California Dreamin’
OUR SAN FRANCISCO HIGHLIGHTS
Install view of Martine Gutierrez “Half Breed”, 2021. Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery.
49 Geary Street, 4th Floor, SF | until January 29, 2022
The Berkeley native, Martine Gutierrez, opened her exhibition “Half Breed” earlier this year to much critical acclaim. Working as both the sitter and photographer, Gutierrez explores the depth of her own identity in a series of pop-influenced compositions, recreating fashion spreads to riffs off of advertising tropes.
Peter Saul, View of San Francisco, 1979, Acrylic on canvas. 67 ½ x 131 inches © 2021 Peter Saul / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy the artist, Venus Over Manhattan, New York, and Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco.
10 Hawthorne Street, SF | January 13 – February 26, 2022
Peter Saul, whose exciting and turbulent visions of American culture have shocked viewers for nearly sixty years, was actually born and raised in San Francisco! This important exhibition is a homecoming of sorts and brings together a major group of works depicting our city, including five monumental paintings, and pieces on loan from the Di Rosa and FAMSF collections.
Wangechi Mutu, Eve, 2011, print made with archival pigments on fine art rag paper. McEvoy Family Collection. Courtesy of the Artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles; Carolyn Drake, Untitled from the series Knit Club, 2019, pigment print. © Carolyn Drake / Courtesy of the artist
1150 25th Street, Building B, SF | January 14–April 30, 2022
Image Gardeners is an art historical excavation of the McEvoy Collection’s trove of portrait photography, bringing together female and non-binary artists across generations who have been influenced by one another’s practice. Highlights are the self-portraits by Diane Arbus and Vivian Maier, and the barrier-breaking collage practice of Lorna Simpson, Stephanie Syjuco and Wangechi Mutu. This heady exhibition is sure to challenge and raise important questions for the viewer!
Installation view of “Hayal Pozanti: Conversational Spirits I.” Courtesy of Jessica Silverman, San Francisco.
621 Grant Ave, SF | January 15 – February 26, 2022
You may recognize Turkish born artist, Hayal Pozanti’s glyph-like abstractions from her large scale mural at the Mid-Manhattan Public Library unveiled in 2021. But if you weren’t able to make it to NYC, Pozanti has opened a solo exhibition in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Here the richly colored paintings continue to embrace her invented visual language Instant Paradise, where the 31 “letters” are meant to express her innermost thoughts and emotions.
Exhibition view: “Tauba Auerbach — S v Z” at SFMOMA with the mural “2020” along the curved wall.Photo: Matthew Millman Photography
151 Third Street, SF | December 18 – May 1, 2022
Another exciting return for a native San Franciscan, Tauba Auerbach has just opened a large retrospective that explores the many mediums in their practice, from a fully functional organ like instrument to Auerbach’s iconic Fold paintings. Titled S v Z, and curated by SFMOMA’s Joseph Becker and Jenny Gheith, this show captures the creative genius of Auerbach and is a must see when in town.
Artist Billie Zangewa with her exhibition, ‘Thread for a Web Begun’ at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco. Photography: Eric Carmichael
685 Mission St, SF | Until February 27, 2022
A highlight of 2021 for LSSAA was hearing Billie Zangewa talk at the opening of her exhibition “Thread for a Web Begun”. The delicate and powerful beauty of Zangewa’s labour intensive silk works are mind blowing in person. Don’t be deceived by the painterly like quality of her work, get up close and you will get an intimate look at how each scrap of silk is carefully sewn together.
Satyavati and Shalya, approx. 1936–1940, by Ida Bagus Putu Taman (Indonesian, 1873–1953). Sandalwood. Asian Art Museum, Vicki Baum Bali Collection; Gift of Wolfgang Lert and Ruth Clark Lert, 1992.43. Photograph © Asian Art Museum. Musical Bodies: Banjo, 1999, by Wilson Shieh (Chinese, b. 1970). Ink and color on gold paper. Asian Art Museum, Gift of the Yiqingzhai Collection, 2005.77. © Wilson Shieh. Photograph © Asian Art Museum.
200 Larkin St, SF | Opening January 21, 2022
We are very excited by the growing trend of museums that are excavating their own collections under thought provoking lenses. At the Asian Art museum, curators Maya Hara, Shinhwa Koo, Joanna Lee, and Megan Merritt have placed artworks from varied cultures and periods to show how gender — whether fluid or fixed, divine or sensual, subversive or orthodox — is constructed, performed, and depicted throughout Asian art in provocative and inspiring ways.
Bruce Nauman, Studies for Holograms, (a) pinched lips, 1970. Screenprint. Gift of the Marmor Foundation © 2021 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
328 Lomita Drive, Palo Alto | Opening January 12, 2022
Famed conceptual artist Bruce Nauman is highlighted at Stanford’s Cantor Center with a small exhibition dedicated to his silkscreen series, Studies for Holograms from 1970. These screenprints depict the lower half of the artist’s face with exaggerated expressions. The humorous images speak to Nauman’s exploration of the human body as an art medium and endless source of inspiration for his practice.
OUR LOS ANGELES HIGHLIGHTS
Eddie Martinez, Pigeon Sweat, 2021, oil, acrylic, spray paint and artist’s tape on canvas, © 2021 Eddie Martinez / Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo
2727 S. La Cienega Blvd, LA | January 15 – February 26, 2022
We love Eddie Martinez’s abstract meets street art meets cartoonish figurative style. This new exhibition of large-scale paintings aims to capture snippets of the artist’s life as it happens— vines crawling up a wall to toys (belonging to his toddler Arthur) littering the floor.
Mika Tajima: Regulation, installation view, Simon Lee Gallery, London 2021. Photo: Ben Westoby.
1201 South La Brea Ave, LA | January 22 – March 12, 2022
Leave it to Los Angeles native, Mika Tajima, to create an exhibition that features jet nozzles blowing air in acupoint patterns. Noted for the conceptual weight of her practice, Tajima also mesmerizes with her highly polished Art d’Ameublement series in this newest show. Depicted here, the artist uses spray paint to create vivid color gradients on the back of a plexi-box, resulting in beautiful and depthless meditations on color and sense of place.
Jonas Wood, Shio with Three Dogs, 2020, oil and acrylic on canvas, 76 x 74 inches (193 x 188 cm), Photo: Marten Elder.
5130 West Edgewood Place, LA | January 22 – March 5, 2022
Calling all pattern lovers! Born in Boston in 1977, the LA transplant Jonas Wood utilizes a mixture of collaged studies, drawings, and photographs to create his pattern dense, flattened landscapes and still lifes. His newest exhibition “Plants & Animals” will continue his practice of colorful paintings that draw on the influence of David Hockney, Henri Matisse, and Alex Katz.
Heidi Hahn in her studio. Image courtesy of the artist and Kohn Gallery.
1227 North Highland Ave, LA | February 2022
The young New York-based artist Heidi Hahn was born and raised in Los Angeles and is known for her haunting paintings of the female figure. Hahn brings together many art historical references from the sinuous lines of Edvard Munch to the soak-stained palette of Helen Frankenthaler, but does so without losing her own distinct voice.
Jeff Wall, Sunseeker, 2021, Inkjet print, 45 ¼ × 52 ⅛ inches (115 × 132.5 cm), edition of 4 + 1 AP © Jeff Wall.
456 North Camden Drive, LA | January 13–March 5, 2022
Wall, born in 1946 in Vancouver, Canada, became involved with photography in the 1960s—the heyday of Conceptual art—and by the mid-1970s he had broken into a new medium for photography with backlit color transparencies. In his new exhibition Wall presents a group of “near documentary” realist pictures, one of the principal directions his work has taken over the last several decades.
Gary Simmons, Rogue Wave, 2021, Oil and cold wax on canvas, 274.3 x 304.8 cm / 108 x 120 in © Gary Simmons. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Jeff McLane
901 East 3rd Street, LA | February 17 – May 22, 2022
For over 30 years, Gary Simmons’ multidisciplinary practice has probed American history to address issues of personal and collective memory, race, identity, politics, and social inequality. This exhibition will showcase the entire breadth of Simmons’ practice from his “erasure paintings” to sculpture, as well as large scale installation. Simmons has recreated his iconic ‘Black Ark,’ installation, which originally debuted for Prospect New Orleans in 2014.
Noah Davis, Casting Call, 2008. Image courtesy the Underground Museum.
3508 W Washington Boulevard, LA | January 12–September 30, 2022
Born in Seattle, Washington, Noah Davis (1983–2015) studied painting at The Cooper Union School of Art in New York before moving to Los Angeles, where, in 2012, he founded the Underground Museum with his wife and fellow artist, Karon Davis. The Museum is having a homecoming for its founder with a solo exhibition curated by Helen Molesworth and Justen Leroy. The show will celebrate Davis’ practice, which was dedicated to painting “Black people in normal scenarios,” with the artist’s characteristic tranquil and intimate atmospheres.
“Black American Portraits” installation image, LACMA. Photograph by Michael Juliano.
5905 Wilshire Boulevard, LA | Until April 17, 2022
Through 140 portraits of Black Americans dating back to 1800 up to the present day, this exhibition is “dedicated to showcasing Black subjects as powerful, beautiful and complex.” Not to be missed!
Jennifer Packer, Interior, 2021, oil on canvas (detail). Photo by Elisa Wouk Almino/Hyperallergic.
250 South Grand Avenue, LA | Until February 20, 2022
Jennifer Packer, a MFA Yale graduate, is an American painter living and working in New York City. This exhibition, “Every Shut Eye Ain’t Sleep,” explores two of Packer’s defining bodies of work: her ethereal portraits of friends and colleagues and the symbol heavy floral still lifes.
