Curated by John Knuth and Ben Lee Ritchie Handler

Brody Albert • Roger Ballen • Matthew Barney • Keith Boadwee • Genesis Breyer P-Orridge • Lou Cantor • Cristopher Cichocki • Jamie Felton • Elizabeth Ferry • Silas Inoue • Kyla Hansen • Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor • Richard Jackson • Mi Kafchin • John Knuth • James Krone • Jessie Makinson • Paul McCarthy • Jeffry Mitchell • Cassi Namoda • Katherina Olschbaur • Joel Otterson • Șerban Savu • Allison Schulnik • Margie Schnibbe • Andres Serrano • Cristian Răduță • Ecaterina Vrana • Ambera Wellmann • Hugo Wilson • and more…

Girl, it’s a hard, hard world
If it gets you down
Dreams often fade and die
In a bad, bad world

I’ll take you where real animals are playing
And people are real people not just playing
It’s a quiet, quiet life
By a dirty old shack
That we called our home
I want to be back there
Among the cats and dogs
And the pigs and the goats
— “Animal Farm,” The Kinks

“Nicodim Gallery is pleased to present BioPerversity, an exploration of humanity’s darker and lighter perversions as told through the personification of the rest of the animal kingdom, creatures who exist a few rungs beneath us on the evolutionary ladder.

Conscious humans have a tendency to attribute animal characteristics to one another in terms of cliché: work like a dog; like a fish out of water; a wolf in sheep’s clothing; happy as a clam; etc.  What happens when we push beyond these trite truisms? By starting with our base animal instincts, we are able to descend deeper down the rabbit hole of our social complexities and psychological neuroses, and we can properly celebrate our feral desires.”

“Force of Nature features painting and video by six international artists: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio (Los Angeles), Glen Baldridge (New York), Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion (Paris), Nick Farhi (Los Angeles), John Knuth (Los Angeles) and Lukas Marxt (Cologne). While traditional landscape art has often been concerned with the sublime and the spiritual, a different focus operates in Force of Nature. The six artists here are inspired by nature to express ideas that are especially relevant now. Immigration, climate change, land abuse, new technology and social media are some of the themes of this exhibition, and while the artists convey political and environmental realities that are bleak, they still rely on the beauty of nature to convey their sentiments.

Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio is a first-generation American of Salvadoran descent whose work focuses on the Salvadoran diaspora, migration, and the interrelated histories of Central and North America. He uses rubber, an important natural resource from El Salvador (and Mexico), to create paintings that encapsulate natural and man-made images embedded within the surface of urban trees in Los Angeles and Mexico City. Using rubber to make “life masks” of the surfaces of urban trees, Aparicio retains the painted and carved graffiti, dirt and natural decay into the surfaces of these molded works, which also incorporate decades of urban history. The works are beautiful as paintings but they also represent a complicated history that relates to the Spanish conquest as well as to the complex relationships between Central America, Mexico and the United States.

Glen Baldridge grew up in Great Falls, Montana amidst vast open spaces and in close proximity to glacial lakes and dense forests. A New Yorker since 2000, his practice encompasses sculpture, printmaking and painting which frequently relate to youth angst and lament for the worsening condition of the environment. In Force of Nature, he presents new paintings that include phrases (dark daze, no way, damaged, spare me and buzz kill) that have been camouflaged to varying degrees of legibility.

Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion are a Paris-based collaborative duo that work in video, painting and sculpture to highlight the nexus of nature and new technology. In Force of Nature, they present three miniature paintings of nature scenes. They are painted on smart phones atop Instagram posts and will be presented with the phones powered on so that they are electronically illuminated.

Los Angeles-based Nick Farhi is an intuitive painter of wide-ranging subjects (figures, drum skins, wine stains, checkered flags, skies) whose most recent works focus on cacti and desert scenes. The images largely come from the artist’s imagination, but in using colors that suggest a fiery landscape, the artist simultaneously creates a beautiful color composition and a frightening outlook.

John Knuth is a Los Angeles-based artist who often interacts with nature to create works of art. In a recent painting series he used thousands of flies to create marks upon sheets of paper. For this exhibition, he presents mountain scenes that have been crafted from UV film that comes in various colors. The scenes appear to be snowy crags and jagged crevasses.

Cologne-based Lukas Marxt has worked in many distant corners of the world to explore the dialogue between human and geological existence and the impact of man upon nature. He has shot films in the Arctic; a total eclipse from a uranium mine in Australia and the raging sea from an oil rig off Norway. In Force of Nature, Marxt presents Imperial Valley (cultivated run-off), a 14-minute video that he shot in California’s most southeastern county. He used a drone camera to shoot the entire length of an irrigation canal as it coursed through a desert landscape. The landscape that Marxt portrays is more geometric abstraction than it is a nature scene suggesting that the post-apocalypse is not a matter for the future, but that we are already well within it.”

“Venice, CA — L.A. Louver is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Los Angeles-based artist Alison Saar. Taking inspiration from the character of Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic Civil War-era novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Saar re-contextualizes the sprightly uncouth slave girl as a symbol of defiance, through paintings on dyed vintage linens and sculptures carved from wood. “She was one of the blackest of her race,” writes Stowe of Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “Her woolly hair was braided in sundry little tails which stuck out in every direction… there was something odd and goblin-like about her appearance.” In over a dozen works, Saar utilizes this literal characterization to figuratively transform the chastised and ill-mannered Topsy into a fearless girl-at-arms. Topsy, abused and mistreated by her former owners, was purchased by Augustine St. Clare and presented to his cousin Miss Ophelia as a gift with the challenge to make her “good.” Despite Ophelia’s attempts, Topsy steals and neglects her servant duties, and when reprimanded describes herself: “I’s wicked, – I is. I’s mighty wicked.” By contrast, Eva, Topsy’s child mistress and playmate, is portrayed with purity and light — her flaxen hair likened to a glowing halo. Upon her untimely death, Eva gifts each of the family’s slaves a lock of her hair. It is this final act of Eva’s love that ultimately tames Topsy’s wicked, wild-child ways. However, Saar imagines a different fate for Topsy. In the sculpture Topsy and the Golden Fleece (2017), the slave girl refuses to be pacified, and is emboldened to take matters into her own hands. Saar braids tales, and weaves into Topsy’s story the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts, drawing upon their seafaring journey to retrieve the Fleece of the Golden Ram to fulfill Jason’s claim to the throne. The artist recasts Topsy as a nude female figure, carved from wood, firmly postured like a self-possessed conqueror. Having deployed the sickle clenched tightly to her chest, Topsy rejects Eva’s docile offering of a single curl of hair, and instead commandeers her entire golden scalp, seizing Eva’s power to carve out her own destiny.”

“Venice, CA — L.A. Louver is pleased to present a new series of iPhone and iPad drawings by David Hockney. Created by the artist between 2009-12, this is the first time these works will be on view in Los Angeles; they have been newly editioned and released by the Hockney Studio. “Anyone who likes drawing and mark-making will like to explore new media.” – David Hockney From photographic collage to facsimile drawings, copier-machine offset printing to computer generated images, David Hockney has nurtured a lifelong fascination with using new technology to make pictures. In 2008, Hockney acquired his first iPhone and quickly became consumed with the device’s drawing applications. Its portability afforded him the ability to create anywhere, at any time, and without restriction. With the stroke of his thumb, all color and markmaking effects imaginable were at his command. Early subjects included domestic settings, like the sunrise from his bedroom window, or the floral arrangements decorating his home. “I draw flowers every day on my iPhone and send them to my friends, so they get fresh flowers every morning,” said Hockney. “And my flowers last.” But what began as impromptu sketches shared with friends and family, soon became a vital means for Hockney to study and capture the world around him. As Hockney’s proficiency with the software app heightened, so did the complexity of his drawings. By transitioning to an iPad in 2010, the artist could employ a larger screen, and use all of his fingers as well as a stylus pen to make images. “I thought the iPhone was great, but this takes it to a new level – simply because it’s eight times the size of the iPhone, as big as a reasonably sized sketchbook,” Hockney said of the iPad. Working in situ with the touch screen as his blank canvas, Hockney layered stroke upon stroke of color to convey the texture, light and presence of his chosen subjects that range from a glass ashtray and a pair of bathroom robes, to playful self-portraits of varying expressions.”

“Betye, Lezley and Alison Saar have created some of the most powerful, important and deeply moving art in our contemporary world. Their compelling works forge idiosyncratic constructions of social memory and personal identity, as well as the cultural histories underlying them. All three Saars assemble two- and three-dimensional works based on unexpected juxtapositions of form and content. They deploy the flotsam of material culture, from discarded architectural components (old windows, ceiling tiles, wall paper) to domestic detritus (washboards, buckets, shelves) to historic photographs and printed fabrics.

​“I like things,” Betye asserted in a recent interview. “Every object tells a story. If I recombine them, they tell another story.”  In their aesthetic practice of collecting and recombining objects, the Saars become what French philosopher Claude Levi-Strauss called bricoleurs: creators who arrange preexisting articles and images to produce dramatic visual compositions.  Levi-Strauss expanded the French term bricoleur (a “Do-It-Yourself” handyman) to include anyone who works with the materials at hand, cobbling together disparate parts to create novel solutions.

​All of the Saars use recycled materials not generally considered “appropriate” art media. Modern art academies, founded in Europe in the seventeenth century, had privileged oil paint on canvas and cast bronze as elite, “high art” media. In contrast, creations in jewelry, textiles and ceramics were considered “low art” or crafts. When the Saars employ objects like handkerchiefs and old books as painting surfaces, or tin ceiling tiles and buckets as sculpture, they violate long-held boundaries between high and low arts. Their material contraventions parallel the artists’ transgressions of identity-based binaries such as male/female, culture/nature and master/slave. “