“ACID-FREE is pleased to announce the return of the Los Angeles Art Book Market & Bazaar, a three-day event produced by a programming committee of LA-based publishers, librarians, and curators, hosted by Blum & Poe Los Angeles.

Following the success of our inaugural Market in 2018 and our temporary installation at Frieze Los Angeles, join us November 1-3 for the 2019 Acid-Free Los Angeles Art Book Market. A-F ⅠⅠ provides a platform for 90+ West Coast and international exhibitors presenting new publications and projects alongside film programming by Now Instant Image Hall and La Collectionneuse, an archival exhibition curated by Guadalupe Rosales, music by Pacoima Techno, and a full schedule of ongoing discursive programming and signings.

This year will also premiere The Bazaar, a new outdoor book publishing-adjacent area including presentations by Artists 4 Democracy, High Desert Test Sites, Virgil Normal, and more.” – per website

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

LOS ANGELES, CA- (January 18, 2019)- LA’s international contemporary art fair will celebrate its 10th anniversary with new visual branding, a reimagined floor design, as well as new “Salon” and Publishing sections. ALAC will bring together international contemporary galleries, collectors, curators, artists, and art enthusiasts for an extended five-day cultural event from Wednesday, February 13-Sunday, February 17. Over ten years, ALAC has helped to solidify Los Angeles as an art epicenter, nurtured a generation of young collectors, and acted as a gateway to international exchange. ALAC’s unique combination of emerging and established galleries has been key to its longevity and success. ALAC maintains an unparalleled commitment to art-making, collection-building, and the galleries that are the bridge between the two. ALAC’s 10th Edition will introduce the next generation of galleries, while continuing to partner with the most exciting established programs in the city. PRESS ACCREDITATION All requests for credentials must be made before Friday, February 8, 2019 to [email protected] Members of the media are invited to preview the fair on Wednesday, February 13 from 2pm. Advance press tours can be arranged by appointment. Tim Fleming, ALAC’s Founder and Fair Director said, “After ten years, I recognize the impact we have made locally and internationally. To walk into a collector’s home and see a work from a past edition of our fair is such a pleasure, because it solidifies for me how we’ve achieved our mission by supporting galleries and informing collections. Our 10th anniversary is a chance for us to recommit to who we are: content-forward, trusted but inventive, international and LA. Our work is really about putting together the best program of established and emerging galleries, to show off the best of LA and around the globe. We feel spoiled by the number of visionaries we get to collaborate with, from new galleries with audacious programming to respected partners we’ve worked with from ALAC’s beginning a decade ago.” For the new visual identity of the fair, ALAC has teamed with award-winning graphic designer and artist Brian Roettinger (WP&A), whose roster of clients includes music visionaries Mark Ronson, Florence + the Machine, Drake, and Jay-Z. Inspired by the fair’s physical venue at the Santa Monica Airport, the experience of navigating an art fair on foot, and the civic architecture of LA’s freeways, ALAC’s new branding explores the language of way-finding. Roettinger comments, “The new bold black and white identity is a modular typographic system. It allows for a strict but playful mix, which is part airport way-finding and part motor transportation. The look focuses on the fair’s better-known name ‘ALAC,’ instead of its official full name, which the team felt was a natural decision after ten years of existence.” For its tenth anniversary edition, ALAC will be housed within a new architectural design by principal architect at Seattle-based firm Olson Kundig Jerry Garcia, who has collaborated with world-renowned artists such as Anish Kapoor, Jaume Plensa, Oscar Tuazon, and Doug Aitken. Claudia Rech, Berlin-based art historian, curator, and former gallerist of Gillmeier Rech, will curate a “Salon” section called “The Academy,” offering a new way for galleries and the public to participate in the fair through a curated exhibition. Frances Horn, Brussels-based curator and initiator of the art book fair PA/PER VIEW at WIELS, has been selected to lead the ALAC publishing section, “Movable Types.” More details on the architectural design as well as the Salon and Publishing sections to come.

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

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“Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition with multidisciplinary artist Jónsi, on view at the gallery’s Los Angeles space from November 16, 2019 through January 9, 2020.

What is the shape of sound? What does it feel like? Can we smell it? How does it move through your body and what kind of sensations does it trigger? These are the questions that are posed by Jónsi in his first exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles. Best known for producing distinctive musical sounds ranging from hypnotic ambient incantations to driving sonic waves as a member of the band Sigur Rós, Jónsi has expanded his artistic practice over the past few years in a series of collaborations with visual artists such as Doug Aitken, Olafur Eliasson, Merce Cunningham and most recently the artist and composer Carl Michael von Hausswolf with whom he formed the musical duo Dark Morph. In the wake of these collaborations, Jónsi’s most recent solo aesthetic explorations have resulted in a series of immersive installations that sculpt with sound as they ask us to meditate on the liminal threshold between our bodies and the world around us.

In a series of three new gallery-based works, Jónsi riffs on the invocation of sensory inversion in Goethe’s fifth Roman Elegy in which the Romantic poet makes a connection between the experience of a lover’s body and a classical marble sculpture with the phrase, “see with a feeling eye, feel with a seeing hand.” In Jónsi’s remix, Goethe’s advice to experience the world in a different way is given a sonic update that might read as follows: “hear with a feeling ear, feel with a hearing hand.” Seeing, hearing, feeling – each of these senses collapse upon one another in Jónsi’s work as sound takes a concrete form and the tactile and the auditory merge into a surprising synesthesia. While one might read these works within the lineage of bombastic noise experiments harkening back to those of the Italian Futurists who championed the revolutionary aspects of noise in opposition to formal music, Jónsi’s approach is far more interested in exploring the phenomenological complication and extension of the senses as an antidote to a world in which we are constantly confronted by the agitated white noise of contemporary civilization. In his work there is an overarching attempt to assert the primacy of the auditory, the tactile, and the visual in helping the human organism navigate its way through this unmoored and volatile world.” – per website

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

Frieze is the world’s leading platform for modern and contemporary art for scholars,connoisseurs, collectors and the general public alike. Frieze comprises three magazines—frieze, Frieze Masters MagazineandFrieze Week—and four international art fairs—FriezeLondon, Frieze Masters, Frieze New York and Frieze Los Angeles.Frieze was founded in 1991 by Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp, with the launch offrieze magazine,the leading international magazine of contemporary art and culture. In2003, Sharp and Slotover launched Frieze London art fair, which takes place each October inThe Regent’s Park, London. In 2012, they launched Frieze New York, which occurs each Mayin Randall’s Island Park, and Frieze Masters, which coincides with Frieze London in Octoberand is dedicated to art from ancient to modern. In 2018, Frieze launched Frieze Los Angeles,which opened February 14–17, 2019 at Paramount Pictures Studios, Los Angeles. In 2016, Frieze entered into a strategic partnership with Endeavor a global entertainment, sports and content company.

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SPRING/BREAK Art Show Los Angeles premiered during Frieze Week LA in February, featuring 40+ projects of near-exclusively Los Angeles-based artists, curators, and artist-run spaces. For press responses to the event, go to our NEWS section.

February 15 – 17, 2019  //  The Stalls at Skylight ROW DLTA  //  1925 East 8th Street, Los Angeles 

SPRING/BREAK Art Show is an internationally recognized exhibition platform using underused, atypical and historic New York City exhibition spaces to activate and challenge the traditional cultural landscape of the art market, typically but not exclusively during Armory Arts Week. The eighth annual exhibition will be held from March 5th  – March 11th, 2019. 

By first inhabiting St. Patrick’s Old School, and then the former James A. Farley Post Office, the initiative offers independent curators free space within New York City landmarks, past and future. In exchange for no-cost exhibition space, visionary perspectives both established and unknown are charged with engaging these areas under a unifying theme and pushed to extend the boundries of typical market week practices, low overhead and shifting curatorial themes their assets to this end. 

All artworks in the show are displayed and available for purchase online, giving artists unknown, emerging, mid-career, and beyond a virtual compliment to their tactile exhibition.

Low-cost exhibition space and low-cost entry for art patrons, public, and practioners alike aims to widen the arts audience in New York and broaden the dialog of what constitutes value and economy in a 21st Century city.

In March 2019, over 100 curators will premiere new artworks created by over 400 artists, all selected around this year’s central art theme, FACT AND FICTION. 

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

We know what you’re thinking, “Been there, done that.” We’re happy to tell you that photo l.a. is an entirely different experience.

We’re bringing the best of the photography world to your doorstep with a collaborative platform that links dealers and collectors with a gamut of galleries from around the globe. Internationally recognized, yet abundantly accessible, photo l.a. cultivates connections between industry elite and up-and-coming talent alike. The longest running international photographic art fair on the West Coast, photo l.a. has been in operation for nearly three decades.

photo l.a. received a new home in the historic Barker Hangar this year. The airplane hangar’s soaring vaulted ceilings, arched steel trusses, and sweeping 35,000 square foot event space will host a roster of 65-75 local and international galleries and dealers, collectives, leading not-for-profits, art schools, and global booksellers.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO_kkECh-RM&feature=youtu.be

GAVLAK Los Angeles is pleased to announce Meta Minimal, a solo exhibition of new sculpture by Gisela Colon (American b. 1966, Vancouver, Canada; raised 1967, San Juan, Puerto Rico). The artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery will open at Gavlak’s new space in Downtown Los Angeles at 1700 South Santa Fe Avenue, Suite 440, on January 11, 2020.

Through her syncretic process of exploring and expanding upon past history, sculptor Gisela Colon has succeeded in creating sculptures that convey the fullest possible array of sensory and intellectual experience, projecting cosmic energy and power outwards into the world. With her astute practice of Organic Minimalism– an idiosyncratic sculptural language that imbues life-like qualities into reductive forms– Colon approaches her sculptural practice from the expansive perspective of phenomenological concerns: addressing the physical laws of the universe such as gravity, time, movement, energy and transformation. Colon’s oeuvre is the result of a synthesis of pointed historical reflection and visceral raw energy.

Colon’s practice of Organic Minimalism simultaneously expands and challenges the legacies of Light and Space, Minimalism, Kinetic and Latin American Op Art, merging industrial inertness with transformative biological mutability. Her sensual, gender-ambiguous sculptural forms further connect her practice to a history of female artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Linda Benglis and Judy Chicago. By channeling Bourgeois’ notions of sexualized energies and Chicago’s nascent feminist atmospheric works, Colon similarly posits her sculptures as vehicles for conversion of classic masculine forms into feminized power.

Colon’s vocabulary of organic forms and humanized geometries embodies a feeling of energy, movement, and growth that stems from the artist’s connection to the Earth, the vital energy that pervades all living organisms, and the extensive, infinite forces that rule the cosmological realm. For Colon, what is most important in a work of art is that it “transcends the material to allow for metaphysical phenomena.”

A merger of scientifically advanced technologies and materials with naturally-occurring in vita properties places Colon squarely in the current international discourse of contemporary sculpture. Contemporaries such as Olafur Eliasson, Alicja Kwade, Jose Davila, and other practitioners, alongside Colon, integrate the use of ubiquitous industrial materials of the Anthropocene era with the palpable tension of the laws of physics that pervade the invisible world around us.

For the Meta Minimal exhibition, Colon’s works will occupy the entirety of the gallery, centering the installation on one of Colon’s signature large-scale aerospace Monoliths, sculpted in iridescent carbon fiber. At 12 feet tall, Colon’s Untitled (Projectile Monolith White Iridium), 2019, stands as a force of gravity around which all other sculptures effortlessly float in synergistic movement. In Colon’s words:

“The Monoliths convey evidence of equality, power, beauty, and strength. By appropriating classic masculine forms and symbols (the phallus, bullets, missiles, rockets) and making them aesthetically ambiguous and even beautiful, the Monolith sculptures subvert the traditionally aggressive and destructive references of these objects. Their negative meanings are transmuted into positive energies, by converting them into aesthetically desirable objects that address phenomenology and the universal concern of human relationships with the Earth.”

Interspersed throughout the gallery, the viewer will also encounter a series of translucent, refined Hyperbolic Monoliths, part of a new body of work entitled Unidentified Objects, which references cosmological origins and otherworldly enigmas. Like stalagmites forcefully growing upwards from the mineral earth, or foreign matter hailing inexplicably from unknown worlds, the 8–foot-tall streamlined Hyperbolic Monoliths act as sinewy reminders of our stardust origins, creating bodily experiences through the activation of surrounding space.

Surrounding the Monoliths, several wall sculptures from Colon’s groundbreaking series of biomorphic Pods will hover as beacons of light and life. The Pods are created through a unique fabrication method comprised of blow-molding and layering of acrylic and optical materials of the 21st century. This technique results in sculptures that emanate, refract, and reflect light while simultaneously possessing fluid spectral color and optical harmony. Activated by light and their surrounding environment, the Pods become perceptual objects whose physical characteristics are transformed by variable factors such as the position of the viewer, their source of light, and the time of day.

Anchoring the central gallery space, Colon’s large-scale 8-foot-long amorphous floor work, entitled Unidentified Object (Slaboid Incandescent Gold), 2020, protrudes from the floor as if growing out of the concrete, presenting a direct aesthetic counterpoint in both organic form and manifested purpose to the forceful verticality of the Monoliths. These objects, though apparently conceptually opposed, emanate from the same transformative world, sharing a primitive kinship with the fundamental aspects of life.

Extending into the east gallery space, Colon presents a subtle immersive installation with a series of Light Portals where highly refined linear swaths of light and color appear to float seamlessly on the wall. Through the elusive shifting of prismatic refractions of structural color, the disembodied Light Portals allow for glimpses into the infinite.

Presented together, all four bodies of Colon’s work, foster a symbiotic dialogue, evoking the physical states of matter that fluctuate between solid, liquid and gas. Meta Minimal evidences a dynamic encounter with the universal forces of energy that surround us, leading to an experience beyond perception– an encounter with the sublime.

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