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Art Appreciation Made Easy
Flavorpill's Back-to-School Gallery-Opening Guide
School's back in session, but there's something far more frenzied than the first day of freshman year afoot. In the next two weeks, things kick into overdrive as just about every gallery in town breaks out the bubbly in celebration of a new exhibition. But no worries: we've filtered out the fluff, winnowing down the massive list of worthy art openings to our 35 favorites. So breathe, baby, then get on out there: after all, that amazing art ain't gonna appreciate itself.
Downtown/Northeast LA | Chinatown | Hollywood | Bergamot Station | Santa Monica | Culver City | Echo Park/Silverlake
Keith Perelli: Return
Opening: Sat 9.8
Having created past works as responses to terrorism and the AIDS epidemic, New Orleans-based artist Keith Perelli tackles the post-Katrina landscape. The haunting, emotionally charged works have a bittersweet beauty and showcase Perelli's fine draftsmanship.
Philip Fagan: The Business of Pleasure: NYC Brothels
Opening: Sat 9.8
The instances of photographers discovering themselves in the line of duty at other jobs — from journalist to security guard — are many. Philip Fagan managed brothels in NYC in the '80s, and his pictures are far more sensual and classy that you'd think.
Jennifer Rae Ochs: Celebrated Moments
Opening: Sat 9.15
Normally, a 21st-century artist doing abstract expressionism would be sort of beside the point, but Ochs pushes this genre to the limit in this series of intensely wrought, assertive canvases at Downtown's favorite gallery/speakeasy.
Pipo Nguyen-Duy: East of Eden
Opening: Sat 9.8
This Vietnamese photographer idealizes the Western landscape as the Garden of Eden, looking to the Hudson River School of painters as inspiration for his arresting, cinematic photos.
Allison Cortson: From Dust
Opening: Sat 9.8
The title of Allison Cortson's latest collection should be taken quite literally: her portraits of family and friends were actually created from dust. Materializing a nearly nonexistent substance further emphasizes the artist's appreciation for the overlooked.
Karl Erickson and Andrew Falkowski: Magnificent Bastards
Opening: Sat 9.8
This series of new works by Karl Erickson and Andrew Falkowski directly addresses the absurdity of artists who dwell in the realm of ideas when there's a war going on. Think classical portraits mashed up with Hogan's Heroes, with a touch of righteous indignation.
Eduardo Kac: Specimen of Secrecy About Marvelous Discoveries
Opening: Sat 9.8
Bio-art pioneer Eduardo Kac's art usually takes the form of multimedia investigations into sound, movement, light, and organic-growth patterns. His new series of "biotopes" are living works that change in response to internal metabolism and environmental conditions.
David Rathman: You're Too Old to Understand
Opening: Sat 9.8
Minneapolis artist David Rathman's romantic images both celebrate and indict unkempt, immortal youth — from stolen cars to mosh pits and broke-down b-ball courts — with a sophisticated and poetic sense of symbolism.
Rankin: Eye Candy
Opening: Thur 9.6
A-list UK portraitist Rankin (co-founder of Dazed & Confused) shares a selection of provocative personal favorites from his career-spanning collection of nudes.
Gary Palmer: Movements & Euro Rotelli
Opening: Thur 9.6
Euro Rotelli uses romantically vintage Polaroids and poetry to capture the subtle mysteries of the human body, while LA painter Gary Palmer creates gestural, sensual mixed-media abstractions.
Luke Chueh: Paintings of Hope and Hopelessness
Opening: Thur 9.6
Beloved illustrator, painter, designer, and zeitgeist surfer Luke Chueh shows off both his melancholy and mischievous sides with a series of seriously bummed-out, bloodied, and badass cartoon animals.
Tom Sachs: Space Program
Opening: Sat 9.8
Sculptor Tom Sachs — best known for fur-lined atom bombs and weapons fashioned from department-store gift boxes — takes it from the next level to the next planet, transforming Gagosian into an extraterrestrial playground.
Peter Rogiers: Slagroom & Andrew Schoultz: Power Structures and Chaos
Opening: Sat 9.8
Formed at random, Dutch artist Peter Rogiers' monumental, slightly silly sculptures are as bright and soft as sorbet. Andrew Schoultz, meanwhile, redeems OCD with symbol-rich mythological murals built from fine lines.
Sound & Motion
Opening: Sat 9.8
Featuring artists from Montreal (Diane Landry), LA (Klutch Stanaway), SF (Jim Campbell), Stanford (Paul DeMarinis), and Oakland (Alan Rath), Sound & Motion showcases new-media art obsessed with light, sound, video, and digitalia's place in contemporary culture.
Group Show
Opening: Sat 9.8
The Milo Gallery celebrates its first anniversary with a show of new work by a diverse group whose takes on nature, pop culture, storytelling, and mystery helped make this new kid on the block a local favorite right from the start.
Lisa Adams: I Like Interrogatives and Susannah Bettag: But Do You Really Notice Anymore?
Opening: Sat 9.8
Lisa Adams and Susannah Bettag deftly navigate the chasms between serenity and passion, power and purity, and abstraction and figurative symbolism. Though starting from very different places, they seem to have mapped out pretty similar footpaths.
Kent Williams
Opening: Sat 9.8
Fanatically adored LA artist Kent Williams uses classical painting techniques and visual quotations from his highly developed illustration shorthand to create darkly poetic images of a post-punk renaissance.
Dan McCleary, Lucas Reiner, and George Stoll: Portraits
Opening: Sat 9.8
McCleary's exaggerated, still-life flatness, Reiner's gestural, tender evocation of nature's stranger expressions, and Stoll's ability to enliven the mass-produced each color this show's straightforward title with an unmistakable sense of irony.
Lari Pittman
Opening: Fri 9.14
One of the brightest stars in LA's painting firmament, Lari Pittman continues to push his operatic, hyperactive vision and advanced technique to new heights. Expect to feel seduced and a bit seasick in front of his gracefully explosive compositions.
Klaus Wanker & Jennifer Nehrbass
Opening: Sat 9.1
While Austrian artist Klaus Wanker is most concerned with trendy, urban lifestyles, Jennifer Nehrbass' subjects exist in more surreal environments, addressing ideas of female-as-subject voyeurism.
William Pope.L: Art After White People
Opening: Fri 9.7
In this site-specific exhibition, the boundary-pushing artist Pope.L imagines an apocalypse of "whiteness," creating an alternate reality that includes a forest of white-skinned palm trees and a Donald Rumsfeld lookalike that cries blood.
Francesca Gabbiani: Soul Keepers & Christoph Schmidberger: Divide et Impera
Opening: Sat 9.8
Francesca Gabbiani's intricately cut paper collages and Christoph Schmidberger's sexually charged photo-realist paintings both play with the illusion of perception and explore themes of luxury.
Suzan Woodruff: New Work
Opening: Sat 9.8
Suzan Woodruff's dreamy, expressionist paintings can't really be called non-objective. As organic as anatomical studies or geographic wonders, her elegant fields of flowing color blend Zen serenity and human passion.
Woods Davy: Cantamar & Richard Ehrlich: Vancouver Island
Opening: Sat 9.8
Woods Davy achieves his desired "Western Zen" effect by creating seemingly weightless sculptures out of natural materials. For this collection, the smooth stones float among each other, creating a series of transcendent miniature monuments.
Charlie Roberts and Heidi Johansen: New Works
Opening: Sat 9.8
Bouncing back and forth between works on paper and photographs, this pair of artists strikes the right note between expressive personality and universality with portraits and hand-wrought snapshots that chronicle the ennui of an entire generation.
Ebony G. Patterson: Hybrids
Opening: Sat 9.8
Following in the footsteps of Kiki Smith and Judy Chicago, Ebony G. Patterson's mixed-media depictions transform the functions of the female body (often those deemed too intimate to be publicly exposed) into lovely and beguiling contemporary works of art.
Whitney Bedford
Opening: Fri 9.21
Whitney Bedford channels her desire to depict heroism and bravery into a central subject: Harry Houdini. Departing from previous studies of shipwrecks, Bedford creates life-size paintings of the infamous photos of Houdini's daring escape acts.
Le Flâneur
Opening: Fri 9.7
In this intriguingly curated, international group show, artists use multiple points of view to re-examine the Flâneur, that bourgeois dandy of 19th-century Europe, in the context of the anti-pedestrian, anti-intellectual, pro-consumerism stereotype of LA.
Lana Shuttleworth: Cone Migration
Opening: Sat 9.8
The languid, reserved beauty of Lana Shuttleworth's landscapes comes from an unusual muse — orange traffic cones. Shuttleworth shreds them to make strange, unexpected works of art that honor the cones even as they're destroyed.
Stanley Goldstein, Derek Buckner, & Glenn Ossiander
Opening: Sat 9.8
Fostering a something-for-everyone enthusiasm, George Billis presents earthy, heavily worked light-and-dark streetscapes from Derek Buckner, splashy, moody abstractions from Glenn Ossiander, and photorealist glimpses into frozen moments from Stanley Goldstein.
Teo Gonzalez
Opening: Sat 9.8
If there's a way to chill out op art's high-octane aesthetic — to soften its chromatic, mesmerizing intensity and pattern-based abstraction without losing its mystery — then Teo Gonzalez is the painter to figure it out.
Charlene Liu: Before the Storm
Opening: Sat 9.8
NYC artist Charlene Liu first hand-dyes and marbleizes paper, then uses it to create collages with oil, watercolor, and ink depictions of deconstructed nature scenes that have the wide, grinning charm of a pastoral.
Alexis Weidig: Small Things
Opening: Sat 9.8
Tracing the iconography of her legacy as a woman both engaged with and removed from her family's Albanian Orthodox background, Weidig draws on her lexicon of nontraditional materials and objects in a series of small-scale works.
Miles Thompson: CA.
Opening: Fri 9.7
If it's at La Luz, you can expect neurotic, labor-intensive figurative images that just can't help but upset the status quo. Thompson takes these ideas to heart in his first solo show — a series inspired by the sexy, ugly things in paradise that no one wants to talk about.
Paige Wery: My Sentiments Exactly
Opening: Sat 9.15
Like some kind of punk-rock fairy, painter, writer, and curator, Paige Wery inflicts her relentlessly happy-go-lucky gallows humor on thickly painted vignettes.