“Venice, CA — L.A. Louver is pleased to announce an exhibition of painting and sculpture by venerable artist Mark di Suvero. Known the world over for his monumental public works, the exhibition features a selection of the artist’s smaller-scaled sculptures, made between 1990-2019, presented alongside a new series of colorful, abstract paintings. Movement, both physical and implied, pervade the works on view in the first floor gallery. Comprised of steel, stainless steel and cor-ten steel, di Suvero conceives the sculptures to spin and sway with a slight touch of the hand. Curious and
engaging, the sculptures convey a sense of grace and weightlessness that defies the rigid and dense materials of their making. In “Untitled” (2019), the largest and most recent work in the exhibition, a base structure made from angular cut-out pieces of raw steel rests on the floor. From its raised point, a large stainless steel pinion-like form is perfectly balanced, and when gently pushed, the silver shape pirouettes with a transcendent elegance. “After 60 years, I’m still doing it with my hands,” says the 86-year-old artist. “I cut the steel. I weld it. I put it together.” Only one sculpture,
“Blue Flame” (1998-2011), is stationary. While its elements are fixed, the work breathes with fluidity and movement – its gnarled centerpiece, a striking blue “flame,” is ablaze against the raw steel frame in which it sits.
A selection of brilliant abstract paintings by the artist accompanies the sculptures. Like the sculptures, his paintings are never still. Created with dazzling colors in dense layers of linear and freeform gestures, they project a swirling sensation akin to the twirling movement in his three-dimensional works. Accented with phosphorescent paints, the works luminesce and reverberate even in the absence of light (and are especially dazzling when activated by black lights installed throughout the gallery space). “The heart of art is the search for form that is electrifying, that gives life to
our vision,” explains di Suvero. “This is the language of emotion. Anesthetic is to kill feeling. Aesthetic is the opposite, aesthetic is feeling. The thing that is most important is the dream, the vision for what doesn’t exist that could exist.” – per website

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“Various Small Fires is pleased to present its second solo exhibition by The Harrisons.

Newton Harrison worked from 1969 to 2012 with his wife Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018), and has continued to work alone since her passing. After reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the late 1960s, The Harrisons decided to only create artworks that benefit “the great web of life”, leading over many years of research and production to the genesis of the Ecological Art movement. Decades later, despite the prescience of The Harrisons and others, the planet finds itself on a short path to the sixth extinction.

In 2007, The Harrisons began to design and realize interdisciplinary works, employing a range of mediums, including landscape-scale living installations, that would not only protect the life web, but actually counter human destruction by stimulating the life web to assist in its own amelioration. The artworks collected in this exhibition, dating from 1970 to the present, demonstrate this singular approach proposed by The Harrisons to mediate the extinction of our natural world, and provide a rough and ready blueprint for countering the extinction now upon us.

Newton Harrison and his team at the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure at University of California, Santa Cruz, continue to develop and implement projects at large-scale across the globe, “aware of the short time remaining for humans to counter the devastating effect of their own greed”. Now 86 years old, Newton is profoundly encouraged by the rising movement of young environmental activists around the globe, led by Greta Thunberg, who he considers to be answering his (and Helen’s) words from their works The Lagoon Cycle (1979) and Serpentine Lattice(1993).

The Harrisons Studio consists of Newton Harrison (b. 1932) and Helen Mayer Harrison (1927—2018). Often simply referred to as “The Harrisons”, the husband and wife team are leading pioneers of the Ecological Art movement. During their prolific career, the Harrisons have been the subject of over 100 solo exhibitions, and have been included in over 250 group exhibitions. For nearly fifty years, the Harrisons have produced work across a vast range of disciplines, working in collaboration with biologists, ecologists, historians, activists, architects, urban planners and fellow artists to initiate dialogues and create works exploring biodiversity and community development. They have shown work at the 2019, 1980, and 1976 Venice Biennales; Taipei Biennial (2018); documenta 8 (1987); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Tate, London, UK; Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, CA; The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; Cooper Hewitt Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; MoMA PS1, New York, NY; Berkeley Art Museum, CA; Boston Museum of Fine Arts, MA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Kunstmuseum Bonn, DE; and Kunstverein Hamburg, DE. Works by the Harrisons are included in many major permanent collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL. Newton Harrison is a Professor Emeriti at University of California, Santa Cruz, and University of California, San Diego.” – per website

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Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel

JUN 9-SEP 1, 2019

“The first American survey of one of the UK’s most influential artists.

Over the past 30 years, Sarah Lucas (b. 1962, London, UK) has created a distinctive and provocative body of work that subverts traditional notions of gender, sexuality, and identity. Since the late 1980s, Lucas has transformed found objects and everyday materials such as furniture, cigarettes, vegetables, and stockings into absurd and confrontational tableaux that boldly challenge social norms. The human body and anthropomorphic forms recur throughout Lucas’s works, often appearing erotic, humorous, fragmented, or reconfigured into fantastical anatomies of desire.

Initially associated with a group known as the Young British Artists (YBAs), who began exhibiting together in London in the late 1980s, Lucas is now one of the UK’s most influential artists. Bringing together more than 130 works in photography, collage, sculpture, and installation, Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel reveals the breadth and ingenuity of the artist’s practice. The exhibition addresses the ways in which Lucas’s works engage with crucial debates about gender and power–with a particular attentiveness to the legacy of surrealism—from her clever modifications to  everyday objects to her exploration of sexual ambiguity and the tension between the mundanely familiar and the disorientingly strange.

Alongside new sculptural works created for the exhibition, Au Naturel features some of Lucas’s most important projects, including early sculptures from the 1990s that substitute domestic furniture for human body parts and enlarged spreads from tabloid newspapers from the same period that reflect objectified representations of the female body. In addition to the photographic self-portraits that Lucas has produced throughout her career, the exhibition features biomorphic sculptures including her stuffed-stocking Bunnies (1997–ongoing) and NUDS (2009–ongoing), the Penetralia series (2008–ongoing), and selections from her installations at the Freud Museum in London (2000) and the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2015). These works, which complicate inscribed codes of sexual and social normativity, have never been shown together in the United States.

Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel is organized by the New Museum, New York. The exhibition is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, and Margot Norton, Curator. The Hammer’s presentation is organized by Anne Ellegood, senior curator, with Nika Chilewich, curatorial assistant.’

• per website
• – 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

curated by BEN LEE RITCHIE HANDLER
with multiversal interiors by JORGE LUIS CRUZATA

“According to multiverse theory, every decision a person makes causes a split in the universe, wherein an alternate version of one’s self continues to exist in an alternate universe, living with the consequences of an alternate decision. There are an infinite number of variations of ourselves existing throughout time and space, having made an infinite number of differing decisions.

TRANS WORLD is an exploration of identity through work by artists who are able to manifest multiple universes at the same time.

TRANS WORLD exists in Bucharest and Los Angeles concurrently, with unique works by the same slate of artists suited for each respective environment.

TRANS WORLD contemporaneously occupies the universes of art and design with design objects evocative of each respective location, transforming the gallery space into a domestic refuge for the

universally ambiguous.

TRANS WORLD is radical, metaphysical empathy. How can we not identify with one another on some level, knowing there’s a version of ourselves out there existing in every conceivable state of being?” – per website

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The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China

“Since the 1980s, Chinese contemporary artists have cultivated intimate relationships with their materials, establishing a framework of interpretation revolving around materiality. Their media range from the commonplace to the unconventional, the natural to the synthetic, the elemental to the composite: from plastic, water, and wood, to hair, tobacco, and Coca-Cola. Artists continue to explore and develop this creative mode, with some devoting decades of their practice to experiments with a single material. The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China brings together works from the past four decades in which conscious material choice has become a symbol of the artists’ expression, representing this unique trend throughout recent history. Some of the most influential Chinese contemporary artists today are featured in this exhibition, including Xu Bing, Cai Guo-Qiang, Lin Tianmiao, and Ai Weiwei. The Allure of Matter premieres at LACMA before traveling to the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, the Seattle Art Museum, and finally the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.

This exhibition is accompanied by the first scholarly volume to examine Chinese art through the lens of materiality. It is co-authored by the exhibition’s curators, Wu Hung, Smart Museum Adjunct Curator, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, and Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago, with Orianna Cacchione, Smart Museum Curator of Global Contemporary Art.”

• per website

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“Since 1996, Cine Gear Expo has grown to become the premier event for the technology, entertainment and media industry.

Created by industry insiders, Cine Gear Expo focuses on the needs of the community and draws the most dedicated specialists from all major department including Digital Media, Film, Entertainment, Post Production, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Government and Military, Sports, Live Events, the Academic World and more.

Unique in concept, Cine Gear Expo offers artists and technicians the opportunity to discover state -of –the- art technology and techniques including content capture hardware, workflow software, support equipment and the latest production services. Invitees get hands-on training, gain knowledge and skills from world technology leaders and network with peers all within a professional and comfortable studio environment.

Cine Gear Expo is the largest and most important event of its kind in the United States and is an acclaimed and well attended occasion attracting over 16,000 professionals from more than 60 countries each June in Hollywood, California, USA.

The annual four day conference includes an unparalleled gathering of Exhibits, Premier and Master Class Seminars, Film Festival Competition with Finalist Screenings and Ceremony, New Product Announcements, Innovative Technical Awards Competition, Special Screening Events and beyond.” – per website

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“Gaze through gilded frames and into the past, to a world inspired by biblical and mythical tales. Witness these epic stories leap forth from massive paintings, and let yourself be swept away in the drama. 

Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) was celebrated for his skillful handling of oil paint; his sensuous coloring; and his taut, action-packed depictions of dramatic narratives. Early Rubens focuses on what is arguably the artist’s most innovative period of production, from 1608 until about 1620. It was during these years that Rubens rose to the highest ranks of European painting. He did so through a series of social and artistic choices that laid the groundwork for his later international fame and established a visual style that would guide ambitious painters for generations to come. 

Rubens was not just a remarkable artist but also an international diplomat, businessman, intellectual, friend to scholars and monarchs, and master of a productive workshop. His early biographers branded Rubens as an aristocrat-artist, the favorite of Europe’s nobles, but his ultimate success was far from an assured outcome. Observe Rubens’s meteoric rise to master of the Northern Baroque.” – per website

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Lowell Ryan ProjectsAlexandra GrantOpening Reception: Saturday, June 1, 2019, 7-9pm

June 1 – July 6, 2019

“Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present Born to Love, a solo exhibition by Alexandra Grant. The title for the show stems from Sophocles’ play Antigone. In the ancient Greek tragedy, Antigone is brought before King Creon for disobeying his mandate against mourning the death of her brother, Polynices, who the King has labelled a traitor to the state. “An enemy is an enemy, even dead,” Creon says, to which Antigone replies, “I was born to love not to hate.” A blend of abstraction and text, Born to Love stands as an exploration of that radical stance—a stance that goes beyond its personal agenda to take on much greater social and universal implications.The show will feature seven large-scale works on paper and two oil paintings on canvas from the Los Angeles-based artist’sAntigone 3000 series. These works simultaneously contrast and incorporate various forms of abstraction––geometric, gestural, color-field––with sepulchral wax rubbings of text. Through Grant’s painterly nods to abstraction, the works achieve their harmony by juxtaposing visual language with textual quotation, repeating the phrase “I was born to love not to hate” throughout the works.Born to Love stands as a visual proposition that Antigone, in choosing love over hate, rises above all opposition with her steadfast conviction.Alexandra Grant is a Los Angeles-based artist who through an exploration of the use of text and language in various media—painting, drawing, sculpture, film, and photography—probes ideas of translation, identity, dis/location, and social responsibility. Grant frequently collaborates with other artists, writers and philosophers, often going so far as to have specific texts written as the impetus to her intricate paintings and sculptures. She has collaborated with author Michael Joyce, actor Keanu Reeves, artist Channing Hansen, and the philosopher Hélène Cixous, among others. RSVP to [email protected]

-per website

Lowell Ryan Projects

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Book of Beasts

The Bestiary in the Medieval World

May 14–August 18, 2019, GETTY CENTERPlan your visit

“Animals tumble, soar, and race through the pages of the bestiary, a popular type of medieval book describing the beasts of the world. Abounding with vibrant and fascinating images, the bestiary brought real and fantastical creatures to life for readers. So cherished were these vividly imagined beasts, they often “escaped” from manuscripts to inhabit other art works made during the medieval period, and even up to the present day.

Generous support from the Leonetti/O’Connell Family Foundation, the Ruddock Foundation for the Arts, Jeffrey P. Cunard, and Elizabeth and Mark S. Siegel

Additional support from Frances Beatty and Allen Adler, Ariane David on behalf of the Ernest Lieblich Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Museum Director’s Council, Dar and Geri Reedy, Virginia Schirrmeister, and Brian and Kathy Stokes” – per Getty website

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