CONTINUING AND RECOMMENDED EXHIBITIONS
July/August, 2006
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Like they say in Jewish vaudeville: "What's not to like...?" That can most certainly be said of “David Hockney Portraits,” the first large museum exhibition devoted solely to Hockney’s portraiture, one of the most popular if not conceptually challenging of his styles. Here is a draftsman who can capture/summarize reality with such ease that it almost looks decorative. He lives a life that intersects with seemingly all of culture's literati, appealing to the voyeur in us. On top of which he possesses the ability to yoke pure form to an undertow of emotional mood. The fun part is that this concentrated dose permits us to see that his portraits actually vary widely in style, reflecting whatever compositional or technical goal Hockney is working out. Images of his young lover at the pool are broad, flat areas of Palm Springs pastel color. "Mum" (the artist's mother) is a study in van Gogh-like texture, in which painter's paint moves across the canvas in thick impasto. In this mega-mug affair you will see Hockney capturing intimate subjects--friends, family, lovers, patrons, critics, and even himself--as well as all manner of wannabes and movers and shakers who have hung onto the artist in his sustained rise to star status (Los Angeles County Museum of Art [LACMA], West Hollywood).
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 David Hockney, "Self Portrait," oil and charcoal on canvas, 76 x 22 1/2" on 5 panels. |
 Kehinde Wiley, "St. John the Baptist II," 2006, oil on canvas, 8' x 6' . |
Kehinde Wiley's portraits of black men are often based on images and poses from Renaissance artists coupled with baroque decorative patterns. His current exhibition is titled "Columbus" because Wiley based his models’ poses on specific works in the Columbus (Ohio) Museum's collection, but his subjects’ dress and attitude are entirely modern. The installation resembles a museum show where the walls are painted and wallpapered, the floor carpeted, and the works hung in the midst of wooden decor. The traditional setting of the works provides obvious counterpoint to the images of the young men who, depicted as they are in blue jeans, baseball caps and untied sneakers, speak to contemporary issues.
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| When planning his work and selecting his models, Wiley often invites them to his studio for them to choose a painting or pose that they would like to be painted in. The large-scale works here convey a striking presence, perhaps heightened by this aspect of collaboration between sitter and painter (Roberts & Tilton, West Hollywood). |
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Jorge Marin’s new work is his most interesting to date because he relies less on his ability to make sensuous, gorgeous figurative objects and turns instead to a provocative mixture of abstract figuration and ancient Olmec styles of representing the human form. There are twelve figures massed together, each with the broad cheeks, short neck and handsome features typical of the Olmec and Mayans. Each figure has its own headdress, each has their eyes barely closed and lips slightly parted, so that they seem personages or beings recalled from the ancient Meso American past (Couturier Gallery, West Hollywood).
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Roe Ethridge is an observer. He creates stunning, if ultra safe chromogenic prints that record his travels in Los Angeles as he prepped for this first west coast show. The process is very deliberate and directorial in the filmic sense—carefully, even beautifully staged. As such, the images are circuitous signifiers of what it means to live 'round these parts. In an image of a decaying apple next to a barely visible bush of flowering plants, if the message of a contemporary L.A. "vanitas" were not clear enough, Ethridge tosses in an ashtray overflowing with used and noxious cigarette butts. There is exotica such as the redhead smoking a water pipe, and many portraits (one of a cop) that come across as 1950s and ‘60s era cinema stills (Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills).
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Kristen Morgin's latest set of sculptures are simply amazing. Her play with scale makes the objects she fashions out of wood, unfired clay and various glues into dilapidated, eerie and slightly scary dopplegangers of the real things. Aside from the sense of imminent collapse and decay that these sculptures elicit in a viewer, there is a sly sense of humor at work. Morgin's "Topolino" car lays out like the evening sky of T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". Her "Carousel Horses" are both a majestic residue drawn from memory and an unsettling deterioration of physical matter (Marc Selwyn Gallery, West Hollywood).
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 Kristen Morgin, "Topolino," 2003, wood, unfired clay, paint, wire. |
 Roger Ballen, "Puppies in Fishtanks," 2000, silver gelatin print, 16 1/2 x 16". |
If you want to make an argument for never, ever using a digital camera, go see these drop dead gorgeous, sonorously poetic silver gelatin prints by Roger Ballen. These images are funny and grotesquely pretty at once. There is a sullied little boy wearing a mask that’s all askew, framed by abject walls, who peers out as if we disturbed his play. A fellow with an oversized head and gruff workman's features, peers at two tiny cages in which puppy bulldogs are confined. All the photographs have this sense of capturing the bizarre poetry of situations and people that the naked eye would pass over as not more than scruffy (Fahey Klein Gallery, West Hollywood).
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You can talk and talk about what it is that makes Los Angeles so strange, and you can mention the gap between the real and simulated that pervades and defines this city. We have all heard the cliché that the perfect metaphor for this city and its odd life is the car. We wear our cars as status, and the streets they travel on spread us out so that we preen and pose but never actually touch. In a drop dead gorgeous group of color photographs Adam Bartos, captures this city via its abandoned or stopped vehicles parked in underpasses or in front of bleak apartments. Bartos nails dead on the strange and distant silence in a city often full of sound and fury and signifying nothing in particular (Rose Gallery, Santa Monica).
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 Adam Bartos, "108 Paloma Avenue, Venice Beach," 2004, color photograph. |
 Carol Kaufman, "Untitled 1," 2006, colored pencil, graphite and gesso on panel, 10 x 13". |
Carol Kaufman creates her dense drawings with progressive overlays of mostly graphite and sometimes colored pencil. Viewed as a whole, they tend to look like a sheet of metal or lead, much like the graphite covered surfaces of Nancy Rubins. Upon closer perusal however, the overlays reveal themselves to be a dense network of differentiated marks crisscrossing the underlying support in a variety of directions. Kaufman's labor-intensive procedures gift the viewer with more than just a simple material transaction; the varying weights and tones of the marks conjure up landscapes and skyscapes, albeit as seen from a great distance (d.e.n. contemporary, Culver City).
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 Jose Bellver, "Untitled #2," 2004, acrylic on panel, 74 x 68". |
 Patsy Krebs, "The Hours: Nones", 2002, watercolor on paper, 22 x 22". |
| "The Hours: Abstract Watercolors" are Patsy Kreb’s poetic studies of light and atmosphere. These petite and sumptuous squares of watercolor that rise from the dark lower edges into an ever lighter atmosphere are condusive to contemplation and introspection. Named after the prayers that once marked off the devout's voyage through clock-less time, her use of subtle gradations of luminescent colors both evokes and projects states of consciousness. José Bellver’s intense bands of brilliant colors mark a dramatic contrast to Kreb’s muted hues. Though each painting focuses on a dominant color, underpaintings of gold, platinum, copper and silver pigments where the gesture is agitated and smoothed out successively in waves. The result is hovering Rothko-like forms and suggestive shapes that morph into a more structural study of the ebb and flow of tint (Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Santa Monica). |
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Light and Space artist Helen Pashgian’s copper and epoxy constructions capture and manipulate shifting realities. Evocative of Robert Irwin’s circular light pieces and Craig Kaufman’s plexiglas forms, mysterious floating circles and cylinders are animated and clarified through the viewer’s changing position. Technically impressive, they hover between being a mystifying perceptual puzzle and adamantly tangible object. These suspended forms, with their coppery shadows and pearlescent surfaces, project and recede into visual and meditative explorations. They force the viewer to pry into the myriad ways light emanates and reflects, free of literary or narrative translation (Patricia Faure Gallery, Santa Monica; see also Jeanne Willette’s review of the “Translucence” exhibition—Ed.).
Helen Pashgian, "Untitled," 2006, |
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