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ART SPOTLIGHT Bill
Sherwood
by Petra Wright
Photo Courtesy of GDCA Gallery
Photos Courtesy of GDCA Gallery
Mixed Media artist Bill Sherwood returns to the GDCA Gallery with his second solo exhibition at GDCA Gallery - “MY TOWN”. Sherwood is hardly a stranger to DTLA. For many, the artist’s bold, multi-layered and textured paintings strike the opening notes of their Downtown experience. Two of his colorful abstracts welcome visitors in the lobby of the Historic Core BID offices, while a custom 3-panel shadow-painting graces their conference room, representing the energy and architectural structures of Downtown.
“MY TOWN” exhibits the artist latest work, broadening his exploration to Los Angeles as a whole. Using his signature style and medium – reverse mixed media on Plexiglas – Sherwood aptly layers energy (gesture), psychology (depth) and emotion (color), to recreate this complex cocktail of agony and ecstasy, we call home.
We are all seekers – transplanted from various corners of the world - having made our journeys here in search of our individual dreams. Sherwood’s compositions examine the glitz and the glamour, the hopes and aspirations, the disappointments, capitulations, silences and heartbreaks - and the re-birthing of one’s purpose and identity that must follow.
“MY TOWN” is a love letter to Los Angeles, written by the artist with fearlessness, sensitivity, honesty and joie de vivre. Los Angeles is Sherwood’s Town, and to our pleasure, he is here to stay.
“MY TOWN” is on display at GDCA Gallery through June 30th. For more information, please contact the gallery directly at (323) 309-2875 or email Petra at petra@GDCAgallery.com
GDCA Gallery
727 South Spring Street Los Angeles, CA 90014
GDCAgallery.com
Beyond the Streets
Installation view of BEYOND THE STREETS, Los Angeles, CA, 2018, photo by Beau Roulette
Photos Courtesy of Benoit Linero, Beau Roulette & Sydell Group
Beyond The Streets (BTS) is the premier exhibition of graffiti, street art and beyond, celebrating the soaring heights to which the world’s most recognizable modern art movement has risen. The exhibit explored fundamental human themes: mark making and rule breaking. It is not intended to be a historical retrospective, but rather an examination of cultural outlaws who embody the spirit of the graffiti and street art culture.
Curated by author and historian Roger Gastman, graffiti’s foremost authority, BTS is a groundbreaking multimedia showcase of paintings, sculpture, photography, installations and more throughout 40,000+ square feet of industrial indoor and outdoor space.
Original works from Shepard Fairey, Jason Revok, Future 2000, Retna, Lady Pink, Dash Snow, C.R. Stecyk III, Guerrilla Girls, Barry McGee, Chaz, Lee Quiñones, Faile, Swoon, Invader, Kenny Scharf, Haze, Felipe Pantone, Gordon Matta - Clark, MArtha Cooper, Taki 183 plus Dennic Hopper, Takashi Murakami and many more.The one-of-a-kind, touring exhibition opened to the public in Los Angeles will run through July 6th, 2018.
The exhibition will also offer dynamic programming in the form of performances, lectures and films, along with a partnership with non-profit STOKED Mentoring and adidas Skateboarding to provide educational workshops for the inner-city youth of L.A. A curated gift shop will feature limited-edition prints, books and collectibles, including a capsule collection developed with adidas Skateboarding, artist-edition Montana Colors spray paint cans featuring Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and limited-edition Shepard Fairey fiberglass chairs by Modernica. Swindle magazine with Shepard Fairey, co-authored The History of American Graffiti and co-produced the Oscar-nominated Banksy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop.
Beyond tHE
Streets
1667 N Main Street Los Angeles, CA 90012
beyondthestreets.com
1966 -Larry-Bell- NY Larry Bell, New York NY, 1966 © Larry Bell - Photo Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Larry Bell Complete Cubes
Larry Bell Untitled, 1985 Vacuum coated glass withchrome plated metal framing 26 x 26 x 26 cm / 10 1/4 x 10 1/4 x 10 1/4 in © Larry Bell - Photo Courtesy of Genevieve Hanson and Hauser & Wirth
Complete Cubes’ is Hauser & Wirth’s first exhibition devoted to Larry Bell in his hometown of Los Angeles. It is also the first show to present glass cubes in every size that the acclaimed California Minimalist produced over the course of a career spanning nearly 60 years. With over 20 works ranging in size from 2 inches to 40 inches and spanning the early 1960s to today, this exhibition celebrates Bell’s mastery of light, reflection, and volume through a groundbreaking approach to glass.
‘Hauser and Wirth’s presentation will also feature new large-scale glass sculptures created for the exhibition’ Bell is one of the most influential artists to emerge from the LA art scene of the 1960s, a decade during which he worked alongside Light and Space artists Robert Irwin and John McCracken, and in tandem with New York Minimalists Donald Judd and Frank Stella. His unique response to the extravagant, fractured light of Los Angeles has rendered an oeuvre of powerful, distinctive work that continues to explore the optic possibilities of sculpture
Exhibits on display until September 23rd. For more information, pricing and hours, please visit www.hauserwirth.com
HAUSER & WIRTH
901 East 3rd Street Los Angeles, CA 90013
hauserwirth.com
THE BROAD
MUSEUM DTLA
Pierre Huyghe
A Journey That Wasn’t, 2006
Super 16 mm film and HD video transferred to HD video, color, sound The Broad Art Foundation
© 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), NYC ADAGP, PARIS
A Journey That Wasn’t is a free exhibition that explores complex representations of time and its passage. The exhibition includes more than 50 works drawn from The Broad Museum’s collection of postwar and contemporary art, and features more than 20 artists including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Gregory Crewdson, Andreas Gursky, Elliott Hundley, Pierre Huyghe, Anselm Kiefer, Ragnar Kjartansson, Sherrie Levine, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Lockhart, Paul Pfeiffer and Ed Ruscha. The collection exhibition is made possible in part by generous support from Leading Partner East West Bank.
The exhibition will bring back Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s highly popular The Visitors, 2012, for the first time since The Broad’s inaugural installation two years ago. Filmed at the historic Rokeby farm in upstate New York, the ethereal yet decrepit estate sets a tone of pervasive decay. The immersive nine-screen installation combines physical and emotional passages of time. Musicians play the same short song repeatedly, instilling it with nuanced meaning through voice, instrumentation and body movements. The Visitors was produced in one take, recording each musician’s performance simultaneously in different rooms of the mansion, and runs for over an hour. More than half of the works in this collection exhibition will be on view for the first time at The Broad.
Making their Los Angeles debuts are Ed Ruscha’s monumental diptych Azteca / Azteca in Decline, 2007; Sherrie Levine’s After Russell Lee: 1–60, 2016, a recent
acquisition; and Sharon Lockhart’s entire Pine Flat Portrait Studio series, 2005. Collection artists whose work will be on view at The Broad for the first time include Crewdson, Hundley, Huyghe, Toba Khedoori and Ron Mueck. “A Journey That Wasn’t brings forth the rich array of artworks in the Broad collection that capture the passage of time by including artists who use devices such as rhythm, repetition, duration, artifice and appropriation to investigate and distort our perceptions, memories and emotions,” said Joanne Heyler, founding director of The Broad. “The exhibition provides viewers space in which to reflect on their own malleable experiences of time, illusion and memory.”
The featured works in the exhibition — ranging from painting and sculpture to photography, film and installation — examine the passage of time by alluding to nostalgia or sentiments about aging, often depicting specific places in states of decay; these works can act as documentation, memorial or symbol. Composed of two canvases, each more than 27 feet long, Ed Ruscha’s Azteca / Azteca in Decline suggests two separate moments. On one, Ruscha recreates a mural he saw in Mexico City. Trompe l’oeil seams, cracks and drips look convincingly like the concrete wall it portrays. On the other canvas, the artist paints the mural as if its image were peeling away from the depicted wall, marked by the gradual yet steady effects of weather and gravity.
After Russell Lee: 1–60 is a major photographic work in which Sherrie Levine reprinted and intervened in the photographic
work of Russell Lee, a contemporary of Walker Evans, most famous for a government-funded Farm Security Agency photograph series taken in Pie Town, New Mexico, in 1940. Levine re-authors 60 photographs from Lee’s series, creating new meaning in these Great Depressionera images of rural life. The work operates in the legacy of another series Levine made in 1981, at the height of the art world’s interest in explorations of appropriation and originality, when she “re-presented” works by Evans as her own in a new and updated context. In her Pine Flat Portrait Studio series, Sharon Lockhart documents the youth of a rural town in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains during the day, when the community’s adults commuted to work, giving the impression that the population consisted entirely of children. Lockhart set up a black backdrop in
Ragnar Kjartansson
The Visitors, 2012 nine channel HD video projection
Commissioned by the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich
The Broad Art Foundation Photo: Elísabet Davids
© 2018 Artists Rights Society, NYC ADAGP, PARIS
Ed Ruscha
Azteca / Azteca in Decline, 2012
acrylic on canvas, diptych 48 x 330 in. (121.92 x 838.2 cm)
The Broad Art Foundation © Ed Ruscha
Andreas Gursky
F1 Boxenstopp III, 2007
chromogenic print mounted on Plexiglas in artist’s frame
74 x 200 in. (187.96 x 508 cm)
The Broad Art Foundation © Andreas Gursky
2018 Artists Rights Society, NYC Court. Sprüth Magers, Berlin/London
Sharon Lockhart
Pine Flat Portrait Studio, Becky, Damien, Katie, 2005
framed chromogenic print 45 1/2 x 36 3/4 in. (115.57 x 93.35 cm)
The Broad Art Foundation © Sharon Lockhart
a barn and photographed the children whenever they wanted — without sentimentality or nostalgia. Both a series of portraits and an ethnographic study, the installation slowly exposes the area’s characteristics and aspirations.
Pierre Huyghe’s A Journey That Wasn’t, 2006, the work that gives the exhibition its title, is one of many artworks in the show that follow subjective changes of time, perceived through emotion imagination and the distortions of memory. Huyghe took a trip to Antarctica in search of an elusive and rare albino penguin, later restaging the search as a performance of music and light in New York’s Central Park. His journey, both real and simulated, offers a baseline for time in this exhibition.
Still other artworks imply movement or narrative within single images; in these, historical styles and events are ruptured, collaged and re-contextualized, becoming portals into other worlds. Goshka Macuga’s tapestry, Death of Marxism, Women of All Lands Unite, 2013, weaves voyeuristic pictures of women with an image of Karl Marx’s grave, transforming the women from passive objects to active — albeit fictional — political participants in a history that usually excludes them. The title of the work invokes the famous communist rallying cry engraved on Marx’s tombstone, “Workers of all
lands unite,” and replaces the word “workers” with “women.” Macuga thus shifts the slogan from a communist call to action to end class struggle to a feminist one calling for the end of sexist oppression.
The works in A Journey That
Wasn’t
share
a
sense
of
slowness, depicting forms and
images evolving within narrow
sets of conditions. By isolating
and
manipulating
individual
moments,
the
artworks
included
provide
space
for
contemplation
offering
questions rather than answers
about
how
we
assemble
meaning in our world.
A Journey That Wasn’t will be on view in The Broad’s first floor galleries through early 2019 and is accessible with free general admission tickets. Public programs associated with the collection exhibition will be announced at a later date. The museum’s third floor galleries will continue to show a robust and changing selection of works from the
Broad collection.
The Broad
221 South Grand Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90012
thebroad.org
