A Brief Survey Of Shapes And Colors Observed In The Greater Los Angeles Basin

 

Lecia Dole-Recio

Kim Fisher

Pearl C. Hsiung

Alex Olson

Monique van Genderen

Margo Victor

 

January 7 to February 11, 2023

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This is an exhibition about Los Angeles. Well, a particular piece of Los Angeles, a confluence of light, landscapes, and ideas at a specific moment leading to something unique in the city. Six painters are included, residents for many years. All attended, and most have taught at, the various lauded art schools around town. CalArts, Art Center, UCLA, Otis, Pomona, and more. Their works have been displayed in countless group and solo exhibitions throughout the city at venues ranging from major museums to small shows in studios. Their CVs are who's who lists of noteworthy Los Angeles galleries. Their paintings are held in the permanent collections of influential Southern California art museums: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. In short, their artworks are deeply woven into the last thirty years of contemporary art in Los Angeles.

 

In LA in the 1990s, as in New York, London, and elsewhere, there was a growing plurality in the kinds of art increasingly gaining public attention. Interesting and urgent work that had been fermenting in schools and studios began to find larger audiences. Los Angeles, long known for taut groups and defined movements, such as Light and Space artists or those associated with the Ferus Gallery, exploded with new ideas. Video installation artists like Diana Thater and Doug Aitken created environments with light, sculptors like Jorge Pardo and Andrea Zittel expanded the definitions of their medium. Paul Schimmel’s 1992 Helter Skelter exhibition at MOCA brought together works that had been hiding in the “long shadows cast by the harsh Southern California light” and seethed over perceived hypocrisies. These are just a few examples of the fecundity of the times.

 

Painters, especially, were experimenting with novel ideas, paths of investigation still ripe and continuing today. This exhibition brings together six artists who began exhibiting their work in Los Angeles roughly between 1993 and 2008. Distinct voices, representative of the breadth of artistic production. Often, there is a shared feeling of fluidity in how the colors seem to move over the surfaces that belies carefully structured compositions. Unexpected color juxtapositions and choices of electric hues can at first conceal precise techniques and adroit decision-making.

Most are making fully abstract works, but some distort any easy line dividing abstraction and figuration.

 

These six artists feel like constellation points, representing the range and vastness found in Los Angeles. Please join us on January 7th to see their work.