IN THE GALLERIES
There has been a lot of talk about the current exhibit at Anat Egbi’s Holllywood Gallery celebrating the 50th anniversary of Womanhouse. Unfortunately I missed the opening which many of the original artists attended, and there were resurrected performances as well. The exhibit not only celebrates but also expands upon narratives surrounding the historic environmental art installation and performance space. On view are historic works alongside ephemera and photographs from the original Womanhouse installations that explore the roots of central core imagery, collaborative practices, and performance and costuming. The exhibition aims to situate Womanhouse within a larger conversation about this underhistoricized and productive experimental period of Southern California Feminist Art History. Anat Egbi location, 4859 Fountain Avenue. February 18 – April 2, 2022.
Karen LeCocq Leah’s Room Performance Objects, Womanhouse 1972
Regen Projects presents an exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Sue Williams. “Williams presents a group of works in which formal ingenuity hovers at the margin of abstraction and representation. In her newest compositions, Williams achieves a delicate balance between density and sparseness, combining line-drawn figures with expressive marks and bursts of color. Radically nonhierarchical, the raucous array of imagery, line, and color in these paintings appears unbound by distinctions between high and low, foreground and background, or any sense of visual primacy. This allover quality subtly gestures towards Abstract Expressionism, even as Williams dismantles the movement’s infatuation with masculine seriousness and artistic genius through invocations of populist forms like illustration and cartoon. Her commitment to raw, gestural immediacy perhaps belies the complex network of marks she orchestrates in her compositions, producing an impression of movement and understated depth” March 5 -April 23, 2022.
Sue Williams
Shoshana Wayne Gallery presents Sabrina Gschwandtner: Scarce Material. For this exhibition, the artist looks back to the earliest iterations of the cinematic form, during the Silent Film era. Using black and white 35 mm film, video, silver gelatin photography, and fabric, Gschwandtner offers an alternative to the male-dominated history of film, and a literal mending and repairing of film history. “Scarce Material” refers both to a quilting term for anything that can be stitched together into a quilt, and to the archived early cinema made by pioneering women filmmakers that is in short supply. Gschwandtner offers an alternative to the male-dominated history of film, and a literal mending and repairing of film history. “Scarce Material” refers both to a quilting term for anything that can be stitched together into a quilt, and to the archived early cinema made by pioneering women filmmakers that is in short supply. The example below is a black and white gelatin print.
Sabrina Gschwandther
Phyllida Barlow, glimpse continues at Hauser & Wirth. Known for her sculptures that challenge previous conventions by infusing humble materials such as cardboard, fabric, plywood, and cement with a boundless energy. Here Barlow responds to, manipulates, and punctuates the distinctive architectural features of the gallery complex with her sculptures, yielding an intimate and confrontational encounter between form, environment, and viewer. Thru May 8, 2022.
Coinciding with her major survey at LACMA, Sprueth Magers will be presenting an exhibition of recent and historical works by Barbara Kruger. Kruger is best known for her silkscreen prints where she placed a direct and concise caption across the surface of a found photograph. March 19-July 17, 2022.
Barbara Kruger
IN THE MUSEUMS
Another “must see” exhibition at the Hammer Museum is A Decade of Acquisitions of Works on Paper. The inaugural presentation in the Hammer Museum’s new works on paper gallery highlights acquisitions of prints and drawings from 2012 to the present. This exhibition shows, for the first time, many contemporary prints and drawings in the collection, ranging from the conceptual to the political, the abstract, the gestural, and the poetic. Artists of the 1960s generation such as Richard Artschwager, Vija Celmins, Sonia Gutiérrez, Betye Saar, and Sue Williamson are included, with beautiful examples made using diverse printmaking techniques. Also featured is a selection of drawings by Ruth Asawa, Lee Bontecou, Miguel-Ángel Cárdenas, Judy Chicago, Mary Corse, Sam Gilliam, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and David Smith. The exhibition also includes artists such as Huma Bhabha, Trisha Donnelly, Sharon Hayes, Rashid Johnson, Glenn Ligon, and Rachel Whiteread whose contemporary practices are represented with innovative and experimental works on paper. Thru May 1, 2022.
Ruth Asawa
Opening later this month at LACMA is the long-awaited retrospective of works by Barbara Kruger, Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You. Spanning four decades, this exhibition is the largest and most comprehensive presentation of Kruger’s work in 20 years; it spans her single-channel videos from the 1980s to digital productions of the last two decades, and includes large-scale vinyl room wraps, multichannel video installations, and audio soundscapes throughout LACMA’s campus. As an active consumer and vigilant viewer of popular culture, Kruger grapples with the accelerated ways pictures and words instantaneously flow through media. “A visually compelling gathering of groundbreaking artwork that is resonant, courageous, and crucial.” March 20-July 17, 2022.
