Vija Celmins

To Fix the Image in Memory

December 15, 2018–March 31, 2019

Floor 4

TicketsEntry to this exhibition is included with general admission.Sharehttps://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition

For more than five decades, Vija Celmins has been creating subtle, exquisitely detailed renderings of the physical world — including oceans, desert floors, and night skies. Distilling vast, expansive distances into mesmerizing, small-scale artworks, these “redescriptions” are a way to understand human consciousness in relation to lived experience. One of the few women to be recognized as a significant artist in 1960s Los Angeles, Celmins relocated to New York City in 1981, where she continues to live and work. Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory features more than 140 artworks, including paintings, drawings, and sculptures. A global debut, this is the first Celmins retrospective in North America in more than twenty-five years.

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

“Have you ever wondered what artists listen to while in the studio and what that tell us

about the artist? London based artist Pia Pack did and took her relocation to Los Angeles as an opportunity to get to know her new city and fellow artists. What Artists Listen To first season explores the soundtracks of Los Angeles female identifying artist’s lives through discussion of tracks on their curated playlist. Inspired by Kim Schoenstadt’s Now Be Here project, Pia decided to focus solely on female identifying Los Angeles artists for the first season of W.A.L.T.

“I love the project because for most artists music has gone hand in hand with their studio practice since the very beginning – it’s a bit like asking to see their dairies. As a listener, it further fleshes out the artists, it’s an insight into their artistic process.“ says creator Pia Pack. The live version will feature Alexandra Grant, Zeal Harris, Cole James, Alison Saar, Shizu Salamando, among others. Pia’s studio work focuses on the way people connect and interact, translating movements and mapping sounds into her artwork. At the centre of her practice is the desire to bring people together. Pia Pack studied fine art in London at Byam Shaw St. Martins School of Art,Wimbledon School of Art, and Hochschule für Künste, Hamburg. She recently completed her MFA at Bath School of Art.

The podcast will launch on 17 March on iTunes, please visit www.whatartistslistento.com for further information and the live version lineup.”

Parrasch Heijnen is pleased to present Peter Alexander, a correlative selection of the artist’s recent sculpture and wall relief work in conversation with his sea and landscape paintings dating from 1990 – 2019. Alexander’s attention to the energies and forces of light and color discerned through observations of atmosphere and water are defining concentrations of this artist’s six-decade practice.

The core of Alexander’s work has consistently remained focused upon a devoted engagement with light in structural space, evoking the emotive sublime in an opulent exploration of color. Whether looking through paint or resin, depth emerges from thin layers and suspended pigments. The artist’s textural play loosely defines focus and horizon lines, often confusing the viewer’s physical orientation. This brilliance permeates through the work’s precise turns bending light by way of tinted gradations. Alexander’s forms transmit luminous energy in relation to their adjacent negative space, with illusionistic light bursting forth from beneath.

Informed by his architectural background (the artist began his career working as an illustrator for architect Richard Neutra), Alexander perceives the atmosphere around him as an all-encompassing entity. Encouraging his paint in swift motions to naturally settle, he mirrors the unpredictability of celestial phenomena and seduces the viewer into a hypersensitive state inciting a spectrum of emotive visual perceptions. The artist’s translucent urethane objects envelop the viewer in secluded interiors, consciously engaging with surroundings through various monochromatic hues, echoing a sense of cosmic awareness. Both mediums inform the other, quietly interacting with the senses and capturing the passage of time.

Peter Alexander (b.1939, Los Angeles, CA) has been widely exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide since the mid-1960s. Alexander is the recipient of multiple honors and awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1980 and the California Art Award in 2014. In 1999, the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA mounted a retrospective exhibition In this Light inclusive of painting and sculpture. His work resides in the permanent collections of numerous institutions including: the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; and The Getty Museum, Malibu, CA.

Peter Alexander will be on view at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, 1326 S. Boyle Avenue, Los Angeles, from January 7 – February 1, 2020, with an opening reception taking place on Sunday January 5, from 1-3 pm. For more information, please contact the gallery at +1 (323) 943-9373 or [email protected]

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

Frieze is a media and events company that comprises three publications, frieze magazine, Frieze Masters Magazine and Frieze Week; and four international art fairs, Frieze London, Frieze LA, Frieze New York and Frieze Masters; a programme of courses and talks at Frieze Academy, and frieze.com – the definitive resource for contemporary art and culture.

History
Frieze was founded in 1991 by Amanda Sharp, Matthew Slotover and Tom Gidley with the launch of frieze magazine, a leading magazine of contemporary art and culture. Sharp and Slotover established Frieze London in 2003, one of the world’s most influential contemporary art fairs which takes place each October in The Regent’s Park, London. In 2012, Frieze launched Frieze New York taking place in May; and Frieze Masters, which coincides with Frieze London in October and is dedicated to art from ancient to modern. In 2019, Frieze opened its first edition in Los Angeles at Paramount Pictures Studios, taking place in Februrary.

– 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

Art Los Angeles Contemporary, the International Contemporary Art fair of the West Coast, will be held February 13–17, 2019.

The tenth edition of the fair will feature top established and emerging galleries from around the world, with a strong focus on Los Angeles galleries. Participants will present some of the most dynamic recent works from their roster of represented artists, offering an informed view on contemporary art making.

– 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