Marian Goodman Gallery, “Ellsworth Kelly,” installation view. All photography courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery unless otherwise noted.

Ellsworth Kelly‘s installation of four 2-panel paintings executed this year is on view at Galerie Marian Goodman in Paris until July 13, 2012. The show, as the gallery’s press release relates, is his first in Paris in 20 years, when his formative paintings made in his youthful residence in the city were exhibited at the Galeries Nationales du Jeu de Paume. This new work comprises four paintings, each consisting of a curved geometrical relief on a white panel, progressing on the ordered spectrum from red, yellow, blue, to green. Laconically hung a single panel to each of the four walls in the gallery, the paintings seem a further distillation of Kelly’s painterly system, a continuation of the experiments he first executed in Paris in his early years.

Marian Goodman Gallery, “Ellsworth Kelly,” installation view

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Judy Chicago collaboration with Materials & Applications, Disappearing Environments (2012). All images on site for Art Observed by Megan Hoetger.

January is a notoriously busy time here in Los Angeles when the two major art fairs in the city, the LA Art Show and Art LA Contemporary, set up shop across town from one another, daring fair-goers to make the arduous trek back and forth across one of the lifelines of the urban sprawl, the dreaded 10 freeway. The opening night performances at both fairs also marked the start of the much-anticipated Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival, which itself encompasses over 30 performances and events across the city.

Myths of Rape (1977/2012)

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David Hockney, A Bigger Splash (1967). All images via Artnet.

Not only is the Getty the hub of activities for the Southern California-wide Pacific Standard Time (PST) programming, but it is also host to a number of events and exhibitions, including Greetings from L.A.: Artists and Publics, 1950-1980, From Start to Finish: De Wain Valentine’s Gray Column, In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945-1980, and performances for the Performance and Public Art Festival that will take place later in January. It has also mounted the large-scale, historical exhibition Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950 -1970. With 79 works by 47 artists, the exhibition charts the unique artistic innovations that have come to define the Los Angeles art scene as well as helped to shape some of the most important art movements from the second half of the 20^th century.

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