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

The fair will take place within the private suites and bungalows of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel from February 14-17, 2019. Felix LA will showcase a diverse selection of 38 forward-thinking exhibitors from across the globe, including galleries located in Europe, North America, China, South Africa and Australia.

Felix LA’s mission is to create an intimate fair experience that prioritizes connoisseurship, collaboration, and community. A return to the hotel fair format, in the spirit of the storied Gramercy International Los Angeles at the Chateau Marmont, Felix LA grants galleries an efficient exhibition opportunity while offering the city’s burgeoning collector-base intimate access and maximum flexibility. The informal setting will allow for more extended conversations among collectors, dealers, and artists alike.

Felix LA was co-founded by Dean Valentine along with brothers Al Moran and Mills Moran. The trio have been longtime members of the cultural landscape at large and look forward to bringing their community-driven approach to their homegrown, hometown fair.

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

Desert X is a site-specific, contemporary art exhibition that is held in the Coachella Valley in Southern California. The inaugural Desert X was held from February 25 to April 30, 2017; Desert X 2019, February 9 to April 21.

The artists included in the 2019 edition include Iván Argote, Nancy Baker Cahill, Cecilia Bengolea, Pia Camil, John Gerrard, Julian Hoeber, Jenny Holzer, Iman Issa, Mary Kelly, Armando Lerma, Eric N. Mack, Cinthia Marcelle, Postcommodity, Cara Romero, Sterling Ruby, Kathleen Ryan, Gary Simmons, Superflex, Chris Taylor & Steve Badgett.

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

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

You’re invited to the “Dogtown – The Legend of The Z-Boys” book-signing event with C.R. Stecyk III, Glen E. Friedman, Jeff Ho, Peggy Oki, Tony Alva and others at Pizzanista in downtown Los Angeles on May 1, 2019. Friedman has put some serious work into making this new expanded edition of the Dogtown book bigger and better and it has more in it than ever, with incredible redesign and a surprise or two for you. 

DOGTOWN: THE LEGEND OF THE Z-BOYS BY C.R. STECYK III AND GLEN E. FRIEDMAN is due to be released on July 1, 2019 through Akashic Books. You can pre-order your copy now here. Copies will ship on or before June 15.

DogTown: The Legend of the Z-Boys 

In the early 1970s, the sport of skateboarding had so waned from its popularity in the 1960s that it was virtually nonexistent. In the DogTown area of west Los Angeles, a group of young surfers known as the Zephyr Team (Z-Boys) was experimenting with new and radical moves and styles in the water, which they translated to the street. When competition skateboarding returned in 1975, the Z-Boys turned the skating world on its head. DogTown: The Legend of the Z-Boys is a truly fascinating case study of how an underground sport ascended in the world. These are the stories and images of a time that not only inspired a generation but changed the face of the sport forever.

This volume has been described as “the DogTown textbook” and an indispensable companion piece to the Sony Pictures Classics film Dogtown and Z-Boys. Now spanning 1975–1985 and beyond, the first section of the book includes the best of the DogTown articles written and photographed by C.R. Stecyk III as they originally appeared in SkateBoarder Magazine. The second half compiles hundreds of skate images from the archives of Glen E. Friedman—many of which appear in the movie. (Stecyk and Friedman acted as executive producers and advisors for the film.)

The bigger, newly designed edition of this iconic skateboarding book, includes additional never-before-seen Glen E. Friedman photos and a new C.R. Stecyk III postscript.

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

“With her very first exhibition in Brussels (and incidentally in Europe) which is hosted at la Patinoire Royale — Galerie Valérie Bach, Gisela COLON rips apart the great white veil of our contemporary art world with her, let’s face it, truly groundbreaking works. These extraordinary iridescent curved shapes, made of her own take on blow-molded acrylic techniques, reveal tangible futuristic anticipation, toying with our visual perception using the very properties of light. Here the infinite variations of light and color show themselves as one moves around, depending on the angle from which it is viewed. The eye is delighted while all our certitudes come crumbling down.
Gisela’s brilliant production has grown from the crossover between Californian minimalism and the kinetic art of the 60’s, taking shape in Los Angeles where she lives and works.Her work resides precisely within this research of pure shape and color, perfectly aligned with the «iLight and Space Movement » started in the early sixties by West Coast artists such as James Turell, Bruce Nauman, Craig Kauffman, Robert Irwin, etc. Their artworks were then (and continue to be) true to their own nature, perfectly autonomous objects, inspired by the light and colors unique to Southern California: these shapes appear in all their glory, in their absolute purest form, without engaging the viewer’s own subjectivity.
Gisela’s works, on the other hand, call upon the involvement of the viewer. Through this shift she engages the optical kinetic art of the sixties, directly inspired by Carlos Cruz Diez (to whom the Galerie Valérie Bach concomitantly devotes a significant retrospective, precisely due to his proximity with Gisela’s work which she acknowledges and claims as her own heritage), Horacio Garcia Rossi, Gregorio Vardanega, Karl Gerstner, Antonio Asis, Rafael Soto or Julio Le Parc.”

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

CURATORS’S POINT OF VIEW
(MICHEL GAUTHIER AND ARNAULD PIERRE)

“While the name Vasarely evokes colourful images playing with optic illusion, the whole scope and logic of this artist’s work remains little known more than twenty years after his death. The last major Parisian exhibition devoted to the artist dates back to 1963 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. This new retrospective at the Centre Pompidou explores his work from all its facets, rather than focusing only on the aspects which would conform to the popular concept of Great Art. Through an outstanding collection of nearly eighty paintings, an architectural integration and a wide selection of multiples, discover a work which rose, like the DS or Pierre Paulin’s armchairs, to the status of the great technical and cultural mythologies of its time.
This exhibition reveals Vasarely’s ‘software’, which holds a dual dimension. As the heir of the historical avant-gardists of the early half of the 20th century, in particular Bauhaus, Victor Vasarely launched into a radical undertaking to secularise art. In other words, he was committed to defining ways of designing and producing which would enable widespread social distribution of art. At the same time, and this is the other major aspect of his work, Vasarely developed forms which caught the eye to a further degree than abstract painting in general and thus marked history as the inventor of kinetic art. The exhibition invites you to discover each of these aspects and how they are linked

Vasarely studied in Budapest alongside the historical avant-gardists. His master, Sandor Bortnyik, was one of the major figures of Hungarian modernism. The first section of the exhibition reveals a Vasarely adapting the language of modernism to advertising and laying the foundations, in the 1930s and through his advertising works and various studies, of his creations to come. The Zèbres series is a striking precedent to the optical-kinetic forms which were to emerge two decades later.

Some twenty paintings, some from private collections and exhibited here for the first time in more than fifty years, demonstrate the uniqueness of Vasarely’s brand of abstraction in the late 1940s. This abstraction is based on the observation of reality, nature and architecture. Particular emphasis is placed on a dozen paintings in the Gordes-Cristal series. In 1948, the artist visited Gordes for the first time, and under the Provence sun, he made a decisive discovery for the development of his work, i.e. the angular geometry of the site and the powerful contrasts of shadow and light which provoked optical illusions and destabilised vision. Crystal, with its complex effects of reflection, transparency and blurred planes, became a model for his abstraction. The instability of these crystalline forms, the first explorations of an elementary visual language and the desire to bring movement to inert forms of abstraction combined to pave the way for the impressive aesthetic revolution which was to be the birth of optical-kinetic art in the mid-1950s, renamed Op Art in the following decade. By reducing his language to black and white, Vasarely thus defined a vocabulary which transports the eye to the dynamic world of waves and particles. The exhibition presents some major works which seem to vibrate or flash. In these works, a shape captured by the eye is endlessly transformed in other shapes.” …

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

From Discovery to Rediscovery

CONTEMPORARY SINCE 1968

Founded in 1968, Art Brussels is one of the most renowned contemporary art fairs in Europe and a must-see in the international art calendar.

Art Brussels represents a unique opportunity to discover the richness of the artistic and cultural scene of the European capital, and attracts a growing number of collectors, gallerists, curators, art professionals and art lovers from around the world. Every year in April, the fair welcomes around 25,000 visitors. Since 2016, Art Brussels takes place in the emblematic building of Tour & Taxis, in the heart of Brussels. In 2019, Art Brussels has launched a new and diverse INVITED section, supporting emerging galleries or art spaces that are transcending the typical gallery format and that have never before participated in the fair.

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

“Xavier Hufkens presents an ensemble of sculptures, paintings and video work by the American artist Paul McCarthy, which will be displayed across both gallery spaces. The exhibition comprises works from three of McCarthy’s most important video performance installations of the last two decades: CP (Caribbean Pirates), WS (White Snow) and CSSC (Coach Stage Stage Coach) / DADDA (Donald And Daisy Duck Adventure).

From Caribbean Pirates, McCarthy presents new iterations of three seminal works: Captain Ballsack (2001–2018), Piggies (2006–2018) and Paula Jones(2007–2018). This sprawling opus, which was inspired by the Pirates of the Caribbean amusement park ride at Disneyland, ultimately led to a spin-off project entitled Pig Island. The latter is the fictitious name given to a large object strewn stage in the middle of McCarthy’s studio, upon which the artist would assemble sculptures on the themes of pirates and pigs (or mutations thereof). Conceived as an artwork from the outset, it functioned as the wellspring for a series of works in which political figures, such as George W. Bush, engage in perverse sexual practices. Both Paula Jones and Piggies are products of this island, so to speak, whereas Captain Ballsack is an iconic figure from the overarching CP narrative, and whose origins can be traced back to the drawing Poop Deck (2001). Previously seen in their raw original states or cast into materials such as fibreglass and stainless steel, McCarthy reinvigorates these pivotal works in a blast of lurid technicolour. The smooth and diffuse painted finishes are unique: sprayed by the artist himself and manipulated by hand.”

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