MOCA

Many of you went to see the William Leavitt show at MOCA for your review. Its a great show the rest of you might want to check out. Plus it is interesting to see how he deals with Los Angeles' landmarks and the important role that architecture plays the history of city. 

WILLIAM LEAVITT: THEATER OBJECTS

03.13.11 - 07.03.11

William Leavitt is the first solo museum exhibition and retrospective of the work of Los Angeles-based artist William Leavitt (b. 1941, Washington, D.C.). A key figure associated with the emergence and foundations of conceptual art in Los Angeles during the late 1960s and '70s, Leavitt is primarily concerned with narrative and narrative forms. Since 1969, his works have employed ordinary fragments of popular and vernacular culture and modernist architecture as both props and signifiers to produce a distilled narrative. The culture and atmosphere of Los Angeles has played a significant role in Leavitt's ongoing interest in "the theater of the ordinary" and the play between illusion and reality and nature and artifice that characterizes the city. Surveying the artist's multifaceted 40-year career, William Leavitt will include sculptural tableaux, paintings, works on paper, photographs, and performances drawn from the late '60s to the present. One of the most significant and influential figures working in Los Angeles, Leavitt has created a remarkable oeuvre that has influenced generations of artists, and this exhibition, which examines his extraordinary contributions, is both long overdue and highly anticipated. The exhibition, co-curated by MOCA Associate Curator Bennett Simpson and Ann Goldstein, former MOCA senior curator and director designate at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an introduction by Goldstein, essays by art historian Annette Leddy and Simpson, an interview with the artist by artist-writer Erik Bluhm, a selected artist's exhibition history and bibliography, and a complete checklist of the exhibition, constituting a comprehensive scholarly overview and examination of the artist's career.

And if you go to LACMA and see the Vija Celmins show don't miss the exhibit at BCAM which includes works by many of the artists that I have mentioned.

This looks Amazing!!

BLUM & POE

is pleased to announce   

FLORIAN MAIER-AICHEN 

April 9 - May 14, 2011

Opening reception: Saturday, April 9, 6 - 8 pm  

    

Blum & Poe is very pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Cologne and Los Angeles-based artist Florian Maier-Aichen. This is the artist's fourth solo-presentation with Blum & Poe and his first in the gallery's new space at 2727 S. La Cienega. 

Maier-Aichen's defiant new works take aim at the characters of abstraction while expanding the photography of landscape. Their poetic nature and monumental status represent layers of media and processes, rendered in both the field and the studio. Above all, the artist's practice of image making is a subversive one, fully cognizant that only in the commingling of genres can an original view emerge. 

The images originate from sources as varied as documentary or textbook photos to escapist landscape paintings. From there, the artist's visual vocabulary and broad technical repertoire take over. For Untitled, 2011, the photographic resonance is geographical: a heavily frequented postcard spot overlooking the Geiranger Fjord in Norway. The tricolor exposure serves as both an abstract counterpoint to the high realism of large format photography and an evolution of impressionist principles or offset printing. The artist's familiar framing of a maritime adventure is as much a self-aware reenactment of early pioneering as the amateur photographer's ascension to the famous outlook.