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The Perfect Arrangement: Q+A with Rachel Foullon
The title of Rachel Foullon's latest exhibition, "Ruminant Recombinant" [through May 26 at ltd los angeles], refers to the four-compartment stomachs of cows, goats and sheep. By chewing, swallowing, processing, regurgitating, re-swallowing and reprocessing, these animals digest their food in a way similar to that in which the artist deals with her materials. For this show, "Clusters," Foullon has constructed hanging assemblages (all works 2012) of found objects, sewn and dyed garments and ropes, and past works that evoke frontier esthetics.
Decidedly more elegant than the description above would suggest, Foullon's sculptures hang on a movable cleat system of pegs mounted on two levels of Western red cedar planks. The works are spread over two walls in increasing density toward the back of the gallery. Each work seems to be negotiating or conspiring with its neighbors as if its life depended on it. On the opposing wall hang four mirrored sculptures made of polished nickel and refurbished farm tools that perform the role of fetishized antiques. Each reveals distorted views of the space.
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Painting in Silver and Noir: Q+A With Jacqueline Humphries
Over the course of a more than two decade-long career, Jacqueline Humphries has approached every canvas with the intent to mess it up. She sees its blank white form as the perfect last painting, and she's nowhere near her last. Lately, the artist has been covering and uncovering her canvases with lurid veils of paint in signature metallic, washing them out, scraping at them, smudging them, and then re-painting all over them again. The traces of these gestures resurrect various historicized tropes of abstraction-fields of expressionist marks are frequently layered upon chilly monochromes, representing the painting's version of personality shopping in its search to find itself.
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B Wurtz's Legacy Is Unfinished
The group show "B. Wurtz and Co." at Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles, announces itself plainly [on view through April 21]. Engraved onto an office placard, the title, adapted from a 2001 MoMA exhibition, "Walker Evans and Co.," juts out on high from a copper mount in the corridor to the main gallery. Just as Evans's everyday subject matter influenced generations of artists, Wurtz's exploration of detritus served as a fulcrum for many of his peers and successors. Curated by White Columns director Matthew Higgs, the show charts the impact of the unsung artist, featuring 10 emerging, midcareer and outsider artists whose waggish visual poetry resounds with Wurtz's delicate works of found and recovered objects.
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Physical Pictorial: Q+A With Daniel Joseph Martinez
For over thirty years, Daniel Joseph Martinez has explored physical bodies as political instruments. In his current exhibition, "I want to go to Detroit: Cheerleaders CHEER," at LAXART [through March 3], Martinez shows two series of photographs from early in his career. Featuring men and women who have made themselves over as idols, the artist's pictures shuttle past the possibility of objective documentation. Martinez's photography concerns naturalism and beauty, with subjects who create futuristic avatars for themselves.
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Matthew Marks on His New West Hollywood Outpost
Matthew Marks opened the fifth location of his gallery (he has 4 in New York) last week on the east side of West Hollywood. Located just south of Santa Monica Boulevard, the building features a permanent architectural intervention by Ellsworth Kelly, who is also featured in the new space's inaugural show,. The 40-feet long rectangular black form, inspired by the artist's Study for Black on White Panels (1954) and Black Over White (1966), hovers in relief along the top of the facade's length, a minimal gesture that is both monumental and understated.
The building, both inside and out, is as much the product of its architect, Peter Zellner, as it is of Kelly. The interior, a sizable 3,000 square feet, features six square glass skylights recessed into the ceiling. These provide shadowless daylighting to the space, in accord with the artist's specifications. In the main space, Kelly shows six new relief paintings [through April 7]—mostly rectilinear canvases superimposed by equally colorful oblong monochromes, each parabolic form appearing to defer to an uneven gravitational pull to the left or right.
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Mixed Media. Courtesy Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York, and the artist.
Extraction, the most recent series of mixed media collages
