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John Altoon at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

admin — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 07:00:35 +0000

Today from our friends at Artillery Magazine, we bring you John David O’Brien’s review of John Altoon’s retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. O’Brien notes, “…Altoon’s art lives up to any expectations a viewer might have for it.” This article was originally published on September 2, 2014.

John Altoon couples his relaxed, entirely convincing painterly hand with a flippant disregard for norms, whether social, societal, or artistic. His retrospective at LACMA cavorts, galumphs, and saunters through a wide variety of styles, approaches, and modes of image-making that astound for their vibrancy and their prescient lack of concern for modernist confines of working in a signature style.

Ranging from abstraction to figuration, Altoon seems equally at ease with either. This large but not overwhelming selection of painted and drawn works is taken from his fine-art practice, as well as some of his modified advertising boards, and delves into numerous of his outrageous sketches. This allows the viewer to circulate liberally through the ideas and images knitting together Altoon’s complex, variegated, and whimsical world. Adroitly arranged by curator Carol Eliel in a primarily chronological order, the different rooms concentrate on distinct portions of Altoon’s output and offer an implicit interpretative key to his participation in the artistic, historical, and societal chapters of his time.

Links between the quirky, erotic, and downright odd forms he colors and conjugates underscore his freshness and his singular interpretative axis. Occasionally seeming to echo other artists—biomorphic abstraction in the vein of Arshile Gorky or muscular, gestural slathering along the lines of Willem de Kooning—Altoon retains a strain of poetic reverie that keeps his works operating along their own lines. The color gamut runs from bold tertiary colors to unusual combinations of dark and light, often with the negative space etching forcefully into the composition. He dabbled with airbrush, mixed drawn-line and painted line, scrambled and splattered with abandon and a paradoxically deft sense of control.

Read the full article here.

Staggering Works: Beatriz da Costa at Laguna Art Museum

admin — Sat, 07 Sep 2013 07:00:57 +0000

As part of our ongoing partnership with Artillery, today we bring you author Seth Hawkins‘s report on the Laguna Art Museum’s exhibition ex·pose: Beatriz da Costa, a posthumous retrospective of the artist’s work. Only thirty-eight years old at the time of her death last year, da Costa was an artist who, in Hawkins’s words, was “brave enough, strong enough and inspired enough to allow us to view the most intimate of battles, in a beautiful, memorable, and artistic way.” This article was originally published on September 3, 2013.

Beatriz da Costa. Dying for the Other, 2011–12; three-channel video installation, 12 min.; presentation at Eyebeam, Art and Technology Center, New York, NY, 2011

From the light, airy and playful feelings of the Laguna Art Musem’s Faux Real exhibition on the main floor, the atmosphere of ex·pose: Beatriz da Costa shifts into dark, moving, and intense as one descends into the museum’s dark basement.

Da Costa’s Dying for the Other (2011–12) is a three-channel video installation dealing with the artist’s lifelong battle with cancer, with the show occurring not even twelve months after her passing—a timely and haunting exhibition of her last creation.

Beatriz da Costa made work that refused genre classification—seamlessly transitioning between contemporary art, science, engineering, and politics—in many cases working in collaboration with forerunning art/technology groups such as Critical Art Ensemble, Free Range Grains, GenTerra, and Preemptive Media. Born in 1974 and raised in Germany, da Costa attended Carnegie Mellon University, eventually moving on to teach in the Studio Art, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Departments at UC Irvine.

Read the full article here.

Mexico as Muse

admin — Sat, 22 Jun 2013 07:00:59 +0000

As part of our ongoing relationship with the Los Angeles-based Artillery, today we bring you an article about artists who have been inspired by the landscape and culture of Mexico. The author, Betty Ann Brown, says, “My journey through Mexico has been a journey from consumption to critical thinking.” Mexico as Muse was originally published on April 30, 2013.

Robert Motherwell. Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive, 1943; cut-and-pasted printed and painted papers, wood veneer, gouache, oil, and ink on board; 28 1/4 x 35 7/8 in.

“Mexico is truly the promised land for abstract art.”
Anni & Josef Albers, 1936

“Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world.”
Andre Breton, 1938

Why Mexico? It was not only that Mexico was nearby and easily accessible to U.S.–based artists, although that was certainly true. And it was not just that Mexico had powerful ancient arts that were alien and mysterious to the Euro-American public, though that was true as well. It was also that Mexico was, in the 1920s, a significant cultural center. As historian Amy Lifson notes in “Art of Influence” from 2010, “[O]ne of the hottest venues in the art world was the Mexican Ministry of Public Education, where Diego Rivera was painting the frescoes that would revive mural painting in the West. Rivera was world-famous, considered one of the three great living artists—the other two being Picasso and Matisse. It took him seven years to paint the cycle, which consisted of 235 panels. Artists, intellectuals, students, and curiosity-seekers from all over came to see the work.” Rivera’s work employed a new stylistic language, combining the European avant-garde with Mexican indigenous traditions. The following is a short survey of artists and the years they were in Mexico, where they were inspired and transformed.

Read the full article here.