SEPAND DANESH – FEAR OF COLLAPSE

Posted on 2022-07-04

In his practice, Danesh uses drawing, painting and trompe-l’oeil techniques to provoke questions of the human condition. Danesh references his personal experiences and memories, and relates them to the grander memory of Human history to create short and unique narratives. In Fear of Collapse, each of Danesh’s paintings contain a character composed from cube-like shapes which he places in a corner, without a floor or a ceiling, to bring awareness to the condition of being trapped and wanting to escape.

Escaping has been an obsession of Danesh’s. To succeed in this, he draws countless numbers of small fragments of his life arranged with rigor in endless grids. Danesh explains, “Every time I feel trapped, images flicker through my head with high frequency. Those images assemble into a fast-paced inner movie that I know by heart. My years in Tehran, my parents, my house, the streets, the neighbors, the extremely violent elementary school of the post-war period I attended and my immigration from Tehran to Paris.” Danesh’s images are captured in his drawings during glimpses of time which creates an archive of ideas that then need a place to be stored. A place which encompassed both the feeling of being trapped and finding a way to escape.

Opposite – Collapse, 2022

Exhibition runs through to September 10th, 2022

Praz-Delavallade
6150 Wilshire Blvd
CA 90048 Los Angeles

www.praz-delavallade.com

  

DAN LEVENSON – TWO PROPOSALS TOWARD THE FORMATION OF A NEW ART SCHOOL

Posted on 2022-07-04

The imaginary State Art Academy, Zürich (SKZ), forms the basis of Dan Levenson’s practice as an artist. Through performance, video, installation, objects and paintings, Levenson expounds on the curriculum and philosophy of an institution that, although never existed, reflects on art institutions both past and present.

The first proposal, “SKZ Kindergarten Maquette,” takes the form of a miniature kindergarten classroom, itself an artwork, that is based on live interactive performances Levenson exhibited with children aged 2-9 in 2019 and 2020. The maquette contains miniature scale versions of the components of the live performances: flat-pack modernist children’s easels and mannequins wearing painting tunics. The mirrored walls of the classroom maquette suggest infinite expansion. Kindergarteners are gently introduced to the same strict formalist principles which form the basis of the advanced graduate program. An accompanying video documents the live performances.

Opposite – Video Still from SKZ Children’s Painting Workshop

Exhibition runs through to September 10th, 2022

Praz-Delavallade
6150 Wilshire Blvd
CA 90048 Los Angeles

www.praz-delavallade.com

  

LONNIE HOLLEY – WHAT HAVE THEY DONE WITH AMERICA?

Posted on 2022-06-27

Holley’s life and work read as a narrative retelling of Black American history—the residual effects of the Jim Crow era, the triumphs of the Civil Rights movement, and the struggles with false narratives around class mobility and race. Holley’s multidisciplinary practice seeks to educate viewers as a means of remedying the historical amnesia surrounding these topics. Rooting himself in the events of the past, the artist moves into the future—presenting synesthetic, multimedia work that visually engages its viewers with unique found objects and intricate motifs to subsequently inform on topics such as inequity and history as memory.

Opposite – Adding to the Foundation (Honoring Daddy James), 2021

Exhibition runs through to August 13th, 2022

Blum & Poe
2727 South La Cienega Boulevard
90034 Los Angeles

www.blumandpoe.com

  

THREE LANDSCAPES: JB BLUNK, ANNA AND LAWRENCE HALPRIN

Posted on 2022-06-27

This exhibition presents key historical works created by JB Blunk in the 1960s and ‘70s. Made specifically for the Halprins’ home, these pieces have never before been displayed to the public. True to JB’s tradition, these sculptures were carved from salvaged old growth redwood burl and cypress—the artist worked with stumps often centuries old and larger than twenty feet in diameter. Known for using chainsaws and hand tools on massive, single blocks of wood, JB would study the grain and burl for days or weeks, and then—without the use of sketches or maquettes—he would work reductively on the single form. Seeking to reveal the spirit of the organic materials with which he worked, JB often left much of the natural form intact, celebrating its inherent qualities. His works were made to be used, with form and function almost indistinct. As artist Charles Ray once put it, “If you can’t see a work of JB Blunk’s, you can sit on it. Perhaps you see it by sitting on it.”

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to August 13th, 2022

Blum & Poe
2727 South La Cienega Boulevard
90034 Los Angeles

www.blumandpoe.com

  

DAVE MULLER – SUNSET, SUNRISE (REPEAT) B/W THE RECORD PAVILION

Posted on 2022-06-27

With Sunset, Sunrise (repeat) b/w The Record Pavilion, Muller looks back on his life of growing up in record stores. In a tribute to the slow and physical act of touching, browsing, and looking at records, this exhibition presents the artist’s treasured pastime, one that is becoming extinct as music consumption is increasingly intangible. The presentation unfolds in three parts: hand-painted wall murals, new paintings of records and record store paraphernalia, and an open-air, modernist pavilion for rehousing records.
Muller’s newest paintings draw from a reservoir of reference materials that the artist has amassed, including his scrupulous archive of price tags and hype stickers—a personal collection of roughly 1,500 unique decals from albums purchased. Depicting these at larger-than-life scale and layering them atop one another to fill the composition, Muller tapes off, gessoes, and paints each section of the work’s surface in thin, accumulating layers, in a nod to the analog and hand-done systems of music distribution.

Opposite – Youth Misspent (in Record Stores): $123.88 + 16.99 £, 2022

Exhibition runs through to August 13th, 2022

Blum & Poe
2727 South La Cienega Boulevard
90034 Los Angeles

www.blumandpoe.com

  

LEELEE KIMMEL – NIGHT RIDE

Posted on 2022-06-20

Leelee Kimmel’s paintings have always sustained this vibe, her abstract shapes from her very first show proclaiming themselves biomorphs, and avowing kinship with the art of Surrealism of Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy, and Roberto Matta-Echaurren. The most immediately apparent stylistic or formal quality is the impression of rapid, perfervid mark making. Her thick impastos nonetheless appear as if racing, colors violently switching ON/OFF ON/OFF, furious binaries. And this gestural ferment, these leaping and bounding motions indicate a desire for relentless movement within the confines of the picture plane and no less within the viewer, who may come to long for those moments of intersection or erasure in Kimmel’s work when everything goes quiet, stops pullulating: when this foreign-seeming tumult proffers moments of respite, or silent meditation.

Opposite – The Transfer, 2021

Exhibition runs through to August 5th, 2022

Almine Rech
27 Huqiu Road, 2nd Floor
200002 Shanghai
China

www.alminerech.com