Winter In Sunny Los Angeles

LSS Art Advisory visited Art Los Angeles Contemporary (ALAC) 2017 once again this year.  The fair  focuses on emerging and mid-career artists from around the globe, with a special emphasis on Los Angeles based galleries and artists. Anchored by the fair, the last weekend in January is always bustling with excellent gallery and museum exhibitions.  Please read on for highlights from this year:

ALAC:

Art Los Angeles Contemporary Art Fair:

Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2017, which took place during the weekend of January 26 – 29, was one of the most exciting and stimulating to date. Exhibitors present some of the most unique, dynamic, recent works from the artists that they represent. Not only does ALAC offer access to some of the most sought after artwork of the time, the fair also hosts curated programming series of artist talks, panel discussions, film screenings, and performances. A few of our favorite artists featured at the fair include Imi Knoebel, Alexander Kroll, and Douglas Gordon.

MUSEUMS:

Kevin Beasley at The Hammer Museum:

Open through April 23rd  The Hammer Museum is hosting a show of Kevin Beasley’s  unique sculptural renderings, all of which are imbued with current social, political, and economical realities.  Beasley’s installation transforms the space into an elaborate environment influenced by a seemingly unlikely pairing: Bernini’s Baroque altarpiece in Saint Peter’s Basilica and an influential image of Black Panther Huey P. Newton.  As Senior Curator Anne Ellegood mentions, “Beasley’s interpretation is also a study in the integrity of form, proposing that the formal innovations of an earlier period in art might be enlivened not through mere mimicry but by altering the materials and subject matter,”.

Toba Khedoori at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

Toba Khedoori,the first major museum exhibition featuring new paintings and survey of the artist’s work in fifteen years, is currently being hosted by LACMA until March 19, 2017. Khedoori’s works frequently focus on distant architectural forms, hovering the lines between representation, commonplace images, and abstraction. “These works are enigmatic and acutely detailed; in an art world awash with rapidly moving images and saturated colors, Khedoori remains committed to the silent, slow, and exacting process of working by hand.”

Artist Gifts at LACMA  

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of LACMA’s opening, the museum is hosting an exhibition entitled L.A. Exuberance: New Gifts by Artists. Featuring over 60 works of art gifted to the museum by the artists themselves, the exhibition will display works by Edgar Arceneaux, John Baldessari, Uta Barth, Larry Bell, Tacita Dean, among many other incredible artists. On view through April 2, 2017, this exhibition is a must-see!

 

GALLERIES:

Theaster Gates at Regen Projects

Theaster Gates’ exhibition entitled, But To Be A Poor Race, is on view at Regen Projects, Los Angeles, through February 25th. As a cross-disciplinary artist, Gates’ expresses his meaningful and empowering works through an array of artistic practices including painting, sculpture, audio, and performance art.The title of the exhibition references The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois’, a publication considered among the most important work in African American literary history and sociology. Serving as a marking point of artistic and formal reflection, the exhibition present Gates’ recent inquiries into the role of painting, history making, the power of material culture, and the polemics of patriotism (courtesy of Regen Projects press release).”

Jon Rafman at Sprueth Magers

Hosted by Sprueth Magers, Los Angeles, an exhibition featuring works by Jon Rafman and Stan Vanderbeek will be on display through March 4, 2017. The two artists, though from different generations, both explore and work “with associative imagery and their effect on the conditioned and subconscious mind.” Jon Rafman is interested in the communication and relationship “between technology and our social and subjective conditions.  the artist mines video game footage, internet memes, and virtual landscapes for images, text and found footage, which he collages together to produce poetic narrative films.

Gallery Opening of Praz-Delavallade Los Angeles

I Love L.A., which opened at the Paris-based Praz-Delavallade’s new Los Angeles location on January 29, 2017, marks the inaugural exhibition, featuring Los Angeles-based artists represented by the gallery.  “Over the years, the image capital of the world has gradually evolved into a cultural capital presenting a socio-political panorama that is open to both aesthetic and pedagogical aspects, thereby conferring upon the city its unique artistic topography (Courtesy of the Praz-Delavallade press release).”  As the first Parisian gallery to settle in Los Angeles, a local presence will allow the gallery to showcase a new generation of European and Los Angeles based artists.

Also Worth Visiting:

• Sam Durant at Blum and Poe
• Karl Haendel at Susanne Vielmetter
• Thomas Houseago at Gagosian
• Ron Nagel at Matthew Marks
• Claire Tabouret at Night Gallery