reviews
DUELLING REVIEWS: MARY CORSE
AND ALL AT ONCE: SUMMER at Various Locations
If you’re reading this, it’s too late. Summer came and went. Pool parties in the Valley? Over. Midnight drives on Mulholland? Gone. We don’t care that you went to Sicily, that your credit score’s crippled because of it, or that you haven’t k-holed at Marcelino’s since...
NOAH DAVIS at Hammer Museum
For those familiar with the late painter Noah Davis and the lasting influence of his Underground Museum—the Arlington Heights exhibition space he operated with his wife and collaborator, Karon Davis—the Hammer Museum’s eponymously titled retrospective survey of the...
2025 CALIFORNIA BIENNIAL: Desperate, Scared, But Social at Orange County Museum of Art
Navigating the tension between impulsive expression and mastery of one’s craft is a fundamental aspect of the artist’s journey. A similar tension underscores the construction of personal identity that defines adolescence, and hence, the Orange County Museum of Art’s...
HOT! AND READY TO SERVE at American Museum of Ceramic Art
In her 1986 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin reimagines human history not as a tale of conquest, but as one of containment. She proposes that the first human tool was not a spear, but a vessel—a bag, a bowl, a bottle. If stories are “carrier...
THE NEW DAVID GEFFEN GALLERIES at LACMA
Once, when I was 12 or 13, I was looking at Fernand Léger’s 1925 painting Composition in the European wing of LACMA’s since-demolished Ahmanson Building when I noticed a small termite crawling across the surface. Slightly alarmed, I notified an elderly gallery...
WILHELM SASNAL at BLUM
The news of BLUM’s abrupt closure after 30 years in Los Angeles reframed the landmark gallery’s final exhibition, Wilhelm Sasnal’s “AAAsphalt,” into an inadvertent elegy for contemporary art in Los Angeles. Entering the massive complex on an early July afternoon, I...
KAORU UEDA at Nonaka-Hill
The night I saw Kaoru Ueda’s self-titled show at Nonaka-Hill, I found myself later at a friend’s house watching YouTube videos of marine life. The viewing experience of the vibrating patterned creatures felt nearly identical to Ueda’s obsessively precise paintings of...
JULIANA HALPERT AND CHRIS KRAUS (With Additional Art by Luis Baez) at Bel Ami
To read a novel is to play detective. The detective novel leverages this symmetry: the reader identifies with Sherlock Holmes’s or Philip Marlowe’s driving curiosity. Our favorite sleuths want to get to the heart of the crime; we want to get to the end of the story....
THE ABSTRACT FUTURE at Jeffrey Deitch
The seminal Jeffrey Deitch exhibition “Post Human” (presented in 1992 and reimagined in 2024) explored evolving concepts of identity in the digital era. “The Abstract Future” feels in some ways like its spiritual sequel. Brilliantly curated by Alia Dahl, the gallery’s...
LEE FRIEDLANDER at Castle
In the shadow of social media, describing a nude portrait of a woman as “authentic” or “not performative” is often a subliminal way of acknowledging that the image has been composed according to an “alternative” set of stylistic constraints: soft, flattering lighting;...
YANG FUDONG at Marian Goodman Gallery
Yang Fudong’s "Sparrow on the Sea" drifts like a fugue. Commissioned for the LED façade of M+ museum in Hong Kong, the silent, black-and-white film now plays in L.A. with full sound, anchored in a dream logic that warps memory and time. Three actors of different...
DON BACHARDY at The Huntington
The wall text for “Don Bachardy: A Life in Portraits”—an exhibition at The Huntington featuring over 100 drawings and paintings—asserts that Bachardy persisted in creating portraits during a time when art was more experimental and less representational. I felt that...
JORDAN ROUNTREE at Baert Gallery
When we are small, adulthood comes to us in impressions: a staticky scene from a horror film, an overheard whisper. As adults, we see childhood memories through a similar film. “I Hear a New World” seamlessly weaves together these visions of curiosity and nostalgia....
DUELLING REVIEW: Viola Frey at The Pit
When The Pit announced a show by the late ceramicist Viola Frey, it piqued my editorial interest. I myself first became aware of Frey when I began taking ceramics courses with other sculptors, who would often speak of her as a totemic influence on their practice and...
ESIRI ERHERIENE-ESSI at Night Gallery
There is a moment in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass when the Unicorn says to Alice: "Well, now that we have seen each other…if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you.” The private question of whether one sees themselves reflected in the art that is...
THE MOMMY LEAKS THE FLOOR at New Theater Hollywood
One of the performers—if “performer” is the right word—in The Mommy Leaks the Floor, a new work by Asher Hartman staged at New Theater Hollywood (May 16–25), is Pablo, a real-life infant, born earlier this year. Throughout the play, cradled in his mother’s arms on the...
JASON FOX at David Kordansky Gallery
The flattening of high and lowbrow imagery is certainly not new, indeed the painter Jason Fox has been mining this territory since the early 1990s. In his current show at David Kordansky Gallery, “Why Are You Sitting in the Dark?,” Fox refines his enigmatic...
