Matt Sheridan Smith’s current exhibition at Hannah Hoffman Gallery is a portrait show, but not in the conventional sense. Instead of painted likenesses of his subject (there is one representational image; more on that later), Sheridan Smith uses pattern, abstraction, and the readymade to create what he dubs “a sort of speculative portraiture.”[1] Evocative and confounding rather than illuminating, the works in the show obscure[…..]

Pia Camil’s hand-dyed and stitched canvases offer a fresh approach to the well-worn field of geometric abstraction. For her first solo show in Los Angeles, this Mexico City-based artist has created four large, square wall works whose surfaces are divided into loose grids of colored stripes. Each work has a dominant color theme—cream, tan, blue, and purple—with brighter accents of yellow, red, and peach. Within[…..]

The portrait is arguably the clearest illustration of the roles of status and patronage in the arts. Historically, portraits were reserved for the great men (and a few women) who shaped society, religion, and culture—or who had the money to pay for it. They proclaim of their subjects: “I exist and I am important.” In an era when many feel that art should remain above[…..]

Men in L.A.: Three Generations of Drawings at The Box features a massive collection of over 400 drawings created by artists Naotaka Hiro, Benjamin Weissman, and Paul McCarthy, individually and in collaboration with one another. The title of the exhibition overreaches somewhat—there are not really three generations, but rather three artists separated by less than thirty years in age. Yet what the exhibition does accomplish is[…..]

For the first solo exhibition in his new Beverly Hills space, Marc Selwyn Fine Art has mounted a significant show of drawings by conceptual-art pioneer Allen Ruppersberg. Spanning almost two decades, from 1972 to 1989, these deceptively simple works on paper show Ruppersberg dealing with themes similar to those of his contemporaries—appropriation, language, identity, authenticity—but with a wry, nostalgic sensibility all his own. In these[…..]

Night Gallery’s current five-artist exhibition, International Women’s Day, celebrates the holiday by focusing on the legacy of one woman artist in particular, Camille Claudel. Although an accomplished sculptor on her own, she was often overshadowed by her mentor and lover Auguste Rodin, and after suffering a breakdown and destroying much of her work, she spent the last thirty years of her life in an asylum. International[…..]

Whenever it seems that painting has run its course, an exhibition like Various Peep Shows comes along to restore our faith in the medium. For her third solo show at Honor Fraser Gallery, Annie Lapin presents a series that contains within each work the broad spectrum of paint’s physical and representational possibilities. These are much more than postmodern pastiches, however, as they show a sincere[…..]