“The quotations in my works are like robbers lying in ambush on the highway to attack the passerby with weapons drawn and rob him of his conviction.” – Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” 1928

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to announce appear to use, a solo exhibition of Haim Steinbach, on view from March 16 – May 18, 2019 at the gallery’s Los Angeles location. For his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in over a decade, Steinbach will present a new body of work including objects, sculptures, site-specific installations, wall paintings and language-based work.

Since the 1970s Haim Steinbach has developed a widely influential practice that redefines structures of presentation and investigates the relationship between object and art, object and architecture, culture and language, and collection and display. With nods to the tradition of Duchamp and the conceptual logic of Minimalism, Steinbach’s work redefines the status of the object in art.

In this new exhibition Steinbach builds a site-specific architecture, reconstructing the gallery’s space. Using exposed building materials, such as free-standing stud walls and plasterboard, the artist invites the viewer to rethink the ways in which architecture influences our understanding of object, context, surface, the human body, and the relationships forged between them. Steinbach utilizes these materials as both language and form, engendering an experience where the viewer is invited to navigate the space; raising an awareness to how the body functions in its surroundings, while exploring rhythm, repetition and seriality.

Entering the gallery, the viewer first encounters two works that highlight the artist’s ongoing exploration of language, color and narrative. Untitled (Pantone 17-5641) features a tin box supporting a green rectangle. Display #103—the band if it is white and black the band has a green string includes the quote from Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons.” The quote is integrated into a wall, an architectural construct. It faces the tin box that sits in a handcrafted wooden box.

Jarvis Boyland – Flaunt

April 09, 2019 in Boyland, Flaunt, News

Q&A | JARVIS BOYLAND AT KOHN GALLERY

By Christopher Andrew Armstrong

Growing up in the South isn’t easy. Not only do you have to deal with the overbearing humidity during the summers, but there’s also the sea of neighboring red states which blanket the United States map each election cycle, the conservative attitudes polluting a majority of its residents, and, of course, the reality of the South’s ugly history which you must confront each time you’re walking down the street and see a Confederate flag posted on a neighbor’s porch. The burdens of living there are even heavier when you’re a person of color, or, heaven forbid, your sexuality is anything other than hetero. Jarvis Boyland, an emerging black, queer artist from Memphis, Tennessee, currently based in Chicago, experienced these burdens throughout his childhood. Instead of allowing the discomfort of his background and surroundings to overwhelm him, he’s using them as catalysts for his work.

Boyland’s most outstanding pieces focus on intimate portraits of queer, black men in the comfort of domestic settings, free from the prejudices which follow them throughout their life. Although relaxed, by deconstructing their anxieties, the men are inherently defiant in their abode. On Saturday, April 6th, Kohn Gallery opened On Hold:, an exhibition, which, in conjunction with NY-based artist Heidi Hahn’s stellar show, Burn Out in Shredded Heaven, continues on until May 23rd. Flaunt had the lovely opportunity to chat with Boyland on his experiences growing up in the South, the inspiration behind his work, and the power behind portraiture.

Heidi Hahn Burn Out in Shredded Heaven
Opening April 6, 2019

Kohn Gallery is very pleased to announce its first solo exhibition by New York-based artist and painter Heidi Hahn, opening on April 6 and on view through May 23, 2019. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Hahn creates introspective paintings that engage with the female body. Her sumptuously atmospheric and layered application of paint, in conversation with art-historical traditions, draw the viewer into a psychological space that evokes our attachment to the female form and how that is processed through both traditional and contemporary readings of the male gaze. Hahn incites the sinuous lines of Edvard Munch, the soak-stained expressionism of Helen Frankenthaler, and therawsymbolismof late-Guston, all the while establishing a truly distinctive voice of today–aware of what came before, but also untethered to it. Gestural, fluid, and frequently spectral, Hahn’s works reframe and re-contextualize her subjects, exploring the ambiguous and shifting boundaries between public and private selves.

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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