"Most of the works were made in 2019, before any notion of the pandemic infiltrated our daily lives. Yet, looking at these large scale works that encompass one’s field of vision, the process of being deconstructed, ripped apart, and then stitched back together again feels familiar. The show, titled “This is Real” might provide a reminder that the “normal” we came from certainly won’t be the one we return to, and perhaps we will arrive on the other side of this more colorful and dimensional than we were before. "

By Lindsay Preston Zappas - 12 January 2021

"Esther Pearl Watson finds a way to channel the surrounding strangeness of this period — and our collective adapting to an unprecedented time — in Safer at Home: Pandemic Paintings at Vielmetter Los Angeles. In more than 100 paintings, the artist froze mundane moments that she observed during the pandemic, which collectively catalogue larger shifts like social distancing, racial uprisings, and economic uncertainty. "

By Eva Recinos - 12 January 2021

"Bass’ work is like a ride on the Long Island Rail Road, winding through a certain kind of world, in which crushed skulls and young love happen simultaneously and often unnoticed, where aspiration and reality meet, where the Piano Man’s jar is filled up with cock-like bread, where hearts are broken and lose their three-dimensionality, only to unflatten at the sight of beautiful arms at work on a floor. And then, eventually, you reach the lighthouse, where the water crashes up against the shore, and there you lie, naked, hoping the droning illumination will project you into yet another narrow strip of land filled with memories."

By William J. Simmons - 5 January 2021

"Coming of age at the tail end of Abstract Expressionism, the painter went through a number of styles (some of her early works employed language) before distilling her influences, from Agnes Martin and Joan Mitchell to feminist politics, into a potent vocabulary that plays with space in a sometimes languid, sometimes jarring, but always graceful way."

By Hilton Als - December 2020

"Watson started the body of work that became Safer at Home: Pandemic Paintings in March in the early days of the shelter in place orders in Los Angeles, and the series spans the timeline of the pandemic right through to the days before the show opened at Vielmetter Los Angeles in late November. In a still ongoing series of nearly 200 paintings, each no bigger than a laptop, Watson processes the subtle and cataclysmic changes wrought by a season of public health crises, civil unrest, and political volatility. But she does this through a lens as intimate as the work’s scale, with street views of urban and suburban blocks, one frame at a time."

By Shana Nys Dambrot - 10 December 2020

"McMillian’s works feel grounded––historically, physically, ideologically––in an arresting and visceral manner, beyond the white cube of Vielmetter. His small paintings are complemented by human-sized cells, constructed from cardboard, fabric and acrylic. These modular, darkened masses are suspended from the walls, implicating viewers in their murky, iconic depths. Motionless, yet organic, these forms serve as manifestations of the lost “accursed share” suggested by McMillian’s constellation of quotations. Juxtaposed with the paintings’ brutal abstraction and panoply of voices, these cardboard assemblages function as doors opening onto  a distorted body."

By Josh Wagner - December 2020

"Walking into the exhibition’s installation room, with its dark green motif wallpaper and midcentury wooden furniture, feels like taking a step back in time. Icons of the civil rights movement such as Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy are prominently featured on the walls, and vintage luggage, frames, and rag dolls are strewn about the room."

By Lana Nauphal - 2 December 2020

"Stanya Kahn’s current outing at ICA Los Angeles consists of just three filmic works produced over a ten-year span. Anyone hoping to grapple with a greater breadth of the artist’s considerable output, will have to wait. That said, the curatorial choices here are pointed and vividly bring to life the artist’s core themes. Foremost among these is an abiding concern with the problem of language – that part of communication which structures human experience and renders it meaningful, yet by the same token can serve to limit, and even undermine existence as such. All three videos would seem to take their cue from an acute premonition of communication breakdown, which is seen to rebound, with mounting force, between continually marginalized human actants."

By Jan Tumlir - 17 November 2020

"For Body Politic, his latest exhibition at Vielmetter Los Angeles, McMillian continues working in an additive manner. The White House Painting, II (2018–20) is made from the physical remnants of the 2018 version, while works on paper such as An Abbreviated History in Abstraction (2019–20) reflect a history of violence against Black individuals, contextualized by writings such as Harriet A. Washington’s Medical Apartheid (2007)1 and Dorothy Roberts’s Killing the Black Body (2000)."

By Jennifer Piejko - November 2020

"Rodney McMillian’s new show at Vielmetter Los Angeles, Body Politic, springs from such histories of the medical exploitation of Black people in the United States. His bright paintings and huge black sculptures of body parts, which together assess American Abstract Expressionism, are inspired by the groundbreaking work of scholars Dorothy Roberts and Harriet A. Washington. The former wrote about the eugenic controls of Black people and the latter authored the 2006 book Medical Apartheid, which sets forth the above story about Mr. Yeagin and also documents research conducted on Black prisoners."

By Yxta Maya Murray - November 2020

"The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA) presents a trio of Kahn’s films in the exhibition Stanya Kahn: No Go Backs, which runs through January. In addition to the world premiere of No Go Backs, curator Jamillah James complements the film with Stand in the Stream, filmed between 2011 and 2017, and It’s Cool, I’m Good (2010). The films capture Los Angeles throughout the last decade, a landscape that remains consistently familiar even as civil rights, climate change, and Kahn’s personal relationships rapidly evolve. "

By Renée Reizman - 3 November 2020

"Rodney McMillian’s Body Politic at Vielmetter Los Angeles builds on themes the artist has long engaged with: racial and socioeconomic injustice, and the relationship between politics and aesthetics.

The exhibition is comprised of collages with text and semi-abstract sculptures, as well as one wall-sized installation. McMillian’s strategies are not novel, but he has rigorously honed his craft. His grasp of nuance and light-handed approach coax viewers in before confronting them with the history of racism in the United States."

By Natalie Haddad - 30 October 2020

"Stanya Kahn has always been politically engaged. Recently, on her Twitter and Instagram accounts, she has consistently posted and reshared vital information for people protesting police murder, brutality, and structural racism. Moreover, she and her son Lenny were out in the streets of LA protesting after the murder of George Floyd; and they, like many of the other protestors, were physically and mentally vulnerable in the face of a militarized police force. "

By William J. Simmons - 26 October 2020

"“A Consequence of History,” a 2020 collage-and-text work by Deborah Roberts made exclusively for T and inspired by the art of Barbara Kruger. Both artists use found imagery in their work — though Roberts generally does not combine her images with text, as she does here in tribute to Kruger’s style. They also both attended Syracuse University, at different times. In an interview, Roberts said that in Kruger’s art, “There’s no room to not understand what she’s talking about.”

By Megan O'Grady - 19 October 2020

"Who is in for a couch conversation with Kennedy Yanko and Kimberly Drew? The former’s Vielmetter exhibition in Los Angeles, “Salient Queens,” is up now providing juicy fodder for a discussion surrounding a new body of work that deals in scrap metal and the juxtaposition of competing narratives. “After I pull metal and other materials from salvage yards, I sit with them in a formal dialogue. I have to understand their physical stance before I can comprehend their presence conceptually. In time, the objects’ stories reveal themselves to me. From there, I can begin to transition the material away from its previous circumstances and reposition its atomic particles (literally, and metaphorically) such that their compositions may be perceived differently and thus newly defined,” says Yanko. To accompany the opening of the exhibition, photographer Mike Vitelli captured Yanko in avant-garde fashion pieces surrounded by the work on view."

- 16 October 2020

"Checkerboard tiles, circular tables, soup bowls, and other interior details are transformed into ecstatically abstract elements under Dingle’s deft brush. In several paintings (including “Full Service,” above), unaccompanied toddlers are seen sharing a meal, suggesting an antic portrait of socially distanced dining and pandemic parenting."

By Andrea K. Scott - October 2020

"One can easily understand Wall’s point upon seeing a piece like Disinfect Our Politics (2020), which includes an image from a vintage advertisement that features a blindfolded white man, who resembles a politician, centered between mirror images of Black women sporting face masks and cleaning spray against a backdrop resembling an inverted confederate flag.Something in the milk isn’t clean and the imagery of Black women cleaning it up speaks volumes, not just in relation to politics, but to corporate America and the home."

By Dominique Clayton - 13 October 2020

"Many of the new paintings seem moderately askew, arranged around an axis maybe 10 degrees off-center. That’s a form of painterly organization she’s used in the past, though here the slant feels more like wobbling, careening. “I really believe in the politics of improvisation,” she says. “On its good side, it’s about contingency, emotions. Tightrope walking.”

By Jason Farago - 8 October 2020

"This exhibition comprises three works by Kahn produced over the past ten years, including her latest short film, No Go Backs (2020), marking its Los Angeles debut. Together, these videos present an urgent reflection of our times, foregrounding global concerns such as climate change, racism, state power, and rebellion with the artist’s singular humor and embrace of experimental time and narrative."

Free drive-in screening October 7th, more info here.

"For the site-specific project, the artist looks at ideas of representation, media aesthetics, and domesticity in collage works made of vintage wallpaper and magazine clippings—like one reading “We Are More Than a Moment” in neon, and another featuring cutouts of women, flowers, and logos from an old issue of Life. Within the vitrines, visitors will find elements of photography and everyday objects like sunscreen, garden hoses, and flip-flops make up 3D installations that encouraging a closer look into Gaignard’s universe."

By Pearl Fontaine - 10 September 2020

"The cool, analytical postmodern tradition has been shot through with the warmth of naked bodies touching. Sepuya doesn’t simply include the camera in the image but rests it tenderly in the crook of his subject’s neck. He doesn’t just show the artist’s hand but places it gingerly on his subject’s back. The images allow the viewer to take pleasure in the surface as well as to look for meaning below it. The photograph’s soft lines and the visible smudging on the mirror add an almost paint-erly texture to a photographic print."

By Ashton Cooper - September 2020

"Eisenman has lately funneled much of her perversity into raucous sculptures that answer exactly to the tenor of our ghoulish, carnivalesque politics. But political life and social life are not exactly the same. There is a difference, for instance, between a rally, where people shout slogans, and a salon like Ariana’s, where people read, and listen, are witty and perverse, and expose their vulnerable inner lives, and where everybody is watching to see what happens next."

By Sebastian Smee - 19 August 2020

"Throughout Kahn forms contemporary layers over historic land contestations: the boys travel by bikes instead of carts, northbound rather than along the southerly inroads formed by westward expansionism during the 19th century; they carry plastic water bottles that must be constantly replenished and skate the dusty half-pipe of the Los Angeles River over which surface waters scantly flow. Albeit subtly, ‘No Go Backs’ never loses sight of the fact that scarcity has been purposefully etched into this landscape."

By Gabriella Beckhurst - 20 August 2020

"Los Angeles-based dealer Susanne Vielmetter started out with a simple idea for her business: reflect the culture that you see around you. With that in mind, she opened her gallery in 2000 with a diverse, gender-balanced stable of artists at a time when white male conceptual artists were dominating the West Coast scene.

Now, as she marks her 20th anniversary in the business, the world is catching up."

By Kate Brown - 6 August 2020

"Pope.L’s I-Machine (2014–20) has a handmade, provisional appearance that conveys a sense of a thing in a state of ongoing and perhaps hopeless becoming. The artist describes the work as a 'self-blinding contraption… self-blinding because its function is to encourage unknowledge or ignorance or, at best, reflection on ignorance and doubt. by encourage, i mean, when one is in the presence of this assembly, one should feel prodded toward opacity, uselessness, dumbness and incompleteness rather than transparency, smarty-pantsness and wholeness.'"

By Artforum - July 2020