MSCHF, Art 2 (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artists and Perrotin. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli. “Spoiler alert: you are likely to laugh out loud.” So warns the promotional material for Art 2, MSCHF’s second exhibition at Perrotin and their first in Los Angeles. “Be glad this art collective maintains a safe distance from the rules dominating the art world.”1 The volume of your laughter will depend on your sense of humor, but the exhibition’s distance from art world protocol may be overstated, driven as the industry is by the commercial impulse present in much of the work on ..read more

Leer en Español Sun Woo, Salamander’s Cottage (detail) (2023). Acrylic on canvas, 84.5 × 63 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles. Photo: Jong Hyun Seo. In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s genre-spanning 1982 book Dictée, the Korean American artist writes: “Being broken. Speaking broken. Saying broken. Talk broken. Say broken.”1 Cha, who was born in South Korea but lived abroad until her death, felt “broken” from her native language and country, an experience that necessitated the highly experimental language in Dictée and elsewhere. Were Cha alive today, she might find a li ..read more

Leer en Español Last June, ceramic artist Sharif Farrag set up his first private studio in a former coffee roaster in L.A.’s Fashion District —a space with enough power to run his heat-hungry kilns. His working style is unabashed and fast, like balancing as many grocery bags as you can in both arms. Often bedecked with figurines and broken-off chunks of “failed” pieces, Farrag’s works aren’t always finished when they come out of the kiln. “The speed of the clay puts pressure on me to make decisions. It’s a perfect recipe for improvisation, for getting things out of me that I don’t necessari ..read more

Scratching at the Moon (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artists and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Jeff McLane. Upon entering the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’ (ICA LA) expansive atrium, visitors are greeted by Michelle Lopez’s Correctional Lighting (2024), a monumental highway lamp that swings haphazardly in a circle, its weight delicately counterbalanced by a resin-cast cinder block. The lamp casts a lighthouse beam that illuminates the diverse collection of artworks on view, which together complicate and widen our understanding of “As ..read more

Julia Kowalska, To Give to Eat or to Allow Oneself to Be Eaten (2024). Oil on canvas, 39.5 x 47.25 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Steve Turner, Los Angeles. An unsettling sensibility permeates Julia Kowalska’s Secrets Of Our Loves, on view at Steve Turner. Inscrutable figures glow radiantly within domestic interiors and gardens in some paintings, while others capture a water droplet, a bed bathed in red, and a lamb’s mouth. Kowalska writes that the works were “born under the cover of night,”1a time when love’s passions most sharply puncture the heart. Despite the simultaneous clich ..read more

Leer en Español Image courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Elon Schoenholz. I first encountered Elmer Guevara’s work during our time as graduate students at Hunter College. His 2022 thesis show presented a series of figurative paintings of family members and versions of his childhood self in South Central Los Angeles. My encounter with both the personal and familial history embedded in these works recalled my early memories of listening to my Korean grandparents’ stories of their post-war immigration to L.A.’s South Bay. I recently reencountered Guevara’s wor ..read more

Leer en Español Teresa Baker, Flow (2023). Acrylic, buckskin, yarn, and artificial sinew on artificial turf, 110 × 74 inches. © Teresa Baker. Image courtesy of the artist and de boer, Los Angeles/Antwerp. Photo: Jacob Phillip. Sometimes, you only notice something when it’s gone. In the past few months, I have become aware of the absence, in a growing number of artists’ work, of narrative—in particular, narrative about these artists’ biographies or identities. Much of this work is abstract, often purely abstract, and it seems that more and more people, myself included, are lately being drawn ..read more

Pat Steir, Painted Rain (installation view) (2024). Hauser & Wirth, West Hollywood, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Jeff McLane. I first visited Painted Rain, Pat Steir’s exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, amid a pummeling rainstorm. Steir’s dripping rivulets of pigment mirrored the deluge outside, her works luminous despite the absence of sunlight. The artist, 85, recently revealed that she had been diagnosed with colorblindness—specifically, the inability to perceive the color blue1—a startling admission given her decades-long career as an adroit colori ..read more

Paul Pfeiffer, Red Green Blue (installation view) (2022). Single-channel video with color and surround sound; 31 minutes and 23 seconds; dimensions variable. The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, 2023–24. Image courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Zak Kelley. A two-inch media player protrudes from the wall, affixed to a metal arm. The minuscule screen features one of Muhammad Ali’s most-watched fights of all time, but Ali and his opponent have been scrubbed from the scene. All that remains is the ring, the spectators, and the residue of the f ..read more

Leer en Español Dominique Moody, N.O.M.A.D. (detail) (2015–23). Layered corrugated patina-stained metal, salvaged stainless steel washing machine door, dryer door, vintage barn wood, salvaged globe, found metal objects, plexiglass panels, 1950 tow truck, patinated steel, paint, train horn, and washing machine doors, 151 × 122 × 768 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and the Hammer Museum. Photo: Khari Scott. On her first day in office in December of 2022, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass declared a “state of emergency on homelessness.”1 Yet today, homeownership remains an insurmountable goal f ..read more