The Permanent Exhibition of Art of the Commanderie de Peyrassol

“Philippe Austruy wished to present works of art protected from badweather. In the beginning, he planned on building only a small chapel to put on display a work of Franck Stella that he particularly liked and which was stored in a small space in the winery. During a lunch, Diane and Bernar Venet suggested him to go further and create a permanent collection. This new artistic entity became an extension of Valerie Bach gallery « La Patinoire Royale », in Brussels.

In one piece, the permanent exhibition of Peyrassol is a vast room with natural lighting coming from the skylight. Its modern design was a real challenge: how to integrate modern architecture at a large scale without removing the intemporality of the historical buildings?

To solve the equation, the new space should not be perceived as a singular separated identity but needed to be designed as a covered space inside the path of the monumental sculpture, a giant hallway where people can wander inside, amid the vines. Constructed like a sculpture, the building breaks the code of classic architecture. There are no doors, no windows, no roof, inspired by the movement of Land Art.
On one side, you will find a monumental mural and on the other side a scree, typical of Peyrassol, these two walls are connected by a gigantic shape of weathering steel, above the ground, highlighting its shape by its horizontality.” – per website

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Library of Ideas: A Course by Charles Gaines, Part One

“Charles Gaines, LA-based conceptual artist, faculty member at CalArts, and recipient of the 2019 Edward MacDowell Medal, will transform the Book & Printed Matter Lab at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles into his classroom. On the occasion of ‘Charles Gaines. Palm Trees and Other Works,’ he will conduct a ten-part lecture series on the tenets of aesthetics and critical theory in art, bringing his mastery of the field into a public setting.

The lecture series is free to attend, however, reservations are required and space is limited. Attendees will be emailed 72 hours in advance of the lecture and must confirm their space. Any unconfirmed spaces will be released to the waitlist.” – per website

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

“At this stage, I have been writing and thinking about what’s going on without trying to control it,” Martínez Celaya says standing with half his body facing the painting and the other toward me. He contends that “The Promise of the Most Whole” and much of the works in “The Tears of Things,” are more focused on “the land, and more about journey, and risk and transformation,” while the sea was a dominant motif in “The Mariner’s Meadow” at Blain|Southern, London. Presenting the roaring ocean in shades of gold, the painting titled “The Second Sign,” is a continuation in the artist’s preoccupation with gold. The terrain has shifted from the water to land which sparks the question for Martínez Celaya, “what happens when the entire landscape that you are engaging with seems to be transforming into gold?” The color gold can be considered an allegory for painting- the presentation of a shining, glistening surface that has risen from the ashes to serve as a beacon. However, there is a tension between the subject and the artifice of the surface. In a conscious decision, Martínez Celaya crudely renders the gold to suggest gold but also acknowledge the crudely painted paint.

While writing is an integral part of his artistic practice, the subjects of each painting are rendered without reference to any source, just as a writer doesn’t begin in pencil to trace over selected words in ink. The paintings undergo a revision just like a piece of writing. “There’s a lot of writing in my notebooks and I have this desire and hope that there will be a lot of text in these paintings when they’re done,” he says while mixing more auburn shades into the golden trunk. “I still haven’t figured out why it is that text appears sometimes early and sometimes later,” he explains. The paintings are often inscribed with words and this weight makes them feel like poems as Martínez Celaya suggests, “I think that sometimes it feels as if the paintings are poems anyway because the aspect of space between words is so important to them that they should be considered poems in themselves.” The narrative of his poetic paintings often shifts depending on who is reading the works, especially because Martínez Celaya’s personal story references turbulent cultural climates in his native Cuba and upbringing in Spain and Puerto Rico. To achieve autonomy from his work so that they are not dependent on his story and symbols, the artist commits to making his actions faithful. Painted in the artist’s light cursive hand, the same message appears on the highest point of the wall, looking down onto the studio space below. Looking up at the message the artist explains that “the idea is that your actions and your words will be the same. If I am saying something to you and the moment you leave I am acting completely different, then that’s kind of a lie that not only destroys you as an individual but destroys you as an artist.” Pointing to a table on the opposite end of the gallery, the artist refers to the photographs and objects placed along the wall. “None of those things are mementos,” he insists. “They look like they are, but they are not. They’re all rulers by which I measure my behavior,” he states after smudging the canvas with a blue cloth.” – per website

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“Confronting insecurities and fears, embracing shortcomings, and contending with the burden of one’s own identity and truth are of paramount importance for becoming more concretely formed. My current studio practice maintains this endeavor: cutting through, digging out, excavating, laying bare wounds—past and present, temporary and permanent—on the surfaces of paper and canvas. 
—Nathaniel Mary Quinn

“Gagosian is pleased to present Hollow and Cut, new paintings and works on paper by Nathaniel Mary Quinn. This is his first exhibition with the gallery.

Quinn’s composite portraits probe the relationship between perception and memory. He rejects the notion of documentary portraiture; instead of depicting physical likeness, he illuminates subconscious aspects of the human psyche, coaxing forth manifestations of innate and repressed emotions.

While Quinn’s portraits might resemble collages, they are actually rendered by hand with oil paint, charcoal, gouache, oil stick, pastels, and gold leaf. He begins with a vision—a vague flash of a face from his past—that he feels viscerally compelled to translate into reality. To do so, he collects images from fashion magazines, newspapers, advertising, and comics, reconceptualizing the snippets as purely aesthetic imagery before methodically redrawing and repainting each one. In an impulse akin to the parlor game cadavre exquis, Quinn covers parts of his own composition with construction paper as he goes, so that no existing section influences the appearance of the next. Only when the work is complete does he remove the paper—revealing a visually disjointed yet psychologically unified portrait or figure whose genesis echoes the extemporaneity of human memory.” – per website

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Larry Bell, Bill and Coo at MOCA’s Nest (2019)

“MOCA presents an outdoor installation by Los Angeles-based artist Larry Bell. Commissioned specifically for the Sculpture Plaza at MOCA Grand Avenue, Bill and Coo at MOCA’s Nest is a signature, space-defining work, at once creating a public art space while also echoing and highlighting the geometric forms that comprise the museum’s Pritzker Prize winning Arata Isozaki-designed building. This installation was generously gifted by MOCA Trustee Carol Appel, who has served on the board for four years, and her husband David Appel.

Bill and Coo at MOCA’s Nest extends Bell’s decades of experimentation with glass. With this work, the pioneering artist long associated with California’s Light and Space movement juxtaposes luminous reds in various saturations, the shades of which are lyrically called habanero, cerise, hibiscus, and carmine. The title refers to the protagonists of 1948’s Bill and Coo, a peculiar and delightful film whose cast is made up entirely of trained birds. The names of the film’s titular lovebirds were in turn drawn from an old-fashioned way to refer to the flirtations of young lovers: within the space of the Sculpture Plaza, a concave hollow defined by the surrounding forms of Isozaki’s architecture, the pair “bill and coo” while nestled in their home in the nest.

This sculpture is the seventh work by Bell to enter the museum’s permanent collection, underscoring MOCA’s commitment to collecting Los Angeles-based artists in depth and joining a rich array of works in MOCA’s collection by other artists associated with the Light and Space movement such as Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, and James Turrell. MOCA’s holdings by Bell include sculptures, drawings, and mixed media works, but Bill and Coo at MOCA’s Nest is the first commissioned work by the artist to enter the collection, and the largest and most significant of his work within the collection.”

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“On October 10, UTA Artist Space and Carpenters Workshop Gallery hosted a conversation between Verhoeven Twins and Studio Drift, moderated by LALA Editor-In-Chief Jessica Kantor, ahead of their collaborative exhibition “Dark Fantasy.”  Curated by Ashlee Harrison and Natalie Kovacs, the exhibition marks the West Coast expansion of Carpenters Workshop Gallery. The blue chip design gallery treated it like a lavish housewarming party with a star-gazing finish at Eugenio Lopez’s compound.” – per website

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“In Point of View, thirteen artists explore how new perspectives expand our concept of the world. Through their art, they play with the definition of perspective, flip its rules, and present abstract and literal forms. Though the methods and media are all different, each artwork opens us up to the views of others.” – per website

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“Originated by The Broad, Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again is the largest exhibition to date of internationally acclaimed artist Shirin Neshat’s approximately 30-year career. Taking its title from a poem by Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, the exhibition (which presents over 230 photographs and eight immersive video installations works) offers a rare glimpse into the evolution of Neshat’s artistic journey as she explores topics of exile, displacement, and identity with beauty, dynamic formal invention, and poetic grace. Beginning with her early photograph series, Women of Allah, the exhibition also features iconic video works such as Rapture, Turbulent, and Passage, monumental photography installations including The Book of Kings and The Home of My Eyes, and Land of Dreams, a new, ambitious work encompassing a body of photographs and two videos that will make its global debut in the exhibition.

Throughout her career, Neshat has constructed poetic worlds in which women and men navigate narratives that mirror interior and political realities. Inside of and against these metaphoric worlds, Neshat studies the specifics of both individual and cultural gestures and poses, often assembling and interviewing real people who have lived through some of the most turbulent events of recent history, including the Green Movement in Iran and the Arab Spring in Egypt.

Neshat’s 2001 collaboration with composer Philip Glass, Passage, will act as a pivot in the exhibition from Neshat’s early, personal work made specifically about living outside of Iran during some of the most turbulent times in the country’s history to new bodies of work which reflect universally on seismic global political events such as 9/11, the Arab Spring, and the current xenophobia in the United States over immigration. Four galleries in the exhibition feature work never-before-seen in the United States, including a body of portraits made in Iran that Neshat has never shown publicly.” – per website

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

With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985

“With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 is the first full-scale scholarly survey of this groundbreaking American art movement, encompassing works in painting, sculpture, collage, ceramics, installation art, and performance documentation. Covering the years 1972 to 1985 and featuring approximately fifty artists from across the United States, the exhibition examines the Pattern and Decoration movement’s defiant embrace of forms traditionally coded as feminine, domestic, ornamental, or craft-based and thought to be categorically inferior to fine art. Pattern and Decoration artists gleaned motifs, color schemes, and materials from the decorative arts, freely appropriating floral, arabesque, and patchwork patterns and arranging them in intricate, almost dizzying, and sometimes purposefully gaudy designs. Their work across mediums pointedly evokes a pluralistic array of sources from Islamic architectural ornamentation to American quilts, wallpaper, Persian carpets, and domestic embroidery. Pattern and Decoration artists practiced a postmodernist art of appropriation borne of love for its sources rather than the cynical detachment that became de rigueur in the international art world of the 1980s. This exhibition traces the movement’s broad reach in postwar American art by including artists widely regarded as comprising the core of the movement, such as Valerie Jaudon, Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner, Kim MacConnel, and Miriam Schapiro; artists whose contributions to Pattern and Decoration have been underrecognized, such as Merion Estes, Dee Shapiro, Kendall Shaw, and Takako Yamaguchi; as well as artists who are not normally considered in the context of Pattern and Decoration, such as Emma Amos, Billy Al Bengston, Al Loving, and Betty Woodman. Though little studied today, the Pattern and Decoration movement was institutionally recognized, critically received, and commercially successful from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. The overwhelming preponderance of craft-based practices and unabashedly decorative sensibilities in art of the present-day point to an influential P&D legacy that is ripe for consideration.

With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 is organized by Anna Katz, Curator, with Rebecca Lowery, Assistant Curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.” – per website

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“ACID-FREE is pleased to announce the return of the Los Angeles Art Book Market & Bazaar, a three-day event produced by a programming committee of LA-based publishers, librarians, and curators, hosted by Blum & Poe Los Angeles.

Following the success of our inaugural Market in 2018 and our temporary installation at Frieze Los Angeles, join us November 1-3 for the 2019 Acid-Free Los Angeles Art Book Market. A-F ⅠⅠ provides a platform for 90+ West Coast and international exhibitors presenting new publications and projects alongside film programming by Now Instant Image Hall and La Collectionneuse, an archival exhibition curated by Guadalupe Rosales, music by Pacoima Techno, and a full schedule of ongoing discursive programming and signings.

This year will also premiere The Bazaar, a new outdoor book publishing-adjacent area including presentations by Artists 4 Democracy, High Desert Test Sites, Virgil Normal, and more.” – per website

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