One of the fundamental games introduced to us as children was a set of building blocks. With unhindered imaginations and seemingly infinite possibilities for rearranging the fragments, we gradually learned depth perception, spatiality, physics, and creative expression. These pieces became representational, familial, and even tools for translating the things that we thought were visually interesting. […]

In a conceptually challenging and forward-thinking text, Osborne puts forth the idea that the term ‘contemporary’ has been misused as a catch-all tag for current art that is actually quite the misnomer. He instead postulates the idea of a ‘post-conceptual art’, arguing that an accurate art-historical evaluation on the present is not only eventually foolhardy […]

Contemporary design compresses the problems of quantum physics into domestic space.  In Lightspeed, a show opened September 7th at the Ruth Bachofner Gallery in Santa Monica, California, Oregon artist Trygve Faste explores the kinetic architecture of such transformations. His work experiments with the way lines organize space dimensionally, how angles catch and refract light, and […]

As a young man really sinking my teeth into what it meant to be painter in undergraduate school, I’ll never forget the day our professor hauled out the legendary Josef Albers book on the Interaction of Color. Hers was a really well-loved copy with loose pages spilling out from the tired binding here and there. […]

It is always a joy to see an exhibition that immediately establishes a specific intention. It is even more enjoyable when the artist goes about exploring and developing this intention and pushes a way of working into a place beyond an initial thematic logic, into something or somewhere else. James Cullinane’s show Limbus at Robert […]

Kris Scheifele: To call you a multimedia artist is an understatement. Online photos don’t do justice to how intentionally dense your work is, not only in the breadth and depth of your materials and techniques, but also in the way your practice is a kind of cannibalized familial gene pool. For instance, your paintings have […]

Justin Mortimer’s paintings reverberate with a fore-knowledge of Baconian flesh and torpor, and that quintessential Freudian cogency and mass that forever changed the idealistic template of the figure in painting into an expression of a post-God mortality. For both twentieth century artists, a delicious glut of adjectives are to be found, as there are when […]

Irena Jurek: You are an ardent collector of pop cultural ephemera. The lines between your art and collecting often blur. Did your interest in art as well as collecting develop simultaneously or did one precede the other? Brent Birnbaum: Certainly. I was collecting and saving things before I was making art. I just knew I […]

Once a mark exists on a page, for the most part that’s it. Erasing can make the pigment seem to disappear, but the impression the drawing implement has left on the surface remains. It usually cannot be moved around. Usually. Adam Fowler’s exhibition of new work titled Escaping Forward at Margaret Thatcher Projects offers one […]

The relationship of art’s influence on architecture and vice versa is a phenomenon that grows steadily stronger as the fields continue to grow closer and closer together. The ambitions of leading figures in either field are constantly pushing them to find new ways to express their increasingly complex ideas, which often means bleeding over the […]