Gottfried Helnwein’s paintings and photographs tackle the persistence of evil and the cruelties perpetrated by humans against each other.
Reviews
Enrique Chagoya @ di Rosa Preserve
In cross-cultural mash-ups, where indigenous icons return to a Disney-fied America, and art historical figures dance through cartoon vistas, Chagoya explores a terrain where all cultures meet and mix.
Video: Patrick Dougherty @ Palo Alto Art Center
Watch this video and learn how Dougherty transforms tons of sticks into architectural masterpieces that quite literally jump the nature/culture divide.
Alex Couwenberg @ Andrea Schwartz
Couwenberg mixes the spatial ambiguity of cyberspace with the disorienting angularity of Cubo Futurism — recasting the Southern California landscape as a mind-bending interior experience.
Christina Seely @ CCAS
Light usually signifies good things, like prosperity and knowledge. But not in Christina Seely’s images. These photos of the “brightest cities on Earth” will make you think twice the next time you flip a light switch.
Tony May @ SJICA
Tony May’s SJICA retrospective showcases the artist’s genius for embedding strong ideas in meticulously crafted objects that both tweak and invoke art history.
2010: Rear View Mirror
What made 2010 notable? OK, it was a lousy year for galleries. But most survived. More remarkably, they hosted more than a few truly memorable shows. Here are some of the highlights we covered in 2010.
Chris Daubert @ Blue Line
Action/reaction is the governing principle in this interactive light-and-sound installation in which the audience is both instigator and spectator.
The Robert Ortbal Interview
Robert Ortbal’s sculptures explore essences. Not actual essences, as in molecular structures, but unfathomable things: like the physical structure of smells as they exist in psychological, emotional and sensory space.
Ed Moses @ Brian Gross
With “wic wack”, Moses extends the abstract methods for which he is famous by running a kind of magical primitivism through a filter of Pointillism and Op. I left feeling like my molecular structure had been re-arranged.
Linda Geary @ Rena Bransten
In the Bay Area, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more exuberant, more imaginative painter than Linda Geary. Using oil, watercolor and spray paint, Geary has charted new frontiers in biomorphic abstraction.
Seth Koen @ Gregory Lind Gallery
With great economy and visual imagination, Koen creates elegant and deliciously open-ended works that tweak the orthodoxies of Minimalism while simultaneously engaging them with serious craft.
John Yoyogi Fortes @ Jack Fischer
Fortes creates an electrically charged, claustrophobic atmosphere filled with high-def images and stupefying excess, where nothing makes sense and everything seems wrapped in a cocoon of white noise.
Cornelia Schulz @ Patricia Sweetow
Talk about mixing macrocosmic and microcosmic views. Cornelia Schultz gives them to us from on high and from inside the planet’s nooks and crannies – all in the same picture.
Wayne Thiebaud @ The Crocker Art Museum
Thiebaud’s 4th solo show at The Crocker since 1951 comes at a propitious time: the museum’s 125th anniversary, the opening of its tripled-in-size exhibition space and the artist’s 90th birthday.
Fred Dalkey @ CCAS
Painting the same scene 54 times over a 6-month period, the artist documented an acutely observed interchange — between raw optical sensations and the mechanism by which they are translated into recognizable forms.