Lee Ufan, From Line No. 800117 (1980), all photos via Art Observed

Blum & Poe’s close ties to the history and proliferation of Asian art in the United States cannot be ignored, having advocated for and built a market around Japanese and Korean artists like Takashi Murakami and Lee Ufan during the 1990’s.  Since then, the gallery has become an inextricable link between the continents, a point explored in the gallery’s most recent exhibition, Dansaekhwa and Minimalism, currently on view at the gallery’s Culver City location.

Kwon Young-woo, Untitled (1982), via Art Observed Read More »

Eddie Martinez, Restartation (2015), via Art Observed

Brooklyn-based painter Eddie Martinez had charted a particularly unique course for himself in recent years, exploring both expressly abstracted compositions and their relationships to more rigid, serial processes in both painting and sculpture.  Trained as both a draftsman and painter, the artist’s dual experience in both meticulously planned composition and free-roving expressionism floats to the surface in his first exhibition with Mitchell-Innes & Nash, on view now at the gallery’s Chelsea location. Read More »

Aleksandra Domanovic, Turbo Sculpture, (2010-13), all photos courtesy The Mistake Room

The Mistake Room Los Angeles presents Histories of a Vanishing Present: A Prologue, the second chapter in a series of four exhibitions, featured as part of a long-term research initiative launched by the space. This multiyear project spotlights the experience of millennial generation artists from the Global South who, through a lens of postmemory, explore the media through which the past is transmitted across time and space. The exhibition investigates how traumatic histories play out in the practices of contemporary artists, often whose experience of these histories is indirect—inherited through the images, narratives and objects of preceding generations. Curated by Cesar Garcia and Kris Kuramitsu, A Prologue features video pieces from four artists situated in non-western cultures, chronicling both events, relations and practices not typically included in the art historical canon.    In animating the enduring consequences of colonization, nationalism, ethnic wars, globalization and the legacy of racism, these artists engage in a complex meditation on their cultural heritage and identity politics, and embrace history as a site of reflection and reinvention.

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Chris Burden, Buddha’s Fingers (2014-15), all images via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

Spanning two uptown locations of Gagosian Gallery is a series of recent works by the late artist Chris Burden, who passed away last year at age of sixty-nine soon after his large scale New Museum retrospective. Burden, who started his career with avant-garde performances that played a significant role in furthering body art on a global scale, alongside his other American peers Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman, then shifted towards idea-based practice later in his career.  Challenging in terms of execution rather than physical fortitude, these projects Burden undertook emphasized a concretized, material practice. Read More »

Diana Thater, Knots and Surfaces (2001), via Art Observed

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has invited Diana Thater to open her first U.S. retrospective, currently on view in the museum campus’s Art of the Americas building, and pulling a focused, yet nuanced exploration of much of Thater’s early work, tracing the intersections of her various aesthetic and conceptual interests as they converge in her environmental installations here. Read More »

LAABF, via Thisbe Gensler for Art Observed

This weekend, MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary space in Little Tokyo opened its doors again for the West Coast edition of the rabidly popular Printed Matter Art Book Fair.  The fourth iteration of the fair in the sunny metropolis, this year’s event saw strong attendance, and benefitted from a staggered scheduling that avoided the bustle of Los Angeles Art Week this past month.   Read More »

Zhu Jinshi, Ten Object 2 (1990), all photos via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Culling together a body of work spread over the past 25 years of the artist’s practice, Blum & Poe’s 66th Street New York location is currently presenting a show by Zhu Jinshi, offering an intriguing and wide-ranging perspective on the artist’s historical development. Read More »

Brian Belott, Baarpyp (2015), via Art Observed

Walking into the doors of Moran Bondaroff in LA, the viewer is immediately greeted with a swarm of colors, massive chunks of colorful canvas often swelling into distended forms that only hint at their original, rectangular shape.  These pieces, the work of Brooklyn-based painter Brian Belott, make up his first exhibition in Los Angeles, as well as his first with the gallery.   Read More »