Los Angeles January 4, 2023 This month brings ten exhibitions that confront and embrace the contradiction, fragmentation, and hybridity of our contemporary condition. MOCA’s Simone Forti retrospective celebrates the influential choreographer, who has been blurring the boundaries between dance and art for six decades. At M+B, Nevena Prijic’s paintings draw on neolithic sculpture and space-age aesthetics, while Carlos Jaramillo’s photographs at Guerrero Gallery document California’s largest charreada, a traditionally Mexican rodeo event taking place just east of LA. Victor Estrada’s drawings and paintings, on view at ArtCenter, showcase his idiosyncratic style that fuses punk, pop, graffiti, and the grotesque in a wild, but characteristically Angeleno, combination. — Matt Stromberg SPONSORED In the second of three exhibitions featuring pairs of artists whose work is sometimes overtly, sometimes inadvertently, linked through the intimacies of living together, Shoshana Wayne Gallery proudly presents the tumultuous, color-dappled ceramic sculptures of Ashwini Bhat and the Pullitzer prize-winning poetry of her partner, Forrest Gander. Learn more CLOSING SOON Nevena Prijic: Skin of the Sun Dec. 10–Jan. 7, 2023 M+B Doheny, 468 and 470 North Doheny Drive, West Hollywood (mbart.com) Nevena Prijic’s paintings explore a bio-futurist fusion of body and technology. Through semi-transparent layers of color, she renders suggestive organic shapes alongside hard-edged geometries that update modernist prototypes of the “man-machine.” Bob Thompson: This House is Mine Oct. 11–Jan. 8, 2023 Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood (hammer.ucla.edu) Before his brief career was cut short by his untimely death at the age of 28, Bob Thompson had established himself as an incredibly prolific painter, who created over 1000 works in the span of eight years. This House is Mine is the first museum show dedicated to his work in over two decades. Códice Maya de México Oct. 18–Jan. 15 The Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood (getty.edu) When the conquistadors arrived in the Americas, they destroyed nearly all the books and manuscripts they found that had been created by Indigenous scribes. Only four pre-Conquest Maya manuscripts are known to have survived, and the Códice Maya de México is the oldest, estimated to have been written about 900 years ago. The Getty’s exhibition will be the first time the manuscript has been seen in the US in half a century. Read more. Become a member today to help keep our reporting and criticism free and accessible to all. Become a Member |