“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

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

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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Brave New Worlds: Exploration of Space invites you to enter the creative universes of five contemporary artists through sculpturally immersive installations. 

“Motivated by the legacies of Southern California as a place of artistic experimentation, a site for self-fulfillment, and a geographic zone of light and natural resources, these artists use their distinctive spatial languages to construct worlds that both challenge convention and ignite our senses. Projects include those by Kelly Akashi, Gisela Colon, Victoria Fu, Karen Lofgren, and Adee Roberson, with works that represent each artist’s understanding of our bodily connection to the world that surrounds us.:” – per website

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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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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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“The Fondation Marguerite et Aimé Maeght is France’s most important private art foundation and among the world-leading cultural institutions. It was created by Aimé and Marguerite Maeght, a visionary couple of publishers and art dealers, who represented and were friends with some of the most important artists of the 20th century, including Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Alberto Giacometti, Marc Chagall and many others. The Maeght Foundation was inaugurated on July 26, 1964, by Charles de Gaulle’s legendary Culture Minister André Malraux, who was a close friend of the Maeghts. The Foundation was France’s very first private art institution and was modeled after American institutions such as the Guggenheim Foundation, the Barnes Collection or Phillips Collection, which the Maeghts visited during their frequent trips to the United States in the 1950s.

Located near the famous village of Saint-Paul de Vence, 25 km from Nice, the Fondation Maeght receives more than 100,000 visitors every year in a unique architectural complex designed by Josep Lluís Sert, showing modern and contemporary art in all its diversity. Painters and sculptors worked in collaboration with the Catalan architect to create a place where art, nature and architecture blend in perfect harmony. The Foundation’s highlights include the Giacometti courtyard, featuring an exceptional ensemble of sculptures by the Swiss artist, the Miró labyrinth, a whimsical sculpture garden by the Catalan artist, monumental mural mosaics by Marc Chagall and Pierre Tal Coat, a pool designed by Georges Braque as well as a mechanical fountain designed by Pol Bury. Visitors can also enjoy the sculpture garden, with a rotating selection of works by Calder, Takis, Miro, Arp and other, two rooftop terraces with spectacular views, exhibition galleries hosting temporary exhibition as well as selected works from the permanent collection, a consecrated chapel, an art library and a gift and book shop.” – per website

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“Gagosian is pleased to present On the Eve of Never Leaving, new drawings and sculptures by Tatiana Trouvé. This is her first exhibition in Los Angeles.

In her large-scale drawings, cast and carved sculptures, and site-specific installations, Trouvé assesses the relationship between memory and material, pitting the ceaseless flow of time against the remarkable endurance of common objects. Combining fragments from both natural and constructed ecosystems, she creates hauntingly familiar realms in which forest, street, studio, and dream coalesce.

“On the Eve of Never Leaving” is a translation of “Na Véspera de Não Partir Nunca,” the title of a poem by Álvaro de Campos, one of the many heteronyms of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935). De Campos’s deeply melancholic writings often deal with notions of time and nothingness; they are hymns to the existential void. Trouvé—attuned to the ways in which journeys, physical and spiritual, can circle back on themselves—visually collapses past and future, echoing Pessoa’s linguistic paradoxes in uncanny material form.” per website

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“David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce GO HANG A SALAMI IM A LASAGNA HOG, an exhibition of new work by Calvin Marcus. The exhibition will be on view November 1, 2019 through January 11, 2020. An opening reception will be held on Friday, November 1 from 6:00 pm until 8:00 pm. 

GO HANG A SALAMI IM A LASAGNA HOG is Marcus’s second exhibition at the gallery and his most extensive and immersive in any venue to date. The gallery has become a “rabbit hole”: four bodies of work—including paintings, sculpture, and photography—unfold across its three exhibition spaces, with only one way in and one way out.

Unexpected shifts in scale, and the uncanniness these shifts engender, are a feature throughout Marcus’s practice and a pronounced theme for the show. This idea is initially raised in the first gallery, where a group of new paintings evoke watercolor pictures at a heroic scale. Whether a filmic depiction of a greyhound chasing a rabbit or a cartoonish rendering of a mortal forearm contorting to shake hands with the divine, these objects balance, with heady precariousness, the washy immediacy and insouciance of a hobbyist’s sketches with the incisive line, poised composition, and physical and psychological gravity of serious painting.

The series, which debuted at the 2019 Whitney Biennial, marks an important development from Marcus’s prior serial production. Each painting attempts to achieve complete autonomy within its edges and is a vignetted universe unto itself. Capturing dream-like visions and snapshots of the absurdity of contemporary life, the paintings depict diverse subjects: animals, humanoid figures, and interior and landscape-like spaces. These singular representations share a sensibility, at once idiosyncratic and disarming, that immediately draws the viewer into the mysteries of the quotidian world. While the pictures retain an inherent openness and recognizability and can often be described succinctly in a few phrases, the paintings belie a prickly, even anxious subjectivity, denying the simple readings they seem to proffer. They also refuse to settle into any one genre, typology, or even medium; amongst one another, the works’ painterliness is a function of formal qualities shared with drawing, sculpture, and installation-based practices. Each, therefore, poses—with Marcus’s humorous brand of surrealism—as many questions as answers.

A second gallery funnels inquiry into two objects, a sculpture lit from within and a color photograph, the only elements in an otherwise darkened space. Each inverts the expectations of the prior room, recalibrating perception again. The sculpture is a small-scale replica of the exterior of an East Los Angeles storefront. Existing somewhere between a memorial and a facsimile, the object expresses a remarkable degree of fidelity, maintaining a working ventilation fan and lights, and retaining a sense of life on its own. The photograph seemingly portrays similarly mundane stuff: a meal of asparagus on a plate. This image, reminiscent of Surrealist photography, flips conventions of representation as it deceives the viewer using only analog means.

The effects of exaggeration reach a crescendo in the final room, a terminus where four monumental paintings encircle the viewer. Each titled Stretch Sturgeon, the four pictures follow the same format: a five-by-twenty-two-foot canvas has been painted in watercolor washes of yellow and green to depict an impossibly extended fish. Recalling both naturalists’ field guide illustrations and the folk-art tradition of fishermen recording their haul, each painting also functions as surrogate human portraiture, as a trophy representing the angler who made this proverbial catch of a lifetime. Anomalous if not absurd, Marcus’s sturgeon stretch belief; indeed, they suggest tall tales by literal elongation. The length of each painting matches that of a novelty stretch limousine, and they follow a similar creation logic. The front and back (or head and tail) of a car bookend multiple middles of the same model, all welded together with custom touches to confirm seamless continuity. The resulting form is still at human scale, but beyond reason. Repeated four times, this expansion inches toward abstraction and the sublime.

As in much of his production, in GO HANG A SALAMI IM A LASAGNA HOG Marcus translates the vagaries of an interior, personal world into images and objects notable for their clarity and directness. By amplifying the peculiarities of his own vision and processes, he channels the contradictions of contemporary life. Through this, Marcus demonstrates how familiar and unfamiliar, large and small, and heroic and ordinary are no longer oppositional categories, but unified experiences in the collective awareness.

Calvin Marcus (b. 1988, San Francisco; lives and works in Los Angeles) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Power Station, Dallas (2017); Peep-Hole, Milan (2015); and Public Fiction, Los Angeles (2014). Recent group exhibitions include Whitney Biennial 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Trick Brain, Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon (2017); Inaugural exhibition, Syz Collection, Banque Syz, Geneva (2017); and High Anxiety: New Acquisitions, Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2016). His work is in the permanent collections of the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.” – per website

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

“ComplexCon is a catalyst for creative collaboration between the most influential people and the hottest brands that move our culture forward. This groundbreaking festival and exhibition brings together pop culture, music, art, food, sports, innovation, activism, and education. ComplexCon launched in Chicago this July and returns to Long Beach in November. Shop hundreds of exclusive releases from the most sought-after brands, catch stunning live performances, watch inspiring talks from the most influential minds in our culture, and experience the future through the most immersive and ambitious pop culture experience yet.” – per website

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