Cream of the Crop: Exceptional Modern Art Collection at Ronald H. Silverman Gallery

Posted on by Diversions LA

Color, color, color. Shape, shape, shape – the glorious combination of vivid palette and extraordinary geometric precision makes Back to Basics: Contemporary Art from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation now at Cal State LA’s Ronald H. Silverman Gallery exceptional viewing. The show features more than 50 artworks, created between 1947 and 2023. The timespan covers a wide range of work that explores a variety of mediums and techniques.

Curated by Billie Milam Weisman, the artists on exhibit collectively and individually pack a powerful punch. You’ll recognize many of the names:  Jason Adkins, Josef Albers, Saradell Ard, Tim Bavington, Charles Biederman, Isaac Brest, Casper Brindle, Tom Burr, S. Byrne, Ronald Davis, Tim Ebner, Ned Evans, Paul Gadegaard, Betty Gold, Daniel Jackson, Donald Judd, Anish Kapoor, Ellsworth Kelly, Melissa Kretschmer, Sol Lewitt, Vladimir Llaguno, Joe Lloyd, Pard Morrison, Andy Moses, Kenneth Noland, John Pearson, Brian Porray, Kevin Reinhardt, Michael Rey, Dorothea Rockburne, David Ryan, Robert Schaberl, Arthur Silverman, Frank Stella, Gary Stephan, Jeremy Thomas, and Victor Vasarely.

 

The show’s vibrancy percolates from the moment the viewer enters the gallery space, presenting stellar examples of works that range from the minimalist to the conceptual. Overall, one word comes to mind to describe the exhibition: radiant. The works emanate light, they pull, revel, and reveal in it. Some works are layered, others deceptively simple. The emphasis throughout is on geometric constructs such as circles, squares, lines, spheres, angles. Color jumps from the art, whether created in eye-popping primary shades or lush jeweled patinas. The works dance with light and change upon approach – viewed in extreme close up, the images differ in appearance from a longer-range view due to the way in which their geometric patterns shape how the eye perceives each work.

Anish Kapoor’s astonishing, ruby rose red “Blood Mirror III” is an intensely reflective example of the use of both light and color. The circular bowl-like mirrored surface contains reflective meaning within meaning and serves as a beautiful example of a work’s appearance altering based on the viewer’s proximity to it.

Jeremy Thomas’s “Iseki Yellow” is an indefinable layered shape, a flower, a collection of sun bubbles, a collection of cells about to take shape and metamorphosize. Both works exude their singular color as if it were a halo around the piece.

 

Joe Lloyd’s “Incline” is a very different work, a large-scale canvas with a varied color palette that traverses a literal and figurative ascent of light and shadow in angles bisected by colors from a dominant rich gold to a sky blue and violet. It is both structure and stairwell, handrails leading to a rooftop or along a path to a mountain peak. Each level is both platform and angle.

A more diminutive work, Pard Morrison’s “So Nice to Be Here With You,” packs a multi-colored series of striped lines into a rectangular canvas, color gradients that draw the eye forward and back with their precision and shifts.

Ned Evans’ color field painting “Got Red” is a large work that stripes a range of oranges, reds, golds, and yellows vertically across the vast canvas, colors that resemble the shades of a burnished summer sunset. Cooler shades prevail in the blues and aquas of Evans’ “Quarter,” which uses a variety of square and rectangular shapes within one canvas to create a lush vision of shadow and light that at once resemble the shape of buildings, the patterns on ocean waves, and leaf shadows in a forest. It is a quietly poetic vision.

While some works are simply beautiful to look at, others contain a visual experiment.

Such is the case with Josef Albers’ “Homage to the Square: Upon Arrival,”  in which three squares are utilized to reveal the subjectivity of color.  Painted using varied light conditions, Albers’ work is both art and alchemy, as it tests the way in which the alignment of different colors side by side create different visual experiences.

Beautifully curated with color the dominant criteria for grouping in each gallery space, the exhibit fully reveals the absolute poetry in the geometric form, the passion of color, and the compelling visual spectrum that makes up the way in which artists – and all humans – view the world.

As multi-faceted as a diamond, the works in Back to Basics dazzle. The closing reception takes place on Saturday,  July 27 from 12 – 5 p.m. The gallery is open 12-5 Monday-Friday only. It is located on the campus of California State University Los Angeles.

  • Genie Davis; exhibition images provided by LA Art Documents; additional opening day images by Genie Davis

Quick Takes and Art Fireworks: Track 16, Durden and Ray, TSLA, Monte Vista, 515 Gallery, Persons Unknown All at the Bendix

Posted on by Diversions LA

If you’d like to experience some explosively beautiful art this weekend along with your fireworks and BBQ,  there’s six stellar exhibitions all in one stop at the Bendix Building in DTLA’s fashion district.

Track 16 was our first stop, and it’s a good place to begin.

In the 10th floor space, vast, immersive, beautiful works evoke life in LA itself, from movie theater to subway car to LA’s iconic 2nd street tunnel, awash in silver light. Frank Ryan‘s lustrous Lived Perspective features large-scale oil paintings and smaller works on paper, each of which offers a window into the lovely soul contained inside familiar representational scenes.

The powerful, even spectacular, images shimmer with dreamy intensity. Works such as “Pitch Perfect,” his rapt audience of theatergoers, are thrilling, awash in both beauty and an almost subliminal danger. It’s a gorgeous show, and an important one, evoking both LA life, and the human condition, both with a touch of the ethereal. The show runs through July 13.

Downstairs at Track 16, you’ll find Lenny Silverberg’s monochromatic richness in Streets and Borders. Bleak but beautiful ink washes on paper depict those displaced, whether homeless, forgoten or lost due to politics, wars, or mental health. Devastating but involving, delicately rendered, and haunting, these are memorable, meaningful works.  Closes July 13, with an artist’s talk.

 

On the 8th floor, Durden and Ray invites viewers to join artists in their Bed.

Curated by David Leapman, Richard Davey, and Jenny Hager,  this fresh, intriguing exhibition features artists from LA as well as from the U.K. and Ireland. Artists Jorin Bossen, Steph Goodger, Jenny Hager, Susie Hamilton, David Leapman, Lee Maelzer, Andy Parsons, Sarah Sparkes, and Lorraine Wake masterfully present beds both realistic and more obscurely representational. We see bedrooms that confined the artist during the “shelter in place” Covid-19 restrictions,  hospital beds, sensually rumpled beds, abstract beds, and even, in Bossen’s western scene, the bed of earth, a final resting place.  A terrific concept and vibrant execution shape this diverse, standout group exhibition. Exploring the idea of the bed as a place in which we are often born and die and everything in between, these beds are made to dream in. But hurry — the exhibition closs this weekend, July 6th.

 

On the 5th floor, at Monte Vista Projects, Daniel Tovar‘s Anti-Frontier,  takes on the much glorified concept of the American frontier, as well as the environmental impact of disparate manmade incursions on that landscape. Comprised of a two-channel video installation that fills the largest walls in the gallery, and a series of concrete-and-steel sculptures presenting modern artifacts as ancient ruins, viewers explore two distinct areas of the Mojave region. Video and sound were recorded at California City, an attempt at a planned community in an isolated and arid region, and a wind farm located in the Tehachapi Pass.  There is the sense of barely avoided environmental catastrophe hanging over every lovely, lush frame of video footage,  along with the question of what precisely man has wrought in our fragile eco-landscape. The exhibition closes July 7th.

 

 

A part of the Share-A-Wall initiative, Push and Pull at Gallery 515, also located on the 5th floor, utilizes a gorgeous mix of mediums from woven woods and fabric to ceramics and thickly painted images. Abstract and exciting, artists Elana Kundell, Janet Neuwalder and Carol Shaw-Sutton presented deep and dreamy work as varied in imagination as material. Curated by Fatemah Burnes, the work evokes delicate beauty in Shaw-Sutton’s sculptural wall works, pulsating color and depths in Kundell’s, and a dreamy asethetic in Neuwalder’s impossibly lovely ceramics. The exhibition just closed, but you can view more images here. 

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In The Eyes Come First,  at Persons Unknown on the Bendix Building’s 6th floor, alien, gorgeous, and ominous sculptures rivet with their fluid movements and mysterious shapes. Carved in stone by Joshua Pelletier, the sinuous and strange beings here are  viscerally exciting, and surprise the eye while compelling repeat viewing. The exhibition closes July 20th.

Talk about aliens! Back on the 5th floor, Tiger Strikes Asteroid exhibits a cool mix of the sculptural and the photographic. Encounters, created by artists Makenzie Goodman & Adam Stacey, serves up fascinating images of the desert, UFOs, the starlit sky,  and strange objects from space, taking viewers on a visionary trip to another world. The subject encompasses Mojave Desert residents who have claimd contact with UFOs. This exhibition is part of an ongoing collaboration that began at the Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency in 2019.

Among the many highlights are an 8mm film depicting experiences in the Mojave Desert, eerie and lovely black and white photos, and beautiful ceramic sculptures all focused on the idea of interplanetary lifeforms. This transportive exhibition closes July 7.

With work this fine in so many innovative spaces, all in one location, it’s easy to enjoy art that transcends the pyrotechnic residue hanging over LA. Boom!

Written by Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis