June 3 to September 2, 2018
10899 Wilshire Blvd., between Westwood Blvd. and Glendon Avenue
Los Angeles, hammer.ucla.edu

Summer in Los Angeles almost inevitably means three things: brutal fires, the Dodgers raising our blood pressure, and – this being an even-numbered year – another iteration of Made in L.A., the Hammer Museum’s buzz-attracting biennial. This year’s, officially the fourth, encompasses 33 artists. Curated by Hammer Senior Curator Anne Ellegood and Erin Christovale, this provocative exhibition is notable for its demographic inclusiveness, with 23 female or non-gender-conforming artists and 21 artists of color. As the curators didn’t nominate a unifying concept, the biennial, spread out across the entire museum, thus seems even more sprawling than usual, leaving the viewer to take each installation on its own terms. Surprises abound. Even so, unlikely dialogues spark. Issues of identity and community weave in and out, along with numerous references to the human body. That confluence of sociological critique and bodily engagement provides the closest thing to a central theme, and gives the exhibition the feeling of a quirky, consciously “woke” travelogue of sorts.

Setting the tone for the show is 97-year old Luchita Hurtado, the latest under-recognized artist to be rediscovered in a “Made in L.A.” biennial, a welcome hallmark of the series. Born in Caracas, and associated with the Dynaton Group in Northern California in the 1940s, Hurtado is represented by a set of compelling, surrealist-inflected paintings from the ‘70s that playfully manipulate perspective, employing parts of her own body – feet, belly, breasts – as elements of landscape. Mysterious, self-affirming, and oddly timeless, the work is a revelation. Although the show is at pains to blur the boundaries of old-fashioned media, two younger painters also memorably twist figuration to their own ends: Christina Quarles, whose looping, semi-abstract protagonists blithely overflow their domestic props, geometric confines, and peeling patterned backdrops; and Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, whose figures navigate their own subjective relationship to both narrative painterly traditions and scenes of traditional Americana. Durham, August 14, 2017, 2017, her image of an overturned, contorted Confederate monument amidst diverse viewers’ legs, is the show’s most telling take on the current political moment. Diedrick Brackens’ striking textile works look to revive and interweave threads of lesser-known African-American history with unsettling glimpses of narrative, while Aaron Fowler’s playful scrap-filled wall reliefs juxtapose automobile fragments of an El Camino, with mirrors, neons, and piñata-like Minion characters, to reflect his own take on American iconography. Inhabiting an altogether more pensive space, Rosha Yoghmai’s folding screen layered with talismans, glass objects, and light projections, meld allusions to the artist’s own Iranian family background and Southern Californian light and space and assemblage art, to quietly haunting effect.

The show invites, and rewards, ambitious visions: Eamon Ore-Giron’s mesmerizing geometric lobby mural, which draws from such disparate sources as Russian Suprematism, Latin American abstraction, musical scores, textiles, and indigenous mythology, rocked its space, distilling its diverse sources into a dynamic formal machinery. While Charles Long’s giddily nightmarish installation conjured art historical specters such as Guston’s smoking klansmen and Munch’s The Scream, conflating tree trunks with phalluses, through a forest of cartoony faces made from giant cross-sections of penises. The image is both goofy and disturbing. A scathing critique of patriarchy’s effect on the environment or a dark joke, once experienced you can’t unsee it. Formally innovative and often pushing limits, Long is the sort of figure you love to see given free rein in a show like this. He’s also currently the subject of his first L.A. solo show in years in the inaugural exhibition of Tanya Bonakdar’s new Los Angeles gallery. Yet it is to the curators’ credit that more intimate visions also had room to shine. One highlight is the work of Linda Stark, whose formally graphic, densely built up oil paintings conjure personal and feminine topographies, with striking technique and an appealing sincerity. At times her work is startling in its vulnerability, as in her emerald green rendering of a woman’s sex and ovaries, with ocean waves for pubic hair, and her witty/loving portraits of cats she has known. Self Portrait With Ray, 2017, an example of the latter, shows a tabby gazing back at the viewer from a circle inset like a third eye in a tearful woman’s forehead. To anyone who’s ever lost a beloved animal friend, or just anyone searching for some actual human feeling in contemporary art, Stark’s precise but soulful canvases resonate powerfully. It’s nice to be touched and dazzled by work, not just dutifully impressed or pleasantly intrigued. Reveling in its diversity of visions, this “Made in L.A.” is an eclectic survey that delivers on all counts.

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Timed to open the same week as The Armory Show on the piers, the ADAA’s long-running fair is Blue Chip city, with high-end historical and contemporary offerings. The name confusion between the two fairs is an ongoing source of befuddlement to the general public—and probably part of some larger, intentional strategy.

ROLLING OUT THE GRAY CARPET

POWER PARTNERS

A preview and press conference kicked things off, with remarks from Mayor Bloomberg. Whisked in to the assembled, he responded to a heckler: “Am I here to buy art? Not today.” He went on to cite the economic facts: a projected $44 million in activity for the fairs overall, including some $1.8 in tax revenues. He estimated some 60,000 visitors for the combined events, with 60 percent of those coming from out-of-town.

FEELING VISIONARY

Charles Long, idiosyncratic sculptor of biomorphic follies, was on hand, overseeing the installation of his solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar’s booth. This comprises three wall-mounted Saarinen-inspired tables that have undergone surrealist transformations, their tops facing viewers, hiding strange agglomerations behind. Long says he’s giving us an “alternate reality” of “displaced gravitational force,” playing off of the modernist tables and chairs found ubiquitously in surrounding booths.

EMOTIONAL OVERLOAD

“Optimistic” is how gallery employee Allana Strong categorized the Vivian Horan Fine Art booth, with its mirror-surfaced words by local artist Rob Wynne. I asked Strong if she felt her own “invisible life” or “destiny” in their presence. “My destiny, I hope, is to have my own gallery in a few years,” she mused.

JAFFE JUMPS

Tibor de Nagy’s booth is given over to the remarkably sophisticated and exuberant abstractions of Shirley Jaffe, a true “American in Paris” expatriate working at the top of her form at age 87. The artist was in town for Tuesday evening’s planned festivities, to be followed soon by a proper show at the 57th Street gallery.

SPERO’S LIFE LINE

Another strong solo consisted of Nancy Spero’s 1996 piece, “Sheela-Na-Gig at Home,” a clothesline installation strung with unique prints of a female fertility god and various undergarments, accompanied by a video of the artist (1926-2009), which finishes with her saying, “I have to get the dishes done.” Asked if she could relate to Spero’s wry feminist predicament, Lelong director Sabbatino responded, “I have a dryer.”

MATCHING ENSEMBLES

Greenberg Van Doren mounted a fine 1950s-1960s survey of works from the estate of still-underrated ab-ex master James Brooks. The lush brushstrokes of his earlier canvases are pared down to gorgeous graphic Matissian elements in later cut-paper collages.

HEADS YOU WIN

Gallery Michael Werner, of Cologne and New York, juxtaposed modernist works of Francis Picabia with the neo-expressionism of Georg Baselitz and Eugene Leroix and a contemporary work by Thomas Houseago, an emerging talent from Los Angeles. The results are authoritative and convincing.

GERMAN SPOKEN HERE

GESTURE AND FORM

The survey of Roxy Paine drawings and sculptures at James Cohan’s brings a personal response to our post-industrial landscape. His artificial take on nature is showcased not only in “tree” studies, but also in the products of his sculpture and painting “machines.” Gallery employee Goodson spoke of the “accresive process” of dropping heated “low-density polyethylene” on a conveyer belt to pleasingly accidental results. Here’s hoping that fair attendees will make the natural connections to Brancusi and Arp.

This is Blue Chip, after all.

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