Michelle Obama hosted a concert this morning at the Pittsburgh Creative & Performing Arts School for its students and the spouses of international leaders deliberating at the G-20 economic summit. She gave an 11-minute address about the arts as a prelude to performances by guests Sara Bareilles, Yo-Yo Ma and […]
Tag: LA Times
Allen Ruppersberg: The art of give and take
Installation View at SMMoA Allen Ruppersberg, “Poems and Placemats,” 2008, 48 x48″ each, mixed media. Courtesy Margo Leavin Gallery. On the LA Times blog, Christopher Knight reports that Allen Ruppersberg’s show at the Santa Monica Museum of Art is surprisingingly poignant. “Using the span of human lifetimes, including his own, […]
Albert Contreras’s brush with the reductive
Albert Contreras, “Untitled.” In the LA Times David Pagel reports that 76-year-old Santa Monica painter Albert Contreras has cobbled together an unusual two-part career — interrupted by years as a city truck driver — that has just come full circle. “In the 1960s, Contreras made a name for himself as […]
Rob Zombie on painting: “I just do it to do it.”
“Drawing and painting are always one of my first loves — that’s what I have always done,” Halloween II (release date August 28) director Rob Zombie, a onetime painting student at Parsons School of Design, says. “That’s always been the thing that’s fallen away. Now it’s something I’ve gotten back […]
Art critic Christopher Knight wins LA Press Club award
LA Times art critic Christopher Knight just won a Los Angeles Press Club award for his review of the 2008 Bernini exhibition at the Getty Museum. Perhaps not accustomed to reading art criticism on a regular basis, the judges commented that the “crisp, clean words painted a picture in one�s […]
Joan Snyder: Fleshy physicality and broken-bones impact
In the LA Times art blog David Pagel reports that the six paintings and four prints in Snyder�s L.A. solo debut at SolwayJones Gallery are vintage Snyder. “Chewy clots of mismatched materials wrestled into abstract images that are lyrical without being lightweight, visceral without being heavy-handed. The fleshy physicality and […]
Shows I’d like to see: “Oranges and Sardines” at the Hammer
Curator Gary Garrels worked with six abstract painters�Mark Grotjahn, Wade Guyton, Mary Heilmann, Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl, and Christopher Wool�to select one of their own recent paintings as well as works by other artists who have influenced their thinking. The artist’s choices, which are presented in separate galleries, include […]
Four artists on Morandi: Irwin, Celmins, McCleary, Barth
In the LA Times Leah Ollman asks Robert Irwin, Veja Celmins, Dan McCleary and Uta Barth how Morandi’s paintings have influenced their work. Robert Irwin: We put on a Morandi show at Ferus. We were trying to explain to some people what a so-called abstract painting was about, and what […]
Craig Kauffman on paper
Craig Kauffman, said to be one of the most prominent and influential artists to have come out of the Los Angeles art scene of the 1960s, currently has a drawing retrospective at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena. In a 2001 NY Times review of a show at […]
Yamaguchi’s doe-eyed children
In the LA Times, David Pagel reports that Ai Yamaguchi’s delicately painted little girls at Roberts & Tilton are too melancholic for easy consumption. “On the stark white walls of the pristine gallery, Yamaguchi has hung eight curiously shaped panels that resemble puffs of smoke or clouds. Two larger ones […]
