled in the traditional way. Some are made from body casts, others are constructed with found objects and only a few use conventional sculptural materials like bronze.

The works in the exhibition reflect the diversity of the artists who created them and the diversity of the people who the sculptures represent. The styles range from hyperrealism to allegory. The subjects range from ordinary individuals to creatures of fantasy. The works explore the uncanny confrontation of the artificial and the real while simultaneously responding to the multiple approaches to human identity in the contemporary world.

Many of the works in the show have a performative quality and one of the featured works, Narcissister’s Totem, will be activated with live performance during the opening week. In keeping with the aesthetic direction of the show, it is unclear which of the figures in her Totem are live and which are not.

People is an expansion of an exhibition presented in Jeffrey Deitch’s New York gallery in May 2018. The show also extends the theme of the Metropolitan Museum’s 2018 Like Life exhibition to encompass a younger generation of artists. People is especially inspired by Mike Kelley’s influential exhibition and book project, The Uncanny from 1993. The show also builds on Deitch’s 1992 book and exhibition, Post Human.

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to announce the opening of our new exhibition space in downtown Los Angeles. Spanning the entire length of 1700 South Santa Fe Avenue, the 11,000 sf warehouse will host some of the gallery’s most ambitiously scaled exhibitions to date and provides additional space for both a screening and reading room. It will be used as a second exhibition space in addition to our Culver City gallery. The gallery design was developed in collaboration with TOLO Architecture and Anderson Studio.

The gallery will open during Frieze LA with a preview on Friday, February 15, 2019, and will open to the public on Saturday, February 16. The inaugural exhibition will feature new and historic works by artists from the gallery’s roster: Edgar Arceneaux, Sadie Benning, Andrea Bowers, Kim Dingle, Sean Duffy, Nicole Eisenman, Charles Gaines, Karl Haendel, Stanya Kahn, Mary Kelly, Rodney McMillian, Wangechi Mutu, Ruben Ochoa, Pope.L, Amy Sillman, and Nicola Tyson. The inaugural exhibition will be followed by solo exhibitions of new work by Arlene Shechet, Deborah Roberts, Sam Levi Jones, Genevieve Gaignard, Andrea Bowers, Shana Lutker, and Liz Glynn.

The downtown gallery is located at 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, just south of the 10 freeway. Limited parking is available on the north parking lot adjacent to the building. Visitors to the opening are encouraged to use ride sharing services.

1700 Santa Fe Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90021 phone 310.837-2117 www.vielmetter.com

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson