In Los Angeles, Abstraction Takes Centre Stage
Exhibition view: Alicja Kwade and Agnes Martin, Space Between the Lines, Pace Gallery, Los Angeles (18 May–29 June 2024). Courtesy Pace Gallery. Photo: Jeff McLane.
For a while, it seemed that all one saw in galleries was figurative or issues-based, political art that required lengthy explication. While such work is still very much in the ascendant, a plethora of remarkable exhibitions of abstract art concludes the spring season in Los Angeles.
Leading the field is BLUM, known until Jeff Poe's departure last year as Blum & Poe. Since the gallery opened in 1994, abstraction has been a cornerstone of its programme; its new incarnation seems to be doubling down. On the heels of a large exhibition of paintings by Oliver Lee Jackson, BLUM just opened parallel exhibitions of abstractions by New York artist Ryan Sullivan—who pours dusky-coloured resins into a shallow mould to miasmic effect—and Los Angeles-based Sebastian Silva, whose monumental canvases joyfully synthesise painterly accidents with shapes inspired by Disney animation.
Also at BLUM is an exquisite pocket exhibition comprising two 1978 redwood burl tables bearing arrangements of ceramics by the late Californian artist and craftsman J.B. Blunk—each functional item a marvellous abstract sculpture unto itself. Nearby is Harvest Moon Series (1956), a calligraphic casein painting by Gordon Onslow Ford, a near-neighbour and mentor to Blunk.
Onslow Ford's painting links to a presentation in an upstairs gallery of work by fellow surrealist Roberto Matta, curated by Dan Nadel and Cornelius Tittel. Alongside his characterful ceramic figures, this exhibition focuses on Matta's drawings, with a selection made between 1959 and 1999, shortly before the artist's death in 2002. These pictures are not so much abstract as fantastical; they evoke impossible, gravity-free architectural spaces. Matta called them 'inscapes'—landscapes of the mind.
Another exhibition of 'inscapes'—of quite a different character—just opened at Karma. In the 1950s, Sadamasa Motonaga was a member of the Japanese Gutai Art Association. The earliest work on display here—made with poured paint and resin—dates from 1965, towards the end of his Gutai period. Later that decade, Motonaga took up painting with an airbrush and, for the rest of his career, was known for producing graphic, black-outlined shapes that prefigured the 'superflat' painting style of Takashi Murakami. Especially when contrasted with areas of poured paint, Motonaga's hard-edged forms evoke alien beings floating in colourful extra-terrestrial landscapes.
Abstraction holds an appeal for younger artists, too. At David Kordansky Gallery, the two main spaces are given to the paintings of 34-year-old Lucy Bull. One of a generation of Los Angeles-based painters inventing their own languages of abstraction, Bull is a rising star whose work is increasingly confident and ambitious. Two grand panoramic diptychs anchor one room of this show, the largest—titled 00.09 (2024)—measuring almost six metres wide. Bull's paintings might, like Matta's images, be viewed as roiling, cosmic 'inscapes'; on another level, however, they are virtuoso demonstrations of handling paint, with the artist etching, scraping, and stippling her surfaces.
At Pace Gallery, across La Brea Avenue from David Kordansky Gallery, a cross-generational conversation occurs between Polish-born sculptor Alicja Kwade and the revered late American painter Agnes Martin. Kwade conceived the installation in collaboration with Pace Gallery founder Arne Glimcher and produced sculptures specially for the exhibition: large black steel rectangles that intersect with polished curving plates and seemingly weightless boulders. These sculptures—Distorted Dream and Distorted Day (both 2024)—reflect and encompass Martin's paintings, including The Sea (2003), the only entirely black painting the artist ever made, in the year before her death.
For more abstract sculpture, head to Marian Goodman's West Coast outpost, where British sculptor Tony Cragg delivers an astonishing exhibition of recent work. Especially in the U.K., Cragg is often considered something of a traditionalist, working in marble, steel, bronze, and occasionally wood. In Los Angeles, however, where he is not widely known and has not shown since 1986, his work seems as dazzlingly contemporary as Bull's and makes Kwade's seem rather staid by comparison. While digital technology makes possible intricate structures like the Cor-ten steel Hedge (2023), Cragg still begins his process with hand-carved elements, which he then scans. His work manifests the exaggerated illogic of digital space and proves that it is possible to find new forms when it sometimes seems that everything under the sun has been imagined.
Tradition and innovation come together in many current examples of abstract art. Recently closed in this city were stellar exhibitions of abstract painting by Japanese painter Masanori Tomita at Chris Sharp, Leelee Kimmel at The Journal Gallery, Dan Miller at Diane Rosenstein, Mark Horowitz at De Boer, and Dan Rees at Tanya Leighton.
At David Zwirner's new Los Angeles gallery, the programme-spanning exhibition '30 Years' divides fairly evenly between rooms of figuration and abstraction, both historical and new. I won't jinx it by branding it a 'moment', but it is refreshing to see a growing diversity of styles and approaches proliferating in Los Angeles' contemporary art galleries. —[O]
