#truth #history #narrative #Afropolitan #multiculturalism #future In an age when fact and falsehood are often indistinguishable, The Ease of Fiction is a title that gives pause. The exhibition, now at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, was curated by Dexter Wimberly for the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, North Carolina. Having been invited to participate in the exhibition’s collateral programming as a speaker[…..]

Owing to the success of her figurative work as well as her 2012 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow is widely recognized for her uncanny mixed-media sculptures that incorporate cast body parts with everyday objects. Often overlooked, however, are her drawings of abstracted figures—erotic, restless, and vulnerable—though they are a central part of her practice. Human Landscape(s)[…..]

Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, Claire Colette reviews Ellen Berkenblit at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles. On view now at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Ellen Berkenblit’s new paintings[…..]

James Hoff: B=R=I=C=K=I=N=G is the first solo museum exhibition of the artist’s “virus paintings”—works shaped and mediated by Hoff’s engagement with digital technology and computer viruses as opposed to brush or paint. Functioning as a series of études to contemporary computer code, these paintings flirt consciously with the provocative gestures and meta-questions of conceptual art and the heavy visual language and history of abstraction. Shaped[…..]

Using strategies of asymmetry and organic mirroring, Julia Westerbeke explores abstraction as a vehicle of human imagination and a catalyst for subconscious thought. The artist cites science fiction and the biology of natural forms as two of her main sources of inspiration, and her paper-based explorations evoke a certain duality inherent within organic life—the ordinary morphing into the extraordinary, the mundane inspiring spurts of wonder.[…..]

Follow the white line back into the middle ground; it outlines a blue-gray pathway that comes to the front of the picture plane. The pathway entreats viewers to step into the architecture of Zahra Nazari’s surreal composition Landscape #14 (2013). Along the way, columns and a house abut the path, and as the line winds backward and diminishes, the horizontal pathway merges with a wall. Beyond[…..]

Lorella Paleni is always creating something that exists just over the horizon of awareness. Her works comprise a series of visual heuristics to nowhere, showing the viewer a picture plan filled with rich colors that simultaneously push into and out of each painting. But instead of resolving compositional elements into a defined image, the elements of her style culminate in a delicately constructed form of[…..]