"At her Brooklyn studio, Thomas explained to correspondent Nancy Giles it's that validation – demanding to be seen – that is part of what Manet intended by including his black model in Olympia: "It's about them looking out at you, and demanding to be seen, demanding the validation – Look at me, I'm here, I exist, I'm present."

By Kay Lim – 14 July 2019

"I think my paintings emerge through color. They emerge through a few different things, but significantly through the language of color and what is happening at the moment on the palette. The colors are almost the domino effect of going through a painting. One leads to the next, edges between colors interact in a way that inspires me onto the next passage or mixing of colors. I spend a lot of time mixing colors on my palette before I even put them on the surface. Mixing is a constant throughout the process, the jumble of ideas that flow through color affects my relationship to them, and how they react with each other, and that always surprises me. They don't do one thing. They're full of surprises."

By Kristin Farr – July 2019

With the opening of two additional exhibition spaces in our downtown location, Vielmetter Los Angeles is expanding the gallery in downtown Los Angeles to 24,000 sqf of exhibition space. We are closing the Culver City space as of July 6 and will be open by appointment until July 30.

Please note our new address and phone number below:

1700 S. Santa Fe Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90021
+1 213 623 3280

Our next opening will take place on Saturday, July 13, with a solo exhibition of Steve Roden’s work at the downtown gallery.

Commissioned by Studio Voltaire, Rand/Goop (July 5–October 6) is a new large-scale installation at Studio Voltaire by Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley and marks the artists’ first institutional exhibition in London.

In Rand/Goop, the artists have created a circular narrative for six totemic video sculptures. The protagonists, all performed by Reid Kelley, speak in pithy and often capricious four–line cento poems. The contents are drawn entirely from two sources. Appraisals of Russian–American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand’s ‘Objectivism’ philosophies – limited only to evangelist scholars of her work – are spliced with titles of articles listed on the website of Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle, beauty and wellness brand Goop.

Sadie Benning, Nicole Eisenman, Rodney McMillian, Pope.L, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya are included in the exhibition The Foundation of the Museum: MOCA's Collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles (May 19, 2019 - Jan 27, 2020). The exhibition is organized by Bennett Simpson, Senior Curator, with Rebecca Lowery, Assistant Curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Liz Glynn is included in Bold Tendencies' rooftop summer program (May 30 – September 21, 2019) in London with her project Unearthed Underground.

Unearthed Underground is a biomorphic network of tunnels spread over the Bold Tendencies' rooftop, some 22m wide and 15m long. The form of the network is taken from Joseph Bazalgette’s original London sewer system, tracing its tunnel network as it converges across London. Glynn’s installation uproots and re-casts this network onto the roof of the car park. The installation is marked by traces of the sewer's curious history: an inverted dinner party scene nodding to the three-hundred person banquet inaugurating the system, and a lost ceramic slipper from the Queen's parade through the tunnels. As a teenage punk in the 1990s, Glynn watched as indie and punk were subsumed by capitalism and now questions whether an "underground" is still possible under the regime of global capitalism. Inspired by the literature of Dostoyevsky, Victor Hugo and CS Lewis - places where the underground represents a darker, fantastic and utopian space - Glynn is equally concerned with historical cases of those members of society operating literally and figuratively in the shadows below ground. The curving forms of the tunnels represent a time before rational urban planning was introduced; in Victorian London, straightening and widening the crocked streets was considered part of a broader effort at moral reform targeting the lower classes. Glynn likens the act of uprooting this sewer – which doubles as a circulatory system – to the current political climate, where the festering discomforts plaguing a society can no longer be ignored.

"Outside, on the terrace, is Nicole Eisenman’s show-stopping Procession (2019), a motley parade of bronze, fibreglass and plaster figures, some of whom will slowly disintegrate in the summer rain. A jet-black giant pulls a cart atop which his pasty pal crouches, doggie-style, awaiting occasional puffs of smoke from his gaping anus. A faceless figure with trashcan lid cymbals seems unfazed by the farts in his face, or the cart’s bumper sticker, which inquires, ‘HOW’S MY SCULPTING? CALL 1-800-EAT-SHIT’. (The answer is very good.) Each figure in this farcical tableau finds dumb, flatulent pleasure in the heavy load it bears – a lesson, perhaps, on how to handle life’s burdens.

Few living artists are as original as Eisenman."

By Evan Moffitt – 20 May 2019

Organized by Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Chief Curator, with Misa Jeffereis, Assistant Curator, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis presents Paul Mpagi Sepuya's first major museum survey (May 17 – August 18, 2019).The artist’s first monograph will be published by CAM for this exhibition, featuring contributions by Grace Wales Bonner, fashion designer; Malik Gaines, writer, performer, associate professor and director of undergraduate studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts; Lucy Gallun, assistant curator of the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Ariel Goldberg, novelist, poet, and essayist; Evan Moffitt, writer, critic, and associate editor of Frieze; and Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, writer and curatorial assistant at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

"There’s no better example of the diversity of this year’s biennial than Wangechi Mutu.

Not just because of who she is, a Kenya-born art star who splits her time between Nairobi and New York, but also because of the way her practice blends painting, immersive installations, performance, video, and other media."

By Ted Loos – 10 May 2019