An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Thursday, July 10, 2025
Contributed by Katy Crowe / The German noun Umwelt means environment. “ultraUMWELT,” the title of Rosy Keyser’s current solo show at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, denotes a world of dynamically connected matter. You can read a great deal into it – earth, ecosystems, subterranean root networks, and of course decay. Her work recalls biomorphic/organic abstraction, but the serendipity her process allows gives her paintings bracing and distinctive freshness.
Contributed by Jason Andrew / Daisy Sheff’s exhibition “Begun in the Dazzling Sunshine” at Parker Gallery’s new space on Melrose in Los Angeles, intertwines reality with the fantastical. Her paintings employ leaping animals, fussy architectures, and bright flora to explain narratives that tease the peculiar logic of fairy tales. Their uneven surfaces, cleverly devised characters, and woolly layered scenes are busy and unwieldy. To interpret them is like piecing together the plot of a really great dream.
Contributed by Katy Crowe / Michael Handley and Greg Lindquist’s show at the Landing Gallery – identified by the emoji for fire – could not have been more poignantly timed. It coincides with California’s fire season and more particularly the destructive Mountain Fire just north of Los Angeles, beyond that with drought-induced fires on the east coast, including Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and with an incendiary presidential election.
Contributed by Mary Jones / Katy Crowe returns to as-is.la with “Lunar Shift,” a superb second show of eleven lively and resonant abstract paintings. All are oil on linen works completed within the last year, six of them 52 x 42 inches and five 24 x 18 inches. A strikingly linear installation puts two opposing walls of the gallery into play, with the paintings equally spaced. The formality of the presentation underscores the dichotomy between window and object inherent in all paintings but Crowe’s especially, and brings out buoyant rhythms from painting to painting.
Contributed by Katy Crowe / In keeping with Sharon Butler’s recent review of painting that is not painting per se, Maxwell Hendler’s thoroughly satisfying show at The Landing in Los Angeles, his first in ten years, consists of works that fulfill the function of paintings — they are flat, largely two-dimensional, and mounted on walls – but do not involve paint at all.
Contributed by Katy Crowe / The quiet revelation in Altoon Sultan’s current show at Chris Sharp Gallery in Los Angeles is that small can be big. The paintings are compact and jewel-like. They also embody detailed images of large farm implements and machinery, and resonate, in a calm but assertive way, the power wielded by these massive machines.
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / The work of the Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha is often referred to as a West Coast version of Pop Art. The implication, of course, is that since it didn’t come out of New York, it must be inferior. His retrospective “Now Then,” his first at the Museum of Modern Art and first in New York since 1983, contains over 200 works from 1958 to the present. It includes paintings, drawings, prints, vitrines with selected self-produced photo-documentary books presented for our perusal, and some film (the Getty Research Institute owns a complete set of Ruscha’s artist’s books). The exhibition also includes the installation Chocolate Room, the walls of which are covered top to bottom with gridded sheets of paper silkscreened with chocolate syrup, recreated from its first iteration at the US pavilion in the 1970 Venice Biennale. Ruscha was also the American Biennale representative in 2017.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s re-imagining of the Sharon Tate story, is among his best films. It is […]
Contributed by Mary Jones / Veteran Los Angeles artist Nancy Evans is bringing an installation of sculpture, painting and works on paper to Two Coats of […]
Contributed by Mary Addison Hackett / There may be a few artists working today who support the current administration in Washington, but it�s safe to […]
“Sylvia Plimack Mangold,” Alexander and Bonin, New York, NY. Through Oct. 13. Annemarie Verna Galerie, Z�rich, November 9�January 12. Paintings by Plimack Mangold from the […]
