Chrissy Angliker: Nudes
Kelly Berg: An Ever-Shifting World
Rachel Rosenthal: Early Works on Paper


June 1 - July 13, 2019

Exhibition Information | Chrissy Angliker | Kelly Berg | Rachel Rosenthal

Whether they are submerged in pools of luscious impasto paint, or melting on blankets rippling over brushy patches of grass, Chrissy Angliker’s nudes exhibit a carefree harmonization with their environments. As she states, “the human body and the banks of a river, are both vessels for the same element. Water is an essential component of their composition, and also the intermediary between these vessels.” Each fluid mark contains a multitude of colors, both revealing and obscuring the human form beneath its slightly reflective, acrylic veneer. Larger paintings, such as Poke Your Shadow, are made of layers so thick that there is an actual depth to the water, the surface betraying the motion below with flickering ripples of paint, like whitecaps on the ocean. Close enough to touch, the nudes are relaxed, approving of our presence; we are participants, looking at “women through the eyes of a woman.”
Born in Switzerland and living in New York, Angliker sets these paintings in vaguely familiar, yet unidentifiable, locations. On her canvases, as the presence of the paint grows, the images disintegrate and float apart. “My ultimate desire is that the viewer should be able to see the paint separately, like the microscopic cells from which the illusion gets created. The bigger the gap, the more space for the viewer.” When approaching one of Angliker’s paintings, you piece together the fragmented image, “see the transparency of how it was created,” and ultimately, share that time and space with the artist.

Kelly Berg records her immediate impressions of Hawaii’s craters, lava fields, and jagged formations in oily ink spread on a metal plate, simultaneously describing the landscape and relating to its viscous, craggy, texture. The monoprints made from these metal prints are unique, even when Berg chooses to work with the ghost image of a used plate, she is manipulating and morphing the original image, like a memory that is constantly revisited. She is stimulated by the sublime, wrangling with the conflicting emotions of fear and attraction, of terror and awe. Her lifelong obsession with extreme weather and geology began during her childhood in Minnesota watching summer storms and visits to National Parks. After the Hawaii’s Kilauea Volcano erupted in 2018, Berg returned, and observed “how the landscape had shifted and changed…a metaphor for the current state of our world and environment beyond Hawaii.” Working at The Donkey Mill Art Center in Holualoa, Berg uses spikes and pyramids in the prints to represent the “volcanic energy within the island.” While this chaos is emblematic of our anxious age, Berg also uses the pyramid as a symbol of transcendence, providing an ancient human context within the shifting natural tangle of lightening and lava.

Rachel Rosenthal was one of the key figures in West Coast performance art, creating works that combined theatre, dance, multi-media staging and live music. Born in Paris in 1926 of Russian Jewish parents, she studied at the High School of Music and Art in New York, and then the Sorbonne in Paris. Moving back and forth between the two artistic capitals, she studied with Hans Hofmann, danced with Merce Cunningham, and formed relationships with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. A little known aspect of her early career centers on her study of engraving and etching with the English artist, Stanley William Hayter. Hayter founded his printmaking studio in Paris in 1927 and, after moving to No. 17 rue Campagne-Premiere in 1933, it became known as Atelier 17. Among the artists who frequented his studio in Paris were Picasso and Giacometti, and when he moved to New York during WWII, Hayter welcomed Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and others. The circle of artists working in etching and engraving with whom Rosenthal became friends included, Terry Haass, Wifredo Lam and Pierre Courtin. These artists exhibited their work together at the IX Salon de Mai in Paris in 1953. The exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery will include Rosenthal’s drawings and prints from this period, as well as works by artists of her circle with whom she traded prints. Rosenthal moved to Los Angeles in 1955, becoming involved with the art scene surrounding Ferus Gallery; that same year, she created the experimental “Instant Theatre,” performing and directing it for ten years. She played a major role in the Women’s Art Movement in LA, co-founding the cooperative gallery, Womanspace, in 1973. Her place in performance art is legendary and her influence vast. She died in Los Angeles at the age of 88 in 2015.

Don Bachardy: Self-Portraits
Carol Es: Memoir
Gwynn Murrill: Figures


April 13 - May 25, 2019

Exhibition Information | Don Bachardy | Carol Es | Gwynn Murrill

On view in the gallery office:
Roberta Neiman

In 1953, Don Bachardy met the renowned British literary figure, Christopher Isherwood, on the beach in Santa Monica, and they remained a devoted couple until the author’s death in 1986. Their home in Santa Monica Canyon became a salon for the local art world as well as a mecca for artists, writers, and musicians visiting from abroad. Since then, Bachardy has become one of the most celebrated portrait artists of our time, always working from life, never from photographs. His illustrious subjects include, Aldous Huxley, Dorothy Parker, Igor Stravinsky, Joan Didion, Ed Ruscha, Jack Nicholson, Allen Ginsberg, Katherine Hepburn, Elton John, and Francis Bacon. The list is endless but, as Bachardy notes, “when a scheduled sitter has cancelled a sitting at the last moment…if I have a strong urge to work and can find no one ready to sit at short notice, I sometimes set up a mirror and paint myself.” Perhaps because they are free of a sitter’s expectations, Bachardy’s self-portraits manifest an extraordinary range of artistic exploration. This exhibition will include 15 self-portraits made within the past three years, all vastly different, but all sharing Bachardy’s penetrating eyes.

A memoirist creates narratives from the nexus of life’s reflections; revelations and turning points transform into diaries of experience, nostalgic photographs, love letters, and paintings. Artist, writer, and musician, Carol Es uses a wide spectrum of media to express personal, yet universal, stories of existential depth with humor and wit. In her new solo exhibition, Memoir, she presents a collection of oil and mixed media paintings, small gouaches on San Fernando Valley area maps, and drawings from The Journal Project—her ongoing diary made by hand-cutting garment patterns of manila paper and spontaneously marking them using only the tools of the manufacturing trade. Additionally, Craig Krull Gallery will host the launch of Es’s first major bookwork of nonfiction, Shrapnel in the San Fernando Valley. She will be reading an excerpt from this memoir, offering a short Q&A, and signing paperbacks, hardcovers, and special editions of the book, just prior to the exhibition reception.

Sculptor, Gwynn Murrill states that her “primary point of departure when beginning a new piece is the memory of a form that caught my attention.” She is recognized for her animal forms, cats, coyotes, and birds, which are reductively composed in sleek, streamlined shapes that she describes as “simultaneously abstract and figurative.” The current exhibition of small human figures represents a departure in both subject and style. With a more hand-built quality, made of plaster and epoxy, these intertwined human forms resemble clusters of Pompeii bodies that were buried in ash. The sculptures with just two figures, which Murrill calls “The Wrasslers”, were inspired by erotic Japanese Shunga prints. Some of these figures ended up being stacked on top of each other, thus forming another series, “Pyramids.” Several of the plaster pieces were later translated into bronze. In all her sculptural work, Murrill emphasizes the relationship between positive form and negative space.

In the gallery office, we will feature a selection of Roberta Neiman's photographs, which are included in her new book, Magnetic North: Summers with Extraordinary People. There will be a Q&A with Neiman moderated by Dan McCleary, as well as a book signing, on April 13th at 3pm, prior to the reception.

“Photography is tied to specifying, and in Roberta Neiman’s book the images pay attention to the definition of a time and place in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, over four decades ago, where a group of writers, actors, filmmakers, performers, musicians and artists of every description came together, exchanged thoughts and explored ideas, separately and in collaboration.”
-Richard Serra, April 2017

Phranc: Swagger
Connie Jenkins: Low Tide


July 14 - August 25, 2018

Exhibition Information | Phranc | Connie Jenkins

Phranc, or as she calls herself, “the All-American Jewish Lesbian Folksinger,” began her musical career in L.A. with punk groups like Nervous Gender in the early 80s. She quickly went solo, with an amazing career telling story-songs about women heroes like “Martina” (as in Navratilova), and “I Don’t Like Female Mudwrestling.”
In her other career is as a visual artist, she calls herself “The Cardboard Cobbler”, making everyday objects with paper and cardboard, thread and paint. Previous exhibitions at Craig Krull Gallery have focused on beachwear, winter/ski apparel, and vintage toys. At the museum shop of The Autry Museum of the American West, she created an entire store within a store, based on old western trading posts. This project coincided with the Autry’s Out West program of LGBTQ histories of the West, organized by Gregory Hinton.
Phranc’s new exhibition at our gallery, entitled Swagger, will include colorful hand-made paper dresses that recall her youth when she was taken to her uncle’s dress shop downtown to try them on (which made her very uncomfortable). She says, “Butch fashion is my armor. The dresses I was forced to wear when I was young only made me more determined to dress the way I do today.” Also included are paper life jackets that refer to her Lesbian-Feminist heroes who are fiercely surviving and thriving. As Phranc says, these jackets are “strong enough to float me in a world that wants me to drown." At the opening reception on Sat., July 14, Phranc is orchestrating a “Butch Parade”, a fashion show in which these heroes sail down the runway, head above water in her paper life jackets.

For more than four decades, Connie Jenkins has used water as both a subject and a metaphor. She recognizes the ebb and flow of tides, like the seasons and other natural cycles, as fundamental connections to our natural environment. Her recent tide pool paintings bear a relationship to photo-realism, but, as Jenkins explains, in painting water, she has “tried to paint the visual patterns with which our brains construct images—a shared illusion.” The water is rippled and foamy, blurring and bending the shapes of the purple sea urchins and green anemone below. By focusing on a horizonless bird’s-eye view of the water, Jenkins flattens the image, making it both an illusionistic representation of water, and an abstraction of paint marks that acknowledge the canvas as an object. The tide pool’s surface becomes the picture plane where illusion meets abstraction.

D.J. Hall: Dedication.....
Jessie Homer French: Mapestries


June 3 - July 8, 2017

Exhibition Information | D.J. Hall | Jessie Homer French

On view in the gallery office:

Vivien Mildenberger

Living upon a web of fault lines, as all Californians do, Jessie Homer French decided to make “safe art for above one’s bed in case of temblors.” Her “mapestries” are hand-embroidered maps made of a variety of cloths and threads that resemble the qualities of quilts. Most of the mapestries in this exhibition are based on the area she inhabits, the Coachella Valley, Joshua Tree and Salton Sea, while others focus on the LA Basin. The fault lines themselves are one inch wide strips of cloth that traverse through finely stitched palm trees, roadrunners, chuckwallas, ocotillos, and highways. Her work combines elements of traditional gendered handicraft with a contemporary, environmental awareness and place-oriented sensibility.

D.J. Hall also lives in the Coachella Valley, though part-time, and her iconic paintings of women in big sunglasses lounging poolside with drinks, cakes and magazines were the subject of a major retrospective at the Palm Springs Art Museum in 2008. Hall partially attributes her interest in these subjects to a sometimes difficult childhood that found moments of happiness in her birthday parties in the backyard and the pool of her grandmother's home. Her glamorous women are able to function as personal "illusions of reality" as well as social commentary on our image-conscious culture. This exhibition includes paintings as well as a large tapestry, a selection of small plein-air landscape studies and a new series entitled, The Riff Project. Inspired by an arbitrary grouping of thumbnail images of her paintings on the computer, Hall created archival pigment prints of these images and arranged them in long horizontal grids and face-mounted them to plexiglass.

Michael Light: Sidereal Rift
Jeff Brouws: Desuetude: The Berkeley Pit Stereographs
Pamela Kendall Schiffer: Yellowstone

December 3, 2016 - January 14, 2017

Exhibition Information | Michael Light | Jeff Brouws | Pamela Kendall Schiffer

Michael Light’s work ranges from conceptual reconsiderations of NASA lunar imagery in his project Full Moon, to his aerially performative large-format works of the altered landscape. For the past two decades, Light has photographically examined the physical, cultural and mythological spaces of the American West, creating monumental and majesterial photo-books. Displayed on tilted steel plates supported by tripods, the 35x44” studio-made books are immersive, interactive journeys.

For his sixth solo show at Craig Krull Gallery, Light has re-visited the vast grid of Southern California which he had initially explored in his books, Los Angeles 02.12.04 (LA Day 2004), Los Angeles 07.27.05 (LA Night 2005) and Rancho San Pedro 04.28.06 (2006). This new project, Sidereal Rift, was made from a helicopter on the night of September 10, 2016. The glowing arteries and skeins of light float as if a web of electricity existed in a void of jet-black outer space. It is a landscape orchestrated by mankind, patterned by power structures, and becomes in fact a place purely defined by light — superseding actual physical terrain to show a complex and endless web of human construct.

Michael Light’s photographic evaluation of the arid land of the American West has its roots in the US Geological Survey expeditions of the 19th century. Participants in these efforts included legendary photographers such as Timothy O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson, whose photographs informed Congress and the American populace living in the East about the opportunities and challenges of the West. In an adjoining gallery, Jeff Brouws’ photographic series, Desuetude: The Berkeley Pit Stereographs, visually and conceptually references this photographic history. Opened in 1955 and closed in 1982, this copper mine in Butte, Montana is both an environmental problem and a tourist attraction. Brouws has formatted his photos of the toxic pit to resemble stereographs, double image cards that create a 3-D illusion when seen through a viewer. His images are framed with the graphics and fonts that were used by 19th century stereographic publishing companies, giving them the historical context of viewing the West as a geological opportunity and wonder. The landscapes that Brouws has created, however, evidence the mistakes and misunderstandings inherent in what we didn’t see through those vintage lenses.

Finally, the gallery will present recent paintings of Yellowstone by Pamela Kendall Schiffer. The extraordinary geothermal features of this region became the focus of the Hayden Geological Survey of 1871, which included photographs by William Henry Jackson and paintings by Thomas Moran. The report that Hayden sent to Congress helped to convince the government and President Grant to create our first National Park. Schiffer’s reverential approach parallels the work of the Tonalist painters of the early 20th century who avoided majestic spectacle in favor of a more reductivist and intimate composition that evoked a poetic mood. As the artist states, “I structure my paintings in an ever simpler way. I try to pare down a scene to its essential qualities. I hope to make images that are fairly uncomplicated, while still imparting a sense of space, atmosphere and stillness, paying particular attention to the quality of light.”

Mark Posey: Bless the Mess
Mark Swope: Between
Nancy Monk: Italy


October 22 - November 26, 2016

After the faceted dimensions of Analytical Cubism, the work of Picasso and Braque evolved into the collage-like constructions of Synthetic Cubism. In his first solo exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery entitled, Bless the Mess, Mark Posey similarly picks up the pieces of life scattered about him and arranges his droll interpretations of them onto awkward, wobbly tables that appear to be lifted from the Cubist realm of cockeyed perspective. Unlike the flat fragments of Cubist still lifes however, Posey’s bottles, baseballs and bricks are oozily conjured elements that are stuck on the surface like an egg sunny-side up in a frying pan. Painterly rugs and squat tables are lifted up, parallel to the picture plane and studded with subtly dimensional, almost sculptural incarnations of animated beer cans and paint brushes that appear to have a life of their own, and even the tables have legs that want to rhumba. In Posey’s recent work, cut-out, painted picnic blankets and tablecloths tousle and tuck on the wall, dotted with bananas and lobsters in a playful embrace of asymmetry, imperfection and as Posey says, “the flaws that give us character and identity.”

Mark Swope’s photographs are grounded in the aesthetic and theoretical approach of the New Topographic photographers, such as Henry Wessel Jr., Joe Deal and especially, Robert Adams. SFMOMA most succinctly described the movement as “unromanticized views of stark industrial landscapes, suburban sprawl and everyday scenes not usually given a second glance.” Remarking on his new exhibition, Between, Swope states, “I always look for what is usually passed over. The subjects may seem unremarkable, but that is why I am attracted to them. They will always be in-between.” In fact, the title suggests not only the mundaneness of being between things that are more “significant,” but also a compounded, sandwiched quality, as if Swope’s gates, trailers and rooflines are mortared together in an amalgamated mass like the bottles and cubes of a Morandi still life.

Firooz Zahedi: This Is Now
Alan Shaffer in collaboration with Ed Moses: Cross Pollination
Don Bachardy: A Single Man; Portraits of Peter Alexander


September 10 - October 15, 2016

Internationally recognized, Iranian-born portrait photographer, Firooz Zahedi began his career at Andy Warthol’s Interview Magazine. His work subsequently appeared on the covers of TIME, Vanity Fair and Vogue, as well as on iconic film posters such as Pulp Fiction. In 1976, he met lifelong friend Elizabeth Taylor and became her personal photographer. His book, My Elizabeth, published earlier this year, is a photographic memoir of their 35-year relationship. However, his exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery ironically subverts these canons of editorial glamour. Discovering the extraordinary effects caused by water damage on old 35mm slides, Zahedi decided to allow this destructive process to become part of his art-making. The altered images are then blown up to painterly proportions of 40x60”. In the exhibit’s catalogue essay, Anne Pasternak, Director of the Brooklyn Museum, states, “by allowing chance encounters…he reveals a beauty that cannot be groomed nor controlled.”

After graduating from Art Center, photographer Alan Shaffer moved to Venice and became immersed in the art scene. In his profession of photographically documenting artwork and exhibitions, Shaffer gained an inside position within the studios of legendary artists such as Ed Moses. Having made casual portraits of Moses over the years, Shaffer proposed that Moses paint on some of these photos that Shaffer had enlarged and printed onto 48x60” canvases. Moses’ signature calligraphic flourishes and stenciled spiders add the presence of the subject through his own hand, but also represent the liberating of Shaffer’s portrait to another uncontrollable agency like Zahedi’s destructive liquids.

At the age of 18, Don Bachardy met the noted British author Christopher Isherwood on the beach in Santa Monica, and the two of them spent their lives together until Isherwood’s death in 1986. While studying at the Chouinard Art Institute, Don began drawing portraits of Chris, who then introduced Don to his circle of illustrious friends. Since then, Bachardy has made thousands of portraits from life, never from photographs. In fact, Bachardy considers all his work a collaboration between himself and his subject, with the final portrait being signed by both himself and the sitter. Like Shaffer and Zahedi's work, an external force comes into play in the creation of Bachardy's portraits. At Craig Krull Gallery, we have mounted exhibitions of Bachardy’s self-portraits, literary figures, Hollywood icons, and LA artists. The new exhibition focuses on portraits of a single man, the artist and longtime Bachardy friend, Peter Alexander. (A Single Man is also, of course, the title of an Isherwood book). These portraits, made over the past 45 years, embody the stylistic developments of the artist as well as the evolving appearance of the sitter.

Finally, in our office areas, we are presenting two additional small exhibitions on the portraiture theme. The first is a group of portraits by Dan McCleary, whom Christopher Knight calls, “one of the finest figure painters working today.” The second is a series of tiny, b/w collages by Rachel Borenstein that layer the same portrait image, one over another, creating what she describes as “a porous and fragmented surface that undermines the singularity of the subject…approaching identity as a palimpsest of experience and memory.”

Paint is a Thing
Chrissy Angliker, Keenan Derby, Roast Hoggmann, Riin Kaljurand, Caroline Larsen, Mark Posey, & Dominic Terlizzi
Curated by Beth Parker

Joe Fay: Small Bird Paintings


July 9 - August 20, 2016

Craig Krull Gallery is pleased to present Paint is a Thing, a group exhibition curated by Beth Parker. This exhibition showcases seven contemporary artists who use paint to create both an object and an illusionistic space. While these artists embrace the materiality of paint, they also depict images and narratives, allowing the paintings to become more than purely objects. Each piece incites a layered read, with a visceral reaction to the physicality of the surface, as well as a cerebral reaction to the illusion described.

Squeezing, weaving, and plopping, Caroline Larsen plays with paint until it is more than just the image that it’s describing. The cacti and succulents on front lawns coil like yarn, and the pointed leaves wave off the surface as though they are being blown by wind. Car crashes and sinking boats are depicted in paintings woven entirely of thick single pigments squeezed like frosting. The textile-like surface veils the tragedy so that we may focus on the paint application, such as a cadmium ember suspended in a night sky.

The characters in Roast Hoggmann’s paintings have one step in our world and one within that of the frame. Windows are glossy, jewelry is metallic, and frosting is matte. As he layers paint, he sculpts and cuts it, adding and subtracting until each element finds its natural place in space. The vulnerable figures are built up until they seem almost touchable, inviting us to share in their humorous and sweetly sad predicaments.

Mark Posey pours acrylic onto panels, creating a hilly terrain that he then covers with oil and spray paint. Bouquets, tabletops, trash-strewn yards, precarious piles of stones; Posey applies a cubist perspective to each scene he paints. The wobbly subjects defiantly ignore conventional perspective and their thick edges catch the light, playfully reminding us that they are built on a flat picture plane.

Keenan Derby constructs his paintings with a mixture of acrylic and sand. Occasionally, he’ll add in a little metallic paint, so that the dark, sea-like surfaces glimmer. Each layer is contradicted by the next, to the point where the painting’s ripples really do seem to be on the surface of a deep abyss.

Riin Kaljurand collages dried layers of acrylic and household paint, which she has manipulated with traditional handcraft techniques such as basket weaving, knitting and crocheting. She uses these techniques to reference jobs that women were required to do in the former Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, where Kaljurand was born. She questions this socially constructed idea of femininity, however, by then depicting women from Soviet Woman (a magazine from Soviet Estonia) working in traditionally masculine milieus like farms, factories, and construction sites.

Chrissy Angliker scoops and smoothes acrylic paint with the back of a spoon, creating pools that drip down rocky surfaces. The paintings are a marriage of form and function, as they are fluid in both brush marks and subject matter. Her energetic strokes, reminiscent of abstract expressionism, add movement to her paintings, so that the water swirls, and the flowers seem to be perpetually shrinking and growing.

With close inspection, Dominic Terlizzi’s painted images dissolve into a mosaic of cast acrylic objects. Some of these shapes are immediately recognizable- the pretzels, Goldfish, and looped ends of ribbons- and some are ambiguous blocks of color, or shapes that, an artist statement divulges, come from homemade bread. His paint marks are truly small things, “a found common object alphabet”, which are applied to a surface, serving to transform “minutia into grandeur.”

Lou Beach: A Plague of Fools
Stephen Aldrich: Subject Matters
Joseph Heidecker: Figures & Faces
Zac Thompson: False Family; The Architecture of Found Photographs


April 16 - May 21, 2016

Apropos of the current political scene in America and barbaric events worldwide, Lou Beach’s exhibition of new collages is titled, A Plague of Fools. His witty and provocative work can be compared to the robust oddities of Hannah Höch, the incisive critiques of John Heartfield and the curious fantasies of Joseph Cornell. The son of Polish parents displaced by World War II, Beach (born Andrzej Lubicz-Ledóchowski) travelled to California in 1968, began studying the Surrealists, and started making collages from LIFE Magazine. In the mid-'70s, he served as a sexton at Arlington St. Church in Boston and had his first solo exhibition at the Boston Center for the Arts. He then returned to L.A., where he built a long career creating record album covers and illustrating magazine and newspaper editorials. Beach now focuses on his collages, which art critic Peter Frank describes as “sweetly uproarious orgasms of juxtaposition.” Terry Gilliam, film director, flatly declares, Beach is “the greatest collage artist on the planet.”

Concurrently, the gallery will present, Subject Matters, an exhibition of recent collages by Stephen Aldrich. A pivotal moment in Aldrich’s career occurred in 1968 when he met the influential photographer, Frederick Sommer. A musician and art student at Prescott College in Arizona, Aldrich was soon enlisted by Sommer to interpret his innovative, abstract musical scores, thus beginning a long relationship of mentoring and collaboration. In the last decade of Sommer’s life, Aldrich worked with him on an extraordinary group of collages, while at the same time, developing his own unique approach to the medium. Working with fine 19th century engravings from books and journals as his source material, Aldrich cuts imagery with mind-boggling precision and complexity. There is an obsessive quality to the work in its overlappings, rhythms, repetitions and patterns that may, in part, be attributable to his background in music.

In New York-artist Joseph Heidecker’s first exhibition in Southern California, Figures & Faces, photographic portraits are stitched with colorful threads that pattern the face like Matisse’s famous portrait of his wife, The Green Line. They also suggest bold masks in the vein of Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon. Heidecker fancies the contrast between black and white photographs and his textured, hand-crafted embellishments. He is also intrigued with exploring images that someone else has made and taking it to another place through ideas of identity, role-playing and impermanence.

Finally, the fourth in our quartet of collage artists, Zac Thompson, works with vintage found carte de visite portraits, reassembling them into a series called, False Family: The Architecture of Found Photographs. Giving context for the genesis of this work, Thompson writes:

“James W. Loewen states in Lies My Teacher Told Me, ‘How people think about the past is an important part of their consciousness.’ I grew up in a hyper evangelical southern household where I learned about things, like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; towns destroyed because of their wickedness and homosexuality. This religious education influenced how I thought about myself growing up and made my decision to come out of the closet 2 years ago extremely difficult.

Acknowledging my sexual orientation heightened my awareness of the past and historical accuracy. This realization has directly influenced my work, an ongoing exploration in understanding that there is a multiplicity to the people and places in our world, despite what popular rhetoric might suggest. Primarily working with found photographs and collage, I construct false objects with an often surreal and dystopian quality. The photos and houses are like hollowed out memories that invite me to fill them with my own history and experiences.”

Robin Mitchell: How Many Heartbeats in a Lifetime?
Peter Alexander: Strokes
Ned Evans: H2Os


March 5 - April 9, 2016

Woods Davy and Tom Lieber: Ingrávido


January 23 - February 27, 2016

Woods Davy works with stones in natural, unaltered states collected from the sea or the earth, and assembles them into fluid and precarious sculptural combinations that appear weightless. These sculptures of heavy stone elements seem to defy gravity and float like clouds, roll like waves, or bend with the flow of the chaotic currents. Art writer Shana Nys Dambrot has observed that Davy’s work is “a collaboration between artist and nature,” one in which the artist “prefers to cooperate with the pre-existing uniqueness and objecthood of his materials.” Every stone contains the story of its own formation, as well as evidence of interaction with its environment. Woods Davy begins with these inherent histories and orchestrates relationships inspired by exploring and studying the underwater landscape, the waves, and the clouds above. As Holly Myers remarked in the Los Angeles Times, there is “something thrilling about a work that appears to defy its own natural properties,” while at the same time one can appreciate the work’s “meditative reverence.” Davy's work is included in the permanent collection of LACMA and many other museum and public collections.

Concurrently, the gallery will present an exhibition of recent work by Tom Lieber. A painter of large abstractions, Lieber is, according to writer Carter Ratcliff, an artist whose work “invites us to note how complex the act of looking becomes when we attend carefully to its pleasures.” With brushes, rags, and his fingers, Lieber layers calm, atmospheric washes amidst dark, frenetic skeins. These marks, lurking below and inching above the surface, create a tension with the rest of the painting, as though they are bursts of consciousness within an unconscious mind. Liebers’s paintings are in the collections of the

SMALL HOUSE
A Pop-Up Show in Palm Springs
Carol Es, Caroline Larsen, D.J. Hall, Jessie Homer French, Julius Shulman, Rudy De Rooy

February 11 - 14, 2016

In a 1936 Spanish cottage on Indian Canyon Road dubbed "Small House," Craig Krull Gallery will present a four-day exhibition of six artists whose work focuses on themes of Palm Springs and Joshua Tree. The patio area will feature music, a fire pit and libations. In a tiny guest cottage in back, called "Very Small House", artist Rudy De Rooy inhabits a space that evokes a candlelit cowboy version of a Joseph Cornell box. This exhibition coincides with the Palm Springs Art Fair and Modernism Week.

Carol Es: Rock and Refuge
Phranc: Toys
John Huggins: Once Again


November 28, 2015 - January 16, 2016

Joshua Tree is an artists' refuge, a place of freedom as well as meditation. Carol Es refers to it as "a kind of Deadwood town where unique exteriors are built seemingly without codes or restrictions," and where precarious rock formations balance one's soul. Recently, Es made a journey of artistic and spiritual exploration into Joshua Tree, hoping to leave behind her baggage of fear, depression and childhood abuse. She said "I found myself making art about what surrounded me in the present, instead of what consumed my insides regarding the past." Es' brightly colored paintings of simple cutout shapes and patterned cloth on birch panel possess a playfulness and raw simplicity, echoing fanciful architecture amidst boundless piles of colossal rounded stones.

Rock and Refuge, Carol Es' first exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery, will include her Joshua Tree paintings as well as a drawing installation from her ongoing Journal Project. Hand-cut manila garment patterns inscribed with daily diary writings and drawings will be pinned to the wall in an organic cluster with sewing pins. Carol Es is a self-taught artist, native Angeleno, Pollock-Krasner Fellowship recipient, and her artist books have been collected by the Getty Research Institute as well as The Pompidou.

Phranc, also known as The All-American Jewish Lesbian folksinger, is a self-described "Cardboard Cobbler," who fashions cardboard, paper, gouache, and thread into life-size, three-dimensional replications of everyday objects. As a teenager, Phranc attended The Feminist Studio Workshop at The Woman's Building in Los Angeles, but she traces her obsession with cardboard back to childhood. She says, "From the time I sat in my first refrigerator box submarine, I knew the cardboard sea was for me." Her third exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery includes interpretations of vintage toys, stuffed animals, Davy Crockett costumes, and the gender play of Raggedy Ann and Andy.

John Huggins' series, Once, was partially inspired by a familial passage, the loss of his father. His soft-focus color photographs embody what the artist calls, "the perfectness of a fond memory." The images put into form the idealized remembrance one may have of indelible moments experienced in youth. Like distant memories, they are stripped of unnecessary details and reduced to their essential components. Rather than being sentimental, these evocations have what Huggins describes as a "peacefulness" that comes from one's associations with a moment in the "purity of recollection." This second exhibition from the Once series is titled, Once Again.

Caroline Larsen: Vacation Views
Joy Taylor: Strange Beauty


September 5 - October 10, 2015

Craig Krull Gallery is pleased to present Caroline Larsen’s first solo exhibition on the West Coast, Vacation Views. Like Ed Ruscha, David Hockney, and Carlos Almaraz, Larsen is not a native Angeleno, but her paintings exalt the iconic symbols of California culture, such as palm trees, bungalows, and swimming pools. “Before settling in New York,” she remembers, “we would visit LA at least twice a year. The landscape, climate and architecture are so unlike the places where I was raised, Toronto and Sarasota.” Her ardent memories of Southern California are manifested in these intensely constructed, brilliantly colored, Van Gogh tableaux. Rather than applying the paint solely with a brush, she squeezes and weaves the paint; building a surface that extrudes the succulents, stucco walls, and even the sky, into our space. Larsen plays with the paint until it is more than just the image it's describing; thick lines on cacti are oozing spaghetti, and tiny threads on crawling ivy become tangled silly string. Larsen's treatment of her surfaces playfully reminds us that her paintings are first and foremost objects, which are materializations of her visual recollections. “These paintings were made on the East Coast with the idea of LA in mind, and they are now returning to the source of their inspiration.”

The exhibition will also feature Larsen’s expansive, panoramic, 10 foot-long mountainscape triptychs. Woven entirely with thick single pigments squeezed like frosting, the paintings deconstruct, like they are built out of pixels, but also employ the optical mix of color, like Pointillism. Perhaps the greatest impression one has when looking at these paintings, however, is that they appear to be woven tapestries. Though the reference to tapestries was originally unintentional, Larsen now looks “to textiles and embroidery for inspiration. My mother is a seamstress, and our home was always filled with beautiful tablecloths and pillows.” Her robust oranges, magentas and blues also recall Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s vibrant mountain paintings of Davos, Switzerland. Larsen’s paintings are a mirage, elusive but tangible, where the colors reflect each other and the mountains shimmer in the distance.

Concurrently, the gallery will present another West Coast premiere, Joy Taylor’s exhibition, Strange Beauty. Taylor’s still lifes explore her desire to reduce an image to the “essentials” of beauty. Her flowers and vases are crisply defined, flattened, and attenuated. Tiny Calder leaves delicately balance above pinched and stretched flowers from early Miró farms. And her bananas, a consistent subject, protrude, twist and dance in phallic merriment. The long history of still life painting abounds in metaphors for life and death. Taylor’s bananas are both spotted in black decay as well as perfectly yellow, and her drooping flowers stand alongside their younger companions. She paints every object on her perfectly smooth surfaces with an equal amount of detail and care. As she says, “the beauty of the world is its inner strangeness.”

Carlos Almaraz: Journal Drawings and Poems 1969-1972
Emmanuel Galvez: Niños Envueltos
Joe Fay: Wild Heart
Ned Evans + David Lloyd: VOLCANO


July 18 - August 29, 2015

In the early 70s, Carlos Almaraz emerged as a leader of the Southern California Chicano arts movement, working on murals with Cesar Chavez, and exhibiting artwork that vibrantly brought Chicano culture and consciousness into the mainstream art world. The exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery will be the first to explore Almaraz’s early journal drawings and poems from 1969-1972, years in which he developed his personal iconography and symbols, as well as explored the sometimes dark and conflicted depths of his soul. Like many young artists, Almaraz made the pilgrimage to New York but his fiery Latino spirit did not conform to the prevailing coolness and structure of Minimalism. He made journal drawings of boxes and lines, but they were bold, and gestural, and he eventually developed them into grids of sequential images that morphed from square to square in a filmic manner. One extraordinary journal is a collage flipbook using found images that later became part of his visual vocabulary; trains, chairs, nudes, and masks. His poems and notes reflect his struggles with art making, but also his torment over his sexuality and personal relationships. In fact, a few of the journals were created in the psychiatric ward of Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York, and later, in the General Hospital of Los Angeles where he spent 40 days in an alcohol-induced coma travelling through a tunnel of light with extra terrestrials. Carlos Almaraz died of AIDS related causes in 1989. A major retrospective of his work, titled Playing With Fire, is scheduled at LACMA in 2017, curated by Howard Fox, and part of Pacific Standard Time: L.A./L.A., the Getty-funded initiative addressing the artistic relationship between Los Angeles and Latin America.

Concurrently, the gallery will present its second exhibition of paintings and pastels by Emmanuel Galvez. Niños Envueltos are Mexican pan dulce of round, red, coconut-encrusted cake with a red jelly swirl inside. Galvez grew up eating them and now, as Christopher Knight observed, he makes paintings that are “a delectable social confection.” In fact, Knight concludes that, “Like Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Galvez deploys mute objects as if they were lush but humble surrogates for a diverse family of interactive characters.”

Finally, the gallery is pleased to re-introduce Joe Fay to the LA art scene. Having made a mark in the 80s showing thick, juicy paintings with Molly Barnes, Roy Boyd, Richard Green and Jan Baum, Fay decided to leave LA and spend his time fly-fishing in Montana. His first LA show in over 20 years is, according to Fay, “like taking a walk in a dense forest…and through a small opening or clearing you notice a bird, animal or beautiful flower that’s framed by the multicolored shapes of the vegetation around you.” Indeed, Fay’s vegetation is a wildly luscious, oozing abstraction, like a more robust type of Italian marbled paper.

Michael Deyermond: I Thought California Could Save Me
Nancy Monk: Maybe


May 30 - July 11, 2015

Michael Deyermond
thoughts on my life and art

i dont know why people think being an artist is so much fun
does trying to save your life everyday sound like fun

not being understood and feeling out of place in the world makes me sad and lonely.
the words i employ and images i conjure in my work are my only chance for salvation.

because i am unhireable my commitment to art is unwavering

while the whole world is trying to think outside the box, live off the grid, do something spontaneous and live a life of adventure i would give anything to be safe inside that box with a little bit of heat, something to eat and a smidgen of routine security.

xo md

Nancy Monk
BRASS (or the order in which they present themselves)

While on a road trip in Minnesota, I found a brass elephant in a second-hand store. It spoke to me like objects tend to do on occasion. The elephant traveled with me back to California and years later initiated the Brass series of 18 X 24" paintings. The brass objects appear to be on a horizon line or a tightrope. One view is grounded where the other view is precarious. Initially I did not see the elephant painting as part of a series, but new brass objects keep appearing, like the brass Magi. He is part of my nativity scene that friends bought in a hardware store in Mexico. I unpack the scene every Christmas. After Christmas, I repack the decorations for storage. Somehow, the wise man fell on the floor and didn’t get re-packed with the group. I imagined that he is the one carrying the gift of gold. After I painted the Magi, a brass pig appeared. While visiting my brother and his wife in Sun City, Arizona, I found it on their bookshelf. Their granddaughter had wanted a real pig as a pet. As an alternative, they had bought her the brass pig.


NINE BY TWELVE
For me, the ink has an expression of exploration and mystery when there are chemical reactions that can surprise. This moment can then serve as a background or an incentive for a narrative or subject—the subject being a vessel for a particular moment. It was my intention to commit to the 9 X 12 format so as not to be distracted by choices of scale. The seasons in which the ink paintings were made are reflected in the colors. Copper in fall, blue or grey in winter, pink in spring, gold in summer. Gold always.

Connie Jenkins: Spring Tides
Jasmine Swope: Our Ocean's Edge
Matthew Chase-Daniel: Monterey Littoral


April 18 - May 23, 2015

On April 18th, Craig Krull Gallery will open three concurrent exhibitions on the subject of the California Coast. Connie Jenkins: Spring Tides is a series large-scale paintings of tide pools in the Channel Islands, Jasmine Swope: Our Ocean’s Edge is an environmentally sensitive photographic project focusing on the Marine Protected Areas of California, and Matthew Chase-Daniel: Monterey Littoral consists of photo-assemblage grids of the Monterey Bay Wildlife Refuge.

For more than four decades, Connie Jenkins has used water both as subject matter and metaphor. She recognizes the ebb and flow of tides, like the seasons and other natural cycles, as fundamental connections to our natural environment. Her recent tide pool paintings also bear a relationship to photo-realism but, as Jenkins explains, in painting water, she has “tried to paint the visual patterns with which our brains construct images—a shared illusion.” The water is rippled and foamy, blurring and bending the shapes of the purple sea urchins and green anemone below. By focusing on a horizonless bird’s-eye view of the water, Jenkins flattens the image, making it both an illusionistic representation of water, and an abstraction of paint marks which acknowledge the canvas as an object. The tide pool’s surface becomes the picture plane where illusion meets abstraction.

Jasmine Swope’s project, Our Ocean’s Edge aims to promote an awareness and appreciation of the network of Marine Protected Areas along the California Coast. Working with traditional film encourages Swope to “slow down, become intimate with the subject, and allow the picture to present itself almost intuitively.” Her images are printed in the palladium process, affording a subtle range of tonal variations. A new Nazraeli Press publication, Our Ocean’s Edge, features Swope’s images, an essay by naturalist author Dwight Holing, and a foreword by scientist and wild water advocate, Dr. Wallace J. Nichols.

For fifteen years, Matthew Chase-Daniel has created photo-assemblages that reflect the dynamic experience of seeing. His grids of images represent a temporal, cinematic unfolding of the visual encounter, usually positioning images that are nearby on the bottom row, and scanning further into the distance in the upper rows. In 2014, Chase-Daniel made several extended trips along the coast from Cambria to Point Reyes, exploring the reaches of the Monterey Bay Wildlife Refuge. Monterey Littoral interprets locations such as Point Lobos and Muir Beach from the minutiae at our feet to the distant scanned horizon. This series also includes a new direction in his work, tracking Pelicans and Turkey Vultures. Individual images of silhouetted birds, once composed in grids, become invented flocking patterns.

Astrid Preston: On Reflections


March 7 - April 11, 2015

Astrid Preston’s work is testament to the fact that landscapes do not exist in Nature but rather, only in the mind’s eye. While her images employ elements of place, they are also reconstructions that manifest personal perspectives or conceptual themes. In this way, she is a kindred spirit to Edward Hicks and his Peaceable Kingdoms, Giorgio de Chirico and his vacant metaphysical piazzas, and René Magritte and his surreal scenarios. On Reflections, the title of Preston’s new group of paintings, refers to her subject matter, but it also suggests her cerebral processing and interpretation of nature. The ponds at Descanso Gardens in Southern California and Monet’s garden at Giverny, France serve as inspiration to her meditations. In fact, these gardens and the idea of gardens in general, are aesthetic re-creations, idyllic ideals, the Plato’s Cave of Nature. Our expulsion from the Garden of Eden is symbolic of our disconnect with a Nature that we are perpetually attempting to re-establish. Within the artifice of a garden, Preston has chosen to focus on reflections, not the trees and plants themselves, but shimmering mirror images of them. As in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, Astrid Preston’s paintings explore the other side of the mirror, the reality that we construct in our minds. In this body of work, her handling of paint continues to evolve, absorbing elements of Milton Avery’s washy daubs and Charles Burchfield’s wiggly wormy lines. She has also introduced seemingly anomalous molecular-web balls that drift throughout her landscapes, suggesting the eye floaters in one’s field of vision, or even our scientific attempts to understand the basic structure of all things.

Dan McCleary: New Paintings
Danae Falliers: library


November 29, 2014 - January 17, 2015

When Danae Falliers explored the extraordinary, Rem Koolhaas-designed, Seattle Public Library, she photographed the building and its endless stacks and shelves of neatly organized books. Due to the relatively low lighting conditions, all of the text along the book spines softly disappeared, and Falliers recognized that her library photographs had edged closer to pure abstraction. She decided to pursue the potential of this discovery by digitally enhancing and manipulating a group of new library images, blurring the book edges and re-assembling assorted rows of books of various colors and thicknesses. Rather than framed and captured in the mode of traditional photographic practice, these images are constructed. They are fabricated using elements of color and form in the manner of a geometric abstract painter or sculptor. Not surprisingly, Falliers acknowledges the conceptual and formal influences of three seemingly disparate artists, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha and Bridget Riley, whose works she references in scraped blurs, the use of books, and the stripes of Op Art.

Concurrently, the gallery will present its fourth exhibition of the work of Dan McCleary. In 2009, LA Times art critic Christopher Knight observed that McCleary has “a clear-eyed sense of gravity that recalls the likes of Piero della Francesca.” His paintings usually contain two or three figures in everyday moments of Southern California life, such as sitting at a nail salon or ordering drinks at a coffee shop, but his compositional structure has the solidity and balance of fine architecture. McCleary employs classical methodologies and devices like the golden mean, as well as the traditional building blocks of design: cube, sphere, cylinder and cone. In fact, in one painting entitled Therapy, two people are considering a cluster of small cubes on a table as if, like the artist, they are contemplating the formal role these objects play in the larger composition. He always works from life, staging his models and props in his studio where they are illuminated from a single natural light source from the left, like the majority of Vermeer's paintings. McCleary also physically engages the viewer by orchestrating scenes with tables that invite one’s approach, or empty chairs that project into the foreground, a technique masterfully executed by Caravaggio in his Supper at Emmaus.

Hilary Brace: Drawings
Ann Lofquist: Urban and Pastoral


October 18 - November 22, 2014

In reviewing Hilary Brace's drawings, The New York Times wrote, "once in a while you come across an art of such refined technique that it seems the product of sorcery more than human craft...” Starting with the smooth surface of polyester film darkened with charcoal, Brace works in a reductive manner by removing charcoal with erasers and other handmade tools. Despite the verisimilitude of her work, Brace composes her images without premeditation, through an explorative process that allows them to unfold in unanticipated directions. Her subjects are based on clouds, water, mist and mountains, but she takes these forms to sublime and unimaginable new heights. As Christopher Knight remarked in the Los Angeles Times, her work is “like a Vija Celmins drawing made Baroque, [it] conjures ephemeral poetics of light and space.” For all their vastness and grandeur, Brace’s drawings are relatively small and intimate. As Leah Ollman observed in Art in America, the drawings “put those two realms – the private and the cosmic – within reach of each other.” The naturalist author Gretel Ehrlich also recognized this dichotomy of the wild and the controlled in her essay for this exhibition, “Everything in these frames is spilling, yet it feels contained somehow, not threatening. We are only asked to move in the atmospheric flux. The perspective is from a seat high up, as if the artist was on a cloud passing over and under other clouds, yet always able to define her territory.”

Concurrently, Craig Krull Gallery will present its first exhibition of paintings by Ann Lofquist. Combining the qualities of tonalism with the approach of plein-air painting, Lofquist’s landscapes begin with what she describes as “an intense observed experience.” Having taught for several years at Bowdoin College in Maine, she became recognized for her New England paintings that combined a contemporary visual awareness with the evocative subtleties of George Inness. Her recent move to Southern California presented an entirely different landscape as well as new light and atmospheric conditions that she has perceived remarkably. Bowdoin art professor Mark Wethli says Lofquist is “one of the few I would describe as having perfect pitch when it comes to color, which is unmistakable in the way she captures very fleeting qualities of light.” On her recent subject matter, Lofquist notes, “…new tracts abut a dry landscape still teeming with rattlesnakes, coyotes and mountain lions. The juxtaposition of the enduring and the ephemeral is everywhere in evidence in Southern California.”

Robert Weingarten: Pentimento
Julian Wasser: Duchamp in Pasadena


May 24 - July 5, 2014

Robert Weingarten describes Pentimento, his recent body of work, as “a re-affirmation of the power of photographic memory.” Beginning with historic photographs that document major events of the last hundred years, Weingarten re-visits the original locations of these pictures and then makes photographs of the site as it exists today. He notes that, in these places, life goes on and there are often no reminders of the profound or tragic events that occurred there in the not so distant past. An Italian painting term, Pentimento is defined as “the presence or emergence of earlier images, forms or strokes that have been changed and painted over.” Weingarten’s work is a seamless layering of his photographs with the vintage images, a digital process he calls a “translucent composite.” In one of these montages, Weingarten blends color views of stately London streets with gritty black and white photos of ambulances, firemen, burning buildings and the rubble of the Blitz of WWII. In another, a ramshackle shantytown, known as a “Hooverville” in the Great Depression, sits in the middle of Central Park in New York, overlaid with contemporary pick-nickers, strollers, balloons and couples lounging in the sun. In his image of Havana, Weingarten reverses his usual practice of combining vintage black and white with contemporary color. In this case, a recent black and white street scene is decorated with the brilliantly colored neon signs that enlivened the street in the pre-Castro era.

Concurrently, the gallery will present an exhibition of Julian Wasser’s photographs of the Marcel Duchamp Retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963. The exhibition itself, organized by the legendary curator Walter Hopps, was, surprisingly, the first–ever Duchamp retrospective and was held not in New York or Paris, but in Pasadena, California. Wasser’s photographs of the opening reception include young artists of the LA Art Scene such as Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, Larry Bell, Dennis Hopper and a very boyish Andy Warhol visiting from NY. Inspired by Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase and the artist’s obsession with chess, Wasser orchestrated one of the most iconic staged performance photographs of the 20th Century, posing Duchamp playing chess with a nude woman (a very young Eve Babitz, now a noted author). On the 50th anniversary of the exhibition, Craig Krull Gallery has assembled a portfolio of 15 of these photographs. Entitled, Duchamp in Pasadena, these signed, 8x10” gelatin silver prints are housed in a linen clamshell box and limited to an edition of 15.

Woods Davy: Piedras del Mar
Pierre Picot: roving unruly horizons


April 12 - May 17, 2014

Woods Davy works with stones in natural, unaltered states collected from the sea or the earth, and assembles them into seemingly precarious sculptural combinations. Art writer Shana Nys Dambrot has observed that Davy’s work is “a collaboration between artist and nature,” one in which the artist “prefers to cooperate with the pre-existing uniqueness and objecthood of his materials.” Every stone contains the story of its own formation, as well as evidence of interaction with its environment. Woods Davy begins with these inherent histories and orchestrates surprising relationships inspired by exploring the underwater landscape. His new sculptures are small, organic clusters of rounded sea stones that seem to reach for the surface or drift with the ocean’s chaotic currents. In fact, the most recent works in this exhibition are composed of both stones and bleached, coral rubble, which Davy collected on recent boating trips.

For several years, French-born painter (and part-time LA resident) Pierre Picot has been visually grappling with what he calls, “roving unruly horizons.” His ink on paper landscapes have the flair and refined spontaneity of Chinese calligraphy, yet they are intensely packed with competing clouds, pointy mountains, rainstorms, and bursts of sunlight in an almost comic sublime. In larger oil on canvas works, he even utilizes the traditional Chinese scroll format to let loose those “unruly” vistas. But these are not scenes for strolling Zen masters with canes. Picot’s colorfully charged falling rocks and whooshes of swirly winds are wildly electrified fantasies. Raw, gestural, and gritty, a pile of Pierre Picot’s rocks has the animated oddness of Philip Guston’s lugubrious shoes.

Yamamoto Masao: Shizuka=Cleanse
Pam Posey: Ungrounded


March 1 - April 5, 2014

Like a Zen master, Japanese photographer Yamamoto Masao approaches his work with an “active passiveness”. He is active in his observations of Nature, but passive in his understanding that he is an inextricable part of Nature itself. In his statement, he quotes the Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu, “A great presence is hard to see. A great sound is hard to hear. A great figure has no form.” Yamamoto seeks the presence of something indefinable that exists beyond the details we are able to see. Living in the forest, he photographically “harvests” what he calls “treasures breathing quietly in nature.” He refers to the presence of these treasures or moments as “Shizuka”, which means cleansed, pure, clear and untainted.

In his sixth exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery, Yamamoto presents black and white photographs of a single rock or branch in deep chiaroscuro. These natural forms appear to take various shapes such as a dragonhead, a falcon, a traditional Noh dancer or a hunter returning home with a deer. Recognizing spirits or creatures in natural objects is rooted in ancient animistic beliefs. From a more analytical, Western point of view, psychologist Steven Goldstein coined the term “pareidolia” in 1994 to describe our tendency to see rabbits in clouds, or the man in the moon. In Japanese culture however, human history is embedded in natural phenomena. The Heikegani is a species of crab native to Japan that bears the image of a face on its carapace. It is believed that these crabs are the reincarnation of samurai warriors defeated in an ancient sea battle. For Yamamoto, the act of making a photograph is like picking up a rock on the beach and holding the universe in your hands.

Pam Posey became interested in stones while making paintings of the plants that were growing out of little holes in her driveway. Her gaze was soon diverted to the concrete itself and the realization that it was composed of millions of tiny stones. She began to see stones as molecules that were everywhere, and understood that each stone contained the history of its own creation. This led to a series of small stone paintings. Then, in the summer of 2012, Posey spent 5 weeks at the Nes Artists Residence in Iceland, and then returned again in March of 2013. It was there that she began the Stone Dislocation project. In her travels, Posey transports stones, carrying a white quartz rock from a Greek island to a black lava field in Iceland. Her exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery contains the evidence of her geologic displacements in the form paintings and hand-drawn maps. Posey revels in the Zen irony of an act so purposeful, yet so purposeless. She is echoing Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, but on a smaller, and at the same time more global, scale. In addition to displacement and replacement, her small gestures are also about re-contextualization and the wonder created when finding something out of its place.

D.J. Hall: Into Plein Air
John Humble: Pico Boulevard


January 18 - February 22, 2014

Craig Krull Gallery is pleased to announce representation of D.J. Hall with her first exhibition at the gallery, Into Plein Air, opening on January 18th. Recognized for her realist paintings of women in big sunglasses lounging poolside with drinks, cakes and magazines, Hall partially attributes her interest in these subjects to a sometimes difficult childhood that found moments of happiness in her birthday parties in the backyard and pool of her grandmother’s home. Yet her glamorous images are able to function as personal “illusions of reality” as well as social commentary on our image-conscious culture. Whereas male Pop-realist artists such as Ramos, Wesselman and Rosenquist employed the sexy, stylized female stereotypes that were a product of mass media, D.J. Hall examines actual women who can both satirize and revel in their fantasies. Her exhibition, Into Plein Air, combines these concepts with a more recent interest in sketching and painting in small notebooks outdoors. Gouaches and watercolors of flowers, desert hikes, Palm Springs Modernist buildings, and the canals of Venice (CA) suggest the pure pleasure of looking at what has come to be identified as the ideal of Southern California living. These fresh perceptions on paper are juxtaposed with a few larger triptychs on canvas. In these paintings, the chatty poolside parties of the past have given way to an introspective solitary swimmer in the center image, flanked by a sleek but empty Modernist home on the left, and flowers silhouetted against the sky on the right. On the occasion of this exhibition, the gallery has published a signed, limited edition facsimile of a D.J. Hall sketchbook.

John Humble began photographing the “paradoxes and ironies of Los Angeles” in 1979. As a keen observer of this strange and extraordinary sprawl, he was one of eight photographers awarded a grant from the NEA to chronicle the city on its bicentennial. Then in 2007, the Getty Museum mounted a mid-career retrospective entitled: A Place in the Sun: Photographs by John Humble, accompanied by a major monograph. After 30 years of photographing L.A., Humble says that he “pinpointed one street that captures the chaotic results of unplanned growth… and a population that reflects waves of continuous mass migration.” Starting at two beachfront luxury hotels and ending at the old Coca-Cola bottling plant, Pico Boulevard passes through vibrant Japanese, Iranian, Jewish, Russian, African American, Latino and Korean towns or neighborhoods, becoming a linear microcosm of L.A.’s remarkable cultural diversity. In this series of photographs, all made along Pico Boulevard, Humble aims to avoid any stylistic affectations, presenting the viewer with empirical evidence. He suggests that his images are “reminiscent of geological cross-sections or archeological excavations with layers of disparate natural and man-made elements compressed – a sampling of a visual strata.”

Robin Mitchell: Moment to Moment
Terry O'Shea: Serious Candy
George Tate: Car Wash


July 13 - August 31, 2013

Robin Mitchell’s exhibition of recent gouache paintings, entitled Moment to Moment, continues a line of visual thinking that has progressed through her previous three exhibitions at Craig Krull Gallery. In Code Paintings, her first exhibit with the gallery in 2007, Mitchell composed intricate arrangements of small marks and brushstrokes that were suggestive of landscapes and architectural cross sections. In her next two shows, working like a zoom lens, she moved progressively deeper into her compositions. The once tiny dots and dashes enlarged into more developed shapes which, according to Constance Mallinson, “recalled forms from Egyptian hieroglyphics and stylized decorative borders, Eastern Mandalas, early Modernist abstraction or popular 50’s design motifs.” In Mitchell’s recent paintings, her brilliantly colored starbursts, orbs and linear overlays suggest that she is moving even deeper into what appear to be the molecular structures of her imagery. Like Zeno’s paradox, one senses that Mitchell may continue to take a half step closer to her subject in an infinite exploration of form and color.

In the 1960s, Los Angeles artists such as Peter Alexander, Helen Pashgian and De Wain Valentine began working with cast resin, creating highly polished sculptural forms that explored relationships of light and space, translucency and opacity. The requisite pristine surfaces of these objects allowed for the visual interplay of reflection and optical penetration. For Terry O’Shea, however, resin offered more fluid, painterly properties; his colored drips react like oil in water. In addition, he was clearly not as concerned about purity, sometimes leaving insects that alighted on the sticky surfaces to remain embedded in the final product, like natural amber. As Holly Myers observed for the LA TIMES, O’Shea’s work could possess a “woozy decadence,” and an effect that is “darker, more psychological” than the work of other artists using the same material. This exhibition, entitled Serious Candy, marks Craig Krull Gallery’s representation of the Terry O’Shea estate. The exhibit will include a selection of his resin capsules from the 60s. These colorfully striped, smoothly polished, psychedelic pills fit comfortably in the palm of one’s hand, functioning as sensual talismans. The exhibit also includes watercolors delicately dripped into concentric circles that echo the rings of color in his capsules.

Complementing these two exhibitions, the gallery’s foyer will feature George Tate’s color photographs of dynamic, boldly colored, Googie-styled car washes from the 50s and 60s in Southern California.

Alexis Smith: Second Nature


April 20 - May 25, 2013

Alexis Smith’s brand of Pop infused Conceptualism has been compared to the highly irreverent, yet equally serious work of other L.A. icons, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari and Mike Kelley. Her exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery, entitled Second Nature, employs found paint-by-number and black velvet landscapes overlaid with remnants of popular culture and pithy literary references that combine to offer multi-dimensional readings into our relationship with Nature and our mental construct of landscapes. Describing Smith’s work in the catalogue of her mid-career survey at the Whitney and MOCA in 1991-92, Richard Armstrong wrote, “her work exists in the gap between text and image, past and present, word and thing, ordinary and extraordinary. She unites thought and physical perception, relying on the eye and memory to make a synthesis. Smith is most successful when otherwise unrelated thoughts and objects are seamlessly melded together, when fragments from our mental and physical lives are ’reunited’.” In Rule of Thumb, a work from the exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery, Smith places a wooden ruler imprinted with the phrase, “A rule to prevent forest fires…Smokey’s friends don’t play with matches” on top of a romantic landscape print with stags, forest, rushing stream and snow-capped mountains. The work addresses our contemporary role as both steward and destroyer of Nature, as well as our desire to classify and measure the natural world from abstract, analytical and scientific points of view. In another work, The Last Time I Saw Paris, a touristy Montmartre painting has a charming hat floating on top of it that reminds one of Madeline in the Ludgwig Bemelmans stories, or Leslie Caron in Lili. Above the hat are painted the words of the artwork’s title. In this piece, Smith plays with our romantic and nostalgic notions associated with a sense of place, as well as the attendant stereotypes and cultural clichés. In all of her work however, Alexis Smith never tells you what to think; her art evokes endless free-associations that emphasize the key role the observer plays in completing the picture.

Dan McCleary: New Paintings
Javier Carrillo: La Lotería de la Vida
Emmanuel Galvez: Pan Dulce


March 9 - April 13, 2013

Dan McCleary brings the formal sensibilities of Piero della Francesca to the everyday moments of life in Los Angeles. A native of Southern California, McCleary notes that L.A. “feels weightless and devoid of formal rituals. It has no center. Its inhabitants find their own center through daily rituals like driving shopping, eating out and seeing movies.” Although his paintings depict people in seemingly mundane situations, these moments are constructed with the care and grace of an artist with keen observation skills and an awareness of the subtle interaction of form and color. All of the work in this exhibition was painted from life, using sets built in his studio. The new work includes a painting entitled Manicure, which preserves a fleeting moment of quiet intimacy between two women that would otherwise go unnoticed.

In addition to his artistic practice, Dan McCleary is the founder of Art Division, an after school arts program for young adults in the Rampart District of L.A. Among the several talented artists involved in this program, Craig Krull Gallery is pleased to present the work of Javier Carrillo and Emmanuel Galvez.

A former student, Javier Carrillo now runs the printmaking program at Art Division. He notes that his paintings depict close friends, family members and his own life experiences. The images take the form of the playing cards used in a Latin American game of chance that is similar to Bingo, entitled La Lotería. As Carrillo states, “I grew up with the game and loved playing it. Each painting has its own story based on struggles encountered when crossing the border.”

Like his mentor Dan McCleary, Emmanuel Galvez paints his subjects from life. His small still-lifes entitled Pan Dulce, depict the unique color, textures and shapes of traditional Mexican bakery goods. As Galvez recalls, “I grew up eating them…each bread has a different story…I also discovered that the baking techniques were originally learned from the French.” Galvez’s cookies, breads and cakes sit on solid colored backgrounds complete with delicately painted crumbs. He is now an instructor at Heart of Los Angeles, an after-school program for underserved and at-risk youth.

Astrid Preston: New Territory


January 26 - March 2, 2013

Since her last exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery in 2010, Astrid Preston’s work has traveled further than during any other period in her career. Entitled, New Territory, these paintings on wood and linen are influenced by traditional Japanese painting, as well as that culture’s reverence of Nature. Using an analogy of ceramics, she calls it a shift from refined porcelain to raku. Whereas her previous work focused on the construction of mazes, topiaries and infinitely complex geometries of leaves and branches, Preston’s new work opts for a more organic interaction with natural forces. Many of the paintings are on raw wood panels, and Preston allows those patterns of wood growth to suggest directions for her paint and compositions. Sometimes she applies washes of thin paint, letting the wood grain become ripples on the surface of water. In the painting, Thirsty Sun, a palette knife is boldly employed to create a thick, deeply textured reflection, thus evoking a more visceral tangibility of light. In this way, Preston’s response to nature combines both Eastern and Western traditions. Her awareness of natural patterns is akin to a finely raked rock garden, while her Expressionist materialization of sensibility is as fundamental as Adolph Gottlieb’s sun and ground abstractions.

E.O. Hoppé: London 1910 - 1945


January 15 - January 19, 2013

Inspired by the lush color photography of that period, he began a four-year project exploring the singular qualities of California light and space using his aging neighborhood as a backdrop. The resulting body of work, entitled California Dwelling, was shown only once and then put away for thirty years. In 2010, he started the slow process of having the original negatives restored and printed to recapture the soft palette that defines our regional light. He observed that “the layering of old bungalows, postwar apartments, vintage cars and traces of contemporary suburban life made the places look like no one know what decade it was. Sunlit pastel surfaces and night views with illuminated facades and impossible shadows projected a feeling of theatricality.” California Dwelling is Tim Bradley’s first exhibition with Craig Krull Gallery, and will consist of a selection of 32 x 38” archival pigment prints.

Concurrently, the gallery will present an exhibition of photographs by Mark Swope entitled, Foliage. Like Bradley, Swope has focused on urban residential neighborhoods of Southern California, but with a specific interest in the relationship between the built environment and ornamental horticulture. His black and white images reflect an aesthetic and theoretical approach associated with the New Topographic movement in photography, and artists such as Joe Deal and Henry Wessel Jr. Some of the images document crisp, neat hedges that define yards and boundaries, or perfectly trimmed topiaries that suggest constant attention to detail. Others depict plant life wildly out of control, such as giant Hollywood Junipers whose tentacle-like branches resemble the tips of flames as they overpower tiny, modest bungalows. This exhibition, Swope’s fifth at Craig Krull Gallery, follows previous photographic bodies of work on local subject matter including The Los Angeles River, The Cornfields, vintage rooftop signage, and the trees of Elysian Park.

Woods Davy: Cantamar
Wendy Burton: Natural Histories

October 20 - November 24, 2012

On October 20th, Craig Krull Gallery will open its seventh solo exhibition of Woods Davy’s sculpture. For the past thirty years, Davy has worked with stone in unaltered states, either from the sea or the earth, incorporating them into assemblages of precarious balance that appear to be in flux. Art writer Shana Nys Dambrot observed that Davy’s work is essentially a “kind of collaboration between artist and nature,” one in which the artist “prefers to cooperate with the pre-existing uniqueness and objecthood of his materials.”

In this body of work, Davy has carefully selected stones that have been rounded and smoothed by the tumbling effects of the Pacific at a beach in Mexico called Cantamar (which means “song of the sea”). Davy’s sculptural assemblages form cantilevered arcs which appear to float or roll like the waves that shaped them. In larger works, these stones are combined with vertically oriented, rough granite boulders pulled from the earth. As Holly Myers remarked in the LA TIMES, there is “something thrilling about a work that appears to defy its own natural properties,” while at the same time one can appreciate the work’s “meditative reverence.”

On October 20th, Craig Krull Gallery will present its sixth solo exhibition of photographs by Wendy Burton with a new series entitled, Natural Histories. In a previous body of work entitled Trace Elements, Burton photographed remnants of human life left behind in the natural landscape. With Empty Houses and Rust Belt, she continued her exploration of abandoned spaces, both domestic and industrial. Natural Histories continues the theme of once inhabited dwellings with photographs of deserted bird nests. Burton notes that each nest is “a small miracle of architecture and engineering…each somehow perfect, even in its imperfection.” This project also includes images of animal skulls, crustacean casings, snake skeletons and other remnants of once living creatures, further developing her investigations into “that which is left behind.” All of the subject matter is photographed as a singular object, on a wooden table, within a relatively dark interior lit by a single source of natural light. They are still-lifes in the tradition of memento mori, but more importantly, they reflect the artist’s reverence of natural form and meditations on how these forms were shaped by instincts and evolution.

Jerry McMillan: The Artist's Image
Dennis Hopper: The Fort Worth 400

March 3 - April 7, 2012

A native of Oklahoma, Jerry McMillan moved west in 1958 with childhood friends Ed Ruscha and Joe Goode.  The three of them lived together while attending Chouinard Art Institute in Southern California.  McMillan quickly became a key figure in the development of photo-sculpture and was given a solo exhibition by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1966. His work was later included in Peter Bunnell’s seminal exhibition, Photography Into Sculpture which opened at the MOMA in New York in 1970.  Currently, he is the subject of a retrospective exhibition curated by Steven Peckman at Cal State University Northridge through March 31st.  That exhibition, as well as the McMillan and Hopper exhibits opening at Craig Krull Gallery, are all part of the Getty’s initiative, Pacific Standard Time: Art in Los Angeles 1945-1980.

The Artist’s Image at Craig Krull Gallery will focus on one aspect of McMillan’s artistic practice, his photographic portraiture of artists. This exhibition demonstrates his inventive techniques and collaborative efforts at creating a persona rather than a mere likeness. Through symbolic and whimsically staged role-playing, McMillan produced implied narratives that were often intended for exhibition announcements and magazine advertisements.  For example, when he was told that Judy Gerowitz was changing her name to Chicago and needed an image to announce her new name and upcoming exhibition, he put her in a boxing ring.  The tough, confrontational photo of Chicago, wearing boxing gloves with her name emblazoned across her chest, suggested a challenge to the male-dominated art scene in L.A. In fact, during the 60s, artists in L.A would one-up each other with ego-driven exhibition announcements picturing themselves in underwear, surfing, or performing other antics.  In this vein, McMillan created a folding exhibition poster/invite for his friend Joe Goode that pictured the artist, but did not include Goode’s name, implying, that his name was not even necessary. The exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery will include McMillan’s vintage photos, contact sheets and examples of his work in exhibition announcements, catalogue design, magazine ads, and even personalized artist stationery. Jerry McMillan’s contributions in these areas were vital to the developing LA art scene, not simply in the presentation of L.A. artists, but in his shaping of how they were perceived.

Concurrently, the gallery will present an exhibition of photographs from the 1960s by Dennis Hopper.  The Fort Worth 400 consists of the original and intact collection of over four hundred vintage 6x9” photographs that were included in Hopper’s 1970 exhibition organized by Henry T. Hopkins for the Fort Worth Art Center Museum.  (Coincidentally, Hopper was exhibited concurrently with Jerry McMillan at Forth Worth as well).  The exhibit includes Hopper’s iconic images of artists, film stars, musicians, poets, bikers, beatniks, hippies, and civil rights marchers. In the essay for Hopper’s book, Out of the Sixties, Michael McClure wrote, “There are no portraits here.  These are not portraits….It’s all in the air like a ball tossed from the hand.” Hopper’s street scenes and pictures of bold signage and graphics, such as Double Standard, parallel the interests of Pop artists and Ed Ruscha.  His images of torn, decayed and painted-over posters plastered on walls suggest an aesthetic akin to both the California Assemblage of his friends and the visceral paintings of the Abstract Expressionists.

Lita Albuquerque: 287 Steps Exhibition Information

January 21 - February 25, 2012

Craig Krull Gallery will present a solo exhibition of a new body of work by seminal Los Angeles based artist Lita Albuquerque in conjunction with the Getty's Pacific Standard Time: Art in Los Angeles 1945-1980 The exhibition, entitled 287 Steps, will also coincide with Albuquerque's Spine of the Earth 2012 a large scale ephemeral work created for the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival, organized by Glenn Phillips of the Getty Research Institute and Lauri Firstenberg of LAXArt.

The exhibit 287 Steps is comprised of three installations in which the human form is alchemically re-embodied, taking new forms in historically significant, elemental materials such as gold, pure powdered pigment dust, and bone white plaster. The artist's body is incorporated into elements of the installation, echoing the excavated bodies from Pompeii, where plaster was injected into the vacant space left by human forms leaving a distinct record of the moment their bodies were transformed into ash.

Three large-scale blue pigment paintings surround the perimeter of one of the exhibition spaces as three gold leaf suits hover, suspended above the gallery floor. The suits undulate in the air, influenced by each subtle movement in the space. The exhibition also includes a series of "wind paintings", composed of pure powdered pigment blown across canvases, creating a record of the artist's gesture joined with the elemental force of a gust of wind. By working with fundamental elements such as wind, pigment and gold as the primary materials for the creation of 287 Steps, Albuquerque brings the interplay of natural forces to the center of the process of creation and the embodiment of form.

Lita Albuquerque is an internationally renowned installation, environmental artist, painter and sculptor. She has developed a visual language that brings the realities of time and space to a human scale in ways that are simultaneously ancient and futuristic. For decades she has created large scale ephemeral pigment pieces in desert sites including the Pyramids of Giza and more recently the ice desert of Antarctica where she led an expedition and team of scientists and artists that culminated in the first and largest ephemeral art work created on the continent. Often best seen from space, Albuquerque's work challenges perspective, and the perpetually shifting relationships between bodies in space.

Her paintings are a materialization of the ideas about color, light and perception first created in her ephemeral works. Through her use of pure pigments, and gold, she engages perceptual and alchemical shifts in the viewing subject. Her work was recently seen at MOCA in The Artist's Museum exhibition and was featured in Art Paris 2011. She is the recipient of numerous honors and awards including three National Endowment for the Arts, the Cairo Biennale Prize and a National Science Foundation Artist Grant. Albuquerque's work is included in collections at the Whitney Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Getty Trust, and The Los Angeles County Museum, among others.

287 Steps opens on January 21st, the night before Albuquerque's large scale ephemeral work Spine of the Earth 2012. 287 Steps is on view through February 25th, 2012.

Julian Wasser: Los Angeles
George Herms: Collages
Edmund Teske: Portraits

December 3, 2011 - January 4, 2012

Coming out of the Beat Generation of the 1950s, George Herms is recognized - along with Ed Kienholz, Wallace Berman and Bruce Conner - as a leading figure of California Assemblage.   His work combines aged, stained, and rusted detritus, always rubber stamped with the four letters L-O-V-E (the E printed backwards).   The collages in this exhibition are from the past 40 years, representing a few different bodies of work.  The Sepia Jones collages (2002-2003) combine a word or two from bold newsprint headlines (such as "Mob" or "Same Congress") along with one or two images torn from print media.  The simple juxtapositions ignite a plethora of connotations - like improvised jazz, one riff playing off another.  Another series of collages in the exhibit resulted while Herms sifted through boxes of his personal papers as the Getty was cataloguing them for acquisition.  The discarded envelopes, blank sheets of thin cardboard, and other scraps of mail were covered with patterns of pale brown and tan acid staining.  Herms assembled these remnants into subtle layers of tone and shape.
 
Julian Wasser started his career in photography in the 1950s as a teenager shooting crime scenes in Washington D.C. which he sold to The Washington Post.  As a copy boy at Associated Press, he met Weegee and rode around with the legendary and unflinching press photographer.   After university and military service, he settled in Hollywood and worked for many years as a contract photographer for TIME, LIFE and PEOPLE.  The exhibit at Craig Krull Gallery entitled Los Angeles will include night scenes of the Sunset Strip in the 60s, images of key LA figures such as Joan Didion, Ed Ruscha and Jack Nicholson, as well as historic photos of the Watts Riots and Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel.  His picture of Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a nude woman (Eve Babitz) has become an icon of conceptual photography.
 
Finally, the gallery will present a small exhibition of photographs by Edmund Teske of legendary artists and the early L.A. art, music and experimental film scenes such as George Herms, Kenneth Anger, Ramblin Jack Elliott and Jim Morrison.  Teske's images however, are never mere portraits.  A true poet and photographic alchemist, Teske employed manipulative and chance darkroom techniques that the artist likened to Hindu philosophies concerning the interplay of natural forces.   He was honored with two major exhibitions at the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1993 and 2004.
 
All three of these exhibitions are part of the Getty initiative, Pacific Standard Time: Art in Los Angeles 1945-1980. On Saturday, December 3rd, the gallery will hold a reception from 4-6pm.  George Herms and Julian Wasser will briefly speak about their work at 3:45pm

Peter Alexander: Velvets 1974-1982, Resins 2009

October 22 - November 26, 2011

In conjunction with the Getty initiative, Pacific Standard Time: Art in Los Angeles 1945-1980, Craig Krull Gallery will present an exhibition of Peter Alexander’s Velvets from 1974-1982, and Resins from 2009. 

Considered one of the key figures in the L.A. Light and Space movement, Alexander first exhibited his seminal cast polyester resin works in his graduate exhibition at UCLA in 1966.  His highly polished, translucent and subtly toned cubes, wedges and wall pieces have inspired comparisons to the West Coast milieu of surfboards and metallic auto bodies, but more specifically, they manifest the artist’s fascination with light, luminosity and a state of suspended liquid space.  While the term, Finish Fetish was often applied to this type of work, the slick surface is more a point of entry than an end in itself.   The exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery will include a selection of recent resin works from 2009.

Since the 1960s, Alexander has continued to explore the relationships of light, surface and space in L.A.’s nighttime grid of lights, sunsets, swimming pools, oceans and icebergs.  One of his most adventurous, and now landmark, bodies of work, Velvets, was inspired by an overnight fishing trip off the coast of California.  Observing the crew catching bait in the middle of the night, Alexander wrote,

“You could smell the desert in the air, carried by the wind from the coast. The red tide was going strong that September, so the sea was fluorescent with those tiny organisms.  To attract squid to the boat, the fishermen placed a very powerful light on the end of a davit that was swung out over the water.  It cast an arc of light some 60 feet in diameter.  Everything beyond its arc lay in blackness, you couldn’t distinguish the sea from the sky; there was no horizon. Within the arc of light was a clear, brilliant emerald green world of water. Thousands of squid swam to the light,like moths to a porch lamp, in layers of pink, transparent, vibrant, squiggly masses.”

The Velvets are large un-stretched squares and rectangles of black velvet painted in vibrant, glittery acrylic with hand-sewn (by his then wife Clytie Alexander) bits of nylon, silk, gold string, sequins and other dazzling fabrics.  In a 1981 review, Christopher Knight wrote, “Suspended between surface and distance, the velvets become lush, underwater jungles of floating anemones, tropical fish and exotic creatures.”  Commenting of the unusual choice of velvet as a painting surface, Knight noted, “They take the lowest of low-art media – those cheesy paintings on black velvet for sale at every abandoned gas station from here to Tijuana – and transform it into an ecstatic world.” 

Richard Ehrlich: Lucha Libre
Gilbert Lujan: Paintings, Pastels & Drawings
Carlos Almaraz: La Ofrenda

November 1 - 5, 2011: One Week Exhibition

Richard Ehrlich: Lucha Libre
In his sixth solo exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery, Richard Ehrlich will present his series of large scale color photographs (44 x 60") of the Lucha Libre wrestlers of Mexico. The photographs were first exhibited at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Los Angeles (June 11 - July 23, 2011).
According to Richard Ehrlich, "My continued interest in the culture of Lucha Libre stems from my close personal association with Jose Sulaiman, Chair of the World Boxing Council, who has known many of the luchadores for more than thirty years. He was instrumental in organizing the photo shoot in Mexico City. The purpose was to attempt to capture photographically the emotion and character of the fighters. The luchadores are Latin American icons and are extremely popular and important cultural figures. They were exceedingly cooperative with this project."


Gilbert "Magú" Luján
Gilbert Luján was born in French Camp, California in 1940, to parents of Mexican and indigenous ancestry from West Texas. He moved to East Los Angeles when he was 6 months old, where he spent the majority of his childhood and adolescence. After serving in the Air Force, Luján earned his B.A. in ceramic sculpture from California State University, Long Beach, and then his M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine. In the early 70s he worked as the Art Director for the East L.A. art journal Con Safos, through which he met the other members of the artist collective Los Four (Frank Romero, Carlos Almaraz, and Roberto de la Rocha), which he co-founded. Following the success of Los Four, Luján became at teacher at Fresno City College and later Pomona College. In 1990 he was commissioned as a design principal for the Hollywood & Vine station on the Metro Rail Red Line. Luján is best known for his use of colorful imagery, anthropomorphic animals, cars with exaggerated proportions and Dia De Los Muertos installation altars. Luján passed away on July 24, 2011, at the age of 70. This small exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery is both a celebration of Luján's life and career, as well as a traditional Mexican ofrenda, and is open the week of Día de los Muertos.


Carlos Almaraz
Carlos Almaraz was born in Mexico City in 1941, moving with his family to Los Angeles when he was nine. After studying at Loyola Marymount University and UCLA, Almaraz received his MFA from the Otis College of Art and Design. Along with Frank Romero, Gilbert Lujan, and Roberto de la Rocha he formed the artist collective known as “Los Four” in 1973 in order to bring Chicano street art to the mainstream. In 1974 their exhibition at the LACMA marked the country's first show of Chicano art at a major institution. Almaraz went on to work for Cesar Chavez painting banners and murals for the United Farm Workers Union. In 1984 he was honored with a major solo exhibition at the L.A. Municipal Art Gallery. His work blends elements of Mexican and Native American mythologies along with contemporary Chicano culture. The exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery is comprised of paintings, pastels and drawings from the 70s and 80s. Almaraz will also be featured in corresponding Pacific Standard Time exhibitions, including “MEX/LA: Mexican Modernism(s) in Los Angeles 1930-1985” at the Museum of Latin American Art, “Mapping Another L.A.: The Chicano Art Movement” at the Fowler Museum.

Julius Shulman: 80 Years of Photography
Carlos Almaraz: Paintings, Pastels & Drawings

September 10 - October 29, 2011

Julius Shulman
80 Years of Photography
Julius Shulman (1910 - 2009) is widely regarded as the most important architectural photographer in history. Over a seventy year career Shulman not only documented the work of many of the great 20th century architects, but he elevated the genre of commercial architectural photography to a fine art form. After making over 260,000 images, Shulman announced his “retirement” in 1989, but the next twenty years were filled with major museum and gallery exhibitions around the world and numerous books by publishers such as Taschen and Nazraeli Press. In 2005, the Getty Research Institute acquired Shulman’s archive, but he continued to work for the remainder of his life. Craig Krull Gallery will be opening a major survey of his work on September 10, 2011. This exhibition will include a range of iconic photographs of works by architects such as Neutra, Koenig, Lautner, Frey, and Eames, as well as early images from Shulman’s personal files. Julius Shulman is featured in Pacific Standard Time exhibitions, including “Civic Virtue: The Impact of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and the Watts Towers Arts Center” at the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and “In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945-1980” at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Carlos Almaraz
Paintings, Pastels and Drawings
Carlos Almaraz was born in Mexico City in 1941, moving with his family to Los Angeles when he was nine. After studying at Loyola Marymount University and UCLA, Almaraz received his MFA from the Otis College of Art and Design. Along with Frank Romero, Gilbert Lujan, and Roberto de la Rocha he formed the artist collective known as “Los Four” in 1973 in order to bring Chicano street art to the mainstream. In 1974 their exhibition at the LACMA marked the country's first show of Chicano art at a major institution. Almaraz went on to work for Cesar Chavez painting banners and murals for the United Farm Workers Union. In 1984 he was honored with a major solo exhibition at the L.A. Municipal Art Gallery. His work blends elements of Mexican and Native American mythologies along with contemporary Chicano culture. The upcoming exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery will be comprised of paintings, pastels and drawings from the 70s and 80s. Almaraz will also be featured in corresponding Pacific Standard Time exhibitions, including “MEX/LA: Mexican Modernism(s) in Los Angeles 1930-1985” at the Museum of Latin American Art, “Mapping Another L.A.: The Chicano Art Movement” at the Fowler Museum.

Don Bachardy: Portraits of L.A. Artists
Malcolm Lubliner: Pacific Party Time

September 10 - October 15, 2011

Don Bachardy was born in Los Angeles in 1934 and has been painting portraits of film stars, literary figures, government officials and the art world since the early 1950s. His work has resulted in almost a dozen books, including Stars In My Eyes, 70 x 1 and Christopher Isherwood: Last Drawings. In 2005 The Huntington Library presented a solo exhibition of Bachardyʼs work, six years after their acquisition of his partner Christopher Isherwoodʼs archives. His works are included in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Institution. Bachardyʼs upcoming exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery will feature portraits made over the last 40 years of artists from Southern California, including Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, and Ed Ruscha. Bachardy will also be included in corresponding Pacific Standard Time exhibitions, including “Civic Virtue: The Impact of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and the Watts Towers Arts Center” organized by the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and “Cruising the Archive: Four Decades of Queer Art and Culture in Los Angeles” at ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives.

During the 1960s and 70s photographer Malcolm Lubliner documented his experiences and friendships in the Los Angeles art scene with images of Larry Bell, Wallace Berman, Sam Francis and others in their studios and at gallery openings. These photographs were featured in Craig Krull Galleryʼs 1996 exhibition (and corresponding catalog) “Photographing the L.A. Art Scene 1955-1975.” Lublinerʼs photographs have been collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.. The exhibition “Pacific Party Time” consists of candid photographs of artists such as John Baldessari, Robert Irwin and John Altoon attending the soirees of Betty Asher, Louise Bernstein, Stanley and Elyse Grinstein, and Ken Tyler. It was at these gatherings that LA artists were first introduced to important artists from around the world. As gallerist Patricia Faure said, “We suddenly became hosts to artists from New York and Europe... all connecting with our LA artists.” Lublinerʼs work is being used in promotional catalogues and advertisements for Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945-1980.

Sara Jane Boyers: Finding Chinatown
John Huggins: American Landscapes

July 30 - September 3, 2011

Over the past decade Sara Jane Boyers has photographed 50 Chinatowns in the United States and Canada. The series began in San Francisco in 2001, home to the oldest Chinatown in America and the largest Chinese community outside of Asia. This initial examination awakened Boyers’ childhood memories of visiting the Los Angeles Chinatown near her father’s downtown office, and inspired her to begin a tour of Chinatowns across North America.

In Finding Chinatown, Boyer’s first solo exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery, her work explores the breadth of the Chinatowns that now range from historic to new strip malls serving the growing Asian population. Throughout, Boyers focuses on the detail of the everyday as she examines these portals into the American dream.

Her sensitive photographs convey the brightness of calligraphic signs, the steam of busy kitchens, and the silence of back alleys. Boyers remarks, “I am fascinated by the light, vibrance and history of the Chinatowns. The vitality of each living, changing community and the general welcoming nature of those who pass through inspire me always. What intrigues me most are the still moments, even in the oft-frenetic mist.”

Concurrently, the gallery will present exhibition of photographs by John Huggins entitled American Landscape. Known for his work in the Polaroid transfer process (the technique of transferring the emulsion from a Polaroid to another piece of paper), in this new series Huggins has enlarged original 4 x 5” transfers into 30 x 40” archival pigment prints. This expansion enhances the grain of the original photograph and the fiber of the paper, resulting in heavily textured images that suggest the quality of a tapestry. The amplified dimensions allow his work to encompass the grandeur of the American landscape, exploring iconic locales such as Niagara Falls, as well as emblematic themes like the American flag and baseball. A native of Southern California, Huggins is equally motivated by his personal history of place, as exemplified in his series of Malibu surfers.

Huggins was honored earlier this year with a retrospective at his alma mater, Hampshire College, which displayed works seen in this exhibition.

Phranc of California
Larry Cohen: Views of the Coast

June 18 - July 23, 2011

Cardboard, paper, gouache and thread come together to create life-size, three-dimensional representations of familiar summer objects in Phranc of California. The exhibition, which opens on June 18th at Craig Krull Gallery, will be Phranc’s first major West Coast solo show following her critically well received exhibition in New York City in 2008. The show will include sculptural renditions of beach paraphernalia, such as swimsuits, inflatable rafts, umbrellas, and beach balls, all composed of paper mediums that were hand sewn and painted.

Although Phranc has been known as the “All American Jewish Lesbian Folksinger” since the 1980s (when she toured with such acts as The Pogues and The Smiths), she has been involved in the arts since childhood. As a teenager she attended The Feminist Studio Workshop at The Woman's Building in Los Angeles, CA where she took courses in silk-screening and was shown in a 1978 group exhibition. Says Phranc, “From the time I sat in my first refrigerator box submarine I knew the cardboard sea was for me. I have been creating objects, food, toys, advertisements, shoes and underwear out of ‘found’ cardboard for many years.”

The evolution of her work as a self described “Cardboard Cobbler” has involved transitioning from flat objects to three-dimensional sculptures, and learning to use a sewing machine to create clothing out of painted yards of Kraft paper “fabric”.

In a 2008 review of her exhibition at the Cue Art Foundation, Martha Schwendener of the New York Times said, “Dress shirts, T-shirts, combat boots, a life preserver… skillfully made from paper or cardboard recall Claes Oldenburg’s ‘Store’ or Warhol’s paper clothing. Phranc’s treatment of Eisenhower-era objects is loaded with subversive significance, however, since many of them functioned as signifiers of gayness in a heavily closeted period.”

Following her beach themed exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery, Phranc will unveil a “trading post” of cardboard cowboy gear in the Museum Shop of the Autry National Center in Griffith Park. This installation, from October through November, is in conjunction with Out West at the Autry, a series of programs on LGBT history and culture in the American West created and produced by Gregory Hinton.

Concurrently, Craig Krull Gallery will present its seventh solo exhibition of plein-air landscape painter Larry Cohen. Following his 2009 exhibition at the gallery, which was comprised of renderings of downtown Los Angeles from distant vantage points, Cohen has returned to the oceanfront with his new series “Views from the Coast”. These works interpret the Malibu Canyon area over the past few years in varying weather conditions, much like an Impressionist would translate the same scene in changing atmospheric conditions. Over the course of his four-decade career, Cohen has become recognized as one of the few accomplished plein-air painters of the constructed environment of Southern California. His works reflect the influence of his mentor Paul Wonner and other Bay Area Figurative School artists, as well as 19th century painters of light.

Robert Weingarten: Portraits without People
Richard C. Miller: Portraits

May 11 - June 11, 2011

On May 11, Craig Krull Gallery will open its fourth solo exhibition of the work of Robert Weingarten.  In his previously exhibited bodies of work, Weingarten's photographic practice has been characterized by the proposition of a thesis that is tested and explored via a rigorous photographic methodology of the artist's own device.  In his 6:30am series, Weingarten set out to demonstrate that the mind develops visual stereotypes and assumes that the sky and ocean are generally blue, when in actuality, they are a constantly changing array of colors. He set up a tripod and made exposures at precisely 6:30 am every day for a year from the exact same spot, using the same aperture and film. Weingarten's "experiment" produced an extraordinary series of images of the Santa Monica Bay at sunrise-- with sky and water ranging in hue from pink to orange, and green to violet. Weingarten's next project,  Palette Series, expanded upon a question raised during the creation of his 6:30am photographs.  The artist wondered how local light affected the palettes of painters.  He arranged to visit the studios of noted artists such as Ed Moses, Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha, Chuck Close and many others, photographing extreme details of their palettes and enlarging them to dramatic proportions.  Although he did not recognize a direct correlation of palettes to local light, he reveled in the ironic ability of photography to further abstract painting.

In his current body of work, entitled Portraits Without People,  Robert Weingarten addresses the very nature of the centuries old tradition of portraiture by posing the question, "Can you express a person's being and character photographically without showing them?"  He began making his own portrait by compositing images of objects and places of personal significance; his violin, his childhood home, a calculator, and other items. Julian Cox, curator of Weingarten's exhibition of this work at The High Museum in Atlanta, wrote, "Weingarten adds to the tradition [of photocollage] by moving beyond the instant of the photographic moment to conjure a more synthetic, impressionistic kind of picture that blurs the boundaries between fact and fantasy."  In order to create a resonant series of these "portraits without people", Weingarten recognized that his subjects should be prominent individuals of high accomplishment and general public recognition.  He sought out icons of our society such as Stephen Sondheim, Frank Gehry, and Joyce Carol Oates, asking them for a list of 10 objects and places that define who they are.  Weingarten made photographs of the items on each list, then created the individual portraits by layering his images digitally.  As Julian Cox observed, "light passes through specific objects and elements in the composition, creating a new kind of depth perception and the suggestion of a three-dimensional space."  Weingarten has identified this digital practice and work as a "translucent composite."

In addition to the exhibition and catalogue at the High Museum in 2010, Weingarten's Portraits Without People will be exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution in 2012.  A reception for the artist will be held at Craig Krull Gallery on Saturday, May 14, 4-6pm.

 Concurrently, the gallery will present an exhibition of photographic portraits by Richard C. Miller created from the 1940s - 1960s in Southern California.   In the spring of 2009, Miller's career was given long overdue recognition in the form of an exhibition at the Getty Museum.  As a practitioner of the exceptionally stable-- yet technically difficult-- color process known as carbro printing, Miller's work was positioned adjacent to an exhibit of one of the masters of that technique-Paul Outerbridge.  The exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery will feature a selection of carbro prints from the 40s, including a very early image of Norma Jean Dougherty (Marilyn Monroe) on the beach.  In addition, the exhibit will include a number of vintage prints of film luminaries photographed very unconventionally, sometimes in extreme close-up, such as in his haunting, almost surreal image of Stanley Kubrick with one eye closed, and the other glaring and direct.

John Humble: Other Places / Venice Beach

April 5 - May 7, 2011

John Humble was raised in a military family and grew up traveling the world. Perhaps his ability to see odd and quirky juxtapositions in the most mundane of public tableaux can be attributable to the freshness of eye that one experiences as a “visitor.” Humble, however, has now lived in L.A. for over 30 years and his color photographs continue to uncover aesthetics of chaos and clutter, and a melting pot of architecture. He quotes the Grateful Dead, “once in a while you get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if you look at it right.”

Humble is recognized as a keen observer of Los Angeles and was one of eight photographers awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to chronicle the city on its bicentennial. In 2007, the Getty mounted a major mid-career retrospective of his photographs entitled: A Place in the Sun: Photographs of Los Angeles by John Humble, accompanied by a significant catalogue.

In this, his first exhibition with Craig Krull Gallery, Humble decided to broaden his scope and “drive around the United States and photograph the American Landscape.” Previously, his work was created with a large view camera, but advancements in digital photography enabled him to make his new photos with a hand-held camera, allowing more freedom and mobility.  Humble made a series of extensive trips, staying primarily on smaller country roads. It is, of course, significant that his explorations were made in a car, and that his discoveries have become part of a great tradition in American photographic road trips. Like his observations in Los Angeles, these American pictures are about insights in juxtaposition; aged and vacant storefronts sit beside gaudy drive-thrus, hand-painted religious billboards stand in empty fields, as do newly constructed, box-like churches that look more like concrete-slab industrial parks.

As a counterpoint to Humble’s photographs of Middle America, he will concurrently present a series of photographs of Venice Beach. As the artist describes it, “there is no place in the world like the tawdry three-ring circus of Venice…electric guitar players on rollerblades, marijuana doctors, tarot readers, muscle builders, tattoo shops, drug addicts, entertainers, and people speaking every language under the sun.”

Dan McCleary: Panel Discussion
Robin Mitchell: Treasure Maps

February 26 - April 2, 2011

According to Christopher Knight at the Los Angeles Times, Dan McCleary paints with,  “a clear-eyed sense of gravity that recalls the likes of Piero della Francesca.”  McCleary, however, applies his sense of classical composition to seemingly banal contemporary moments, such as a solitary figure sitting in a coffee shop with a foam cup and a red plastic stir stick, or a man in pajamas weighing himself on a bathroom scale.  He deals in restraint, and says, “I don’t like to show too much. It’s so much better when things are reserved.”  On February 26th, Craig Krull Gallery will present a new 6.5 x 13.5’ mural entitled Panel Discussion.  After having completed an even larger mural entitled American Jury, which was commissioned for the Las Cruces Federal Courthouse in New Mexico, McCleary felt empowered to attempt another large-scale work.  Panel Discussion depicts five seated panelists and one standing figure behind a long table draped in white linen, with a water pitcher, paper cups, notes, and a laptop.  The viewer is part of the audience that the panel has come to address.  The formal structure and Renaissance balance of this painting was inspired by Andrea del Sarto’s fresco, The Last Supper, which McCleary recently viewed in Florence. The exhibition will also include a number of preparatory drawings and paintings.

     Concurrently, the gallery will present an exhibition of new paintings by Robin Mitchell entitled, Treasure Maps.   These brightly colored, intricately worked gouache paintings are abstract, yet referential, explorations into symmetry and gesture.  As Christopher Miles observed in the L.A. Weekly, her work is “assembled of what one might call controlled gestures-casual yet deliberate marks…. Radiant shapes, often centered in the compositions, and usually among the largest of elements employed, read simultaneously as starbursts, sunspots, dahlia-like flowers….”

Stephen Aldrich: The Time Traveler
Yamamoto Masao: KAWA = Flow
Stephen Aldrich and Barret Oliver: Photo-Synthesis

January 15 - February 19, 2011

Japanese photographer Yamamoto Masao regards his images as the equivalent of a “haiku moment,” when meaning or insight is suddenly made clear. He titled his current body of work, “Kawa,” which is the Japanese word for “river” or “flow” to suggest both a connection as well as a divide between the present and past. His spare and meditative photos depict natural subjects such as a freshly split log, mushrooms growing on heavy rope or crystalline dewdrops on the wings of a dragonfly. Writing for the LA TIMES, Leah Ollman suggested that each photo is “a moment of grace” and that Yamamoto’s work affords one the opportunity “to experience stillness and contemplate beauty, eternity.”

Concurrently the gallery will present an exhibition of new work by Stephen Aldrich. A pivotal moment in Aldrich’s career occurred in 1968 when he met the influential photographer, Frederick Sommer. A musician and art student at Prescott College in Arizona, Aldrich was soon enlisted by Sommer to interpret his innovative, abstract musical scores, thus beginning a long relationship of mentoring and collaboration. In the last decade of Sommer’s life, Aldrich worked with him on an extraordinary group of collages, while at the same time, developing his own unique approach to the medium. Working with fine 19th century engravings as his source material, Aldrich cuts imagery with mind-boggling precision and complexity. There is an obsessive quality to the work in its dense overlappings, rhythms, repetitions and patterns that may, in part, be attributable to his background in music.

Adjacent to the Aldrich works will be a small exhibition introducing the collaborative photo collages of Stephen Aldrich and Barret Oliver titled "Photo-Synthesis". The two have been working together since 2007 as a result of their shared interest in 19th century imagery and photographic techniques. The collaboration begins with albumen prints created by Oliver, which are then sliced and reassembled by Aldrich. Oliver describes their work as an exploration into “how the history of images is understood by the contemporary eye and how the fragmentary nature of photographs affects the way we see.”

Rose-Lynn Fisher: Bee
Brian Forrest: Dusk

December 4, 2010 - January 8, 2011

Brian Forrest’s photographs are made in the Santa Monica Mountains, an often-overlooked natural environment within L.A.’s urban sprawl. Working with a large format camera, his images of dense brush and tangled branches are captured at the very low light of dusk. As the artist notes, in this diminishing light, color sensitivity fades and the world moves closer to black and white, thus exposing rather than concealing new shapes and spaces in the natural landscape. His large-scale (50x80”) photographs may appear completely black at first glance, but like the environment he seeks to convey, they gradually reveal details. As Christopher Knight suggests, “Spend a moment, and out of the inky darkness landscape imagery slowly comes into view.” Knight also discovered his own shadow on the dark surface of the artworks and observed that the viewer “becomes a shadow-figure…appearing to move through the underbrush. Like light and space [artworks], Forrest’s photographs engage perceptual phenomena to revelatory effect.”

Concurrently, the gallery will present an exhibition of black and white photographs by Rose-Lynn Fisher entitled Bee. Working with a scanning electron microscope, Fisher records in extraordinary detail, the intricate and complex anatomy of bees. She notes that, “this project really began the first time I saw the bee’s eye and was amazed to see that it echoed the structure of the honeycomb.” Her recognition of fundamental patterns in nature, from the molecular to the universal, echoes John Steinbeck’s observation that “it is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.” Reflecting on the bee, Fisher takes her observation even further and wonders if the corresponding hexagonal structures could hint at "a parallel kind of encoding relevant to humanity, like fractals or the golden mean, symbolically describing the correspondence between a deeper capacity to see and to do." Crisp in detail and high in contrast, the images sometimes look like scratchboard drawings of surreal landscapes or extraterrestrials, but closer study reveals what Fisher calls a “congruency of form and function, vision and action, spirit and matter.” She concludes that the recent plight of bees has demanded a closer look at their needs and our responsibility for protecting their existence.

The infinite complexities revealed in the subtle landscapes of Brian Forrest and the microscopic details of Fisher’s bees are the rewards that Rainer Maria Rilke promised, “if you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring.”

A reception for the artists will be held at Craig Krull Gallery on Saturday, December 4, 4-6pm. Rose-Lynn Fisher will be signing copies of her new book Bee, published by Princeton Architectural Press.

Astrid Preston: east west spring fall
Julius Shulman: Centennial 10/10/10

October 16 - November 27, 2010

 Astrid Preston's paintings and drawings are grounded in the premise that a landscape is an abstract human construct based on our ability to mentally remove ourselves from the natural world. Because of this conceptual separation, we are still trying to resolve our complicated and ever-changing relationship to nature. Preston addresses both the wild, which has been in our evolutionary blood for thousands of years, and the cultivated, which represents our desire for order and control. While her paintings of topiaries, hedges, mazes and vast deserts dotted with perfectly rounded sagebrush could be described as allegorical, metaphysical and even surreal, her current work, east west spring fall explores the intricate complexities of tangled vines and leaves. The plant forms range from the eugenia in her backyard to the cherry blossoms of Japan. Some are dense foliage, while others are stark and barren. In these works, Preston combines western painting sensibilities with eastern concepts such as wabi-sabi-- the Japanese aesthetic based on transience, imperfection, simplicity and the reflection of natural processes. Several paintings in the exhibition are on raw Belgian linen and include images of leaves that trail off into unfinished passages. In another series of square paintings, the artist has superimposed bare branches over floating color fields reminiscent of Rothko.

    Concurrently, the gallery will present an exhibition celebrating the birthday of Julius Shulman, who would have turned 100 on October 10th. Recognized by many as the most important architectural photographer in history, Shulman's iconic images of works by Neutra, Schindler, Eames, Koenig and others have come to symbolize the optimistic spirit of Modernism. The exhibit at Craig Krull Gallery, entitled Centennial 10/10/10, consists of small vintage prints that Shulman made in the years just prior to becoming a professional photographer in 1936. These never before exhibited photos include self-portraits, camping and hiking adventures, and work from his years as a student at Berkeley.

Woods Davy: La Ascensión de las Piedras
George Herms: Collages

September 4 - October 9, 2010

     On September 4th, Craig Krull Gallery will open its sixth solo exhibition of Woods Davy’s sculptures. For the past thirty years Davy has worked with natural elements, usually incorporating various types of stone in fluid balancing acts that reflect the artist’s “Western Zen” sensibility. Art writer Shana Nys Dambrot wrote that Davy’s work is essentially a “kind of collaboration between artist and nature,” one in which the artist “prefers to cooperate with the pre-existing uniqueness and objecthood of his materials.” In the current body of work, entitled La Ascensión de las Piedras, Davy’s stone configurations suggest levitation-- as if the small boulders are just beginning a linked and gradual ascent. The forms are influenced by the artist’s underwater observations of natural elements growing towards the surface and sunlight. As Holly Myers remarked on Davy’s work, there is “something thrilling about a work that appears to defy its own natural properties,” while at the same time one can appreciate the work’s “meditative reverence.”

    Concurrently, the gallery will present an exhibition of collages by George Herms. Coming out of the Beat Generation of the 1950s, Herms is recognized -- along with Ed Kienholz, Wallace Berman and Bruce Conner -- as a leading figure of California Assemblage. His work combines aged, stained, and rusted detritus, always rubber stamped with the four letters, L-O-V-E (the E printed backwards). As the critic Robert L. Pincus observed, the stamps are “a linguistic hieroglyph, as it were, of his ambitions for art. Collective judgment deems ugly those things Herms recycles as beautiful. That restorative act, in some small way, is analogous to his hope, perhaps implausible and undoubtedly visionary, that art can serve as catalyst for purging the human heart of hate.” The collages in this exhibition are a result of Herms sifting through boxes of his papers that were being catalogued for the Getty Research Institute. The discarded envelopes, blank sheets of thin cardboard, and other scraps of mail were covered with patterns of pale brown and tan acid staining. Herms reassembled the “damaged” remains into subtle layers of tone and shape, which sometimes include a gallery return address or the void of an envelope window.

Connie Jenkins: Fossil Reef
Michael Kenna: Venice and Emilia-Romagna
Matthew Chase-Daniel: Photo-Assemblages

July 17 - August 21, 2010

Craig Krull Gallery is pleased to announce its eleventh solo exhibition of Michael Kenna’s photographs. Recognized internationally for his atmospheric pictures of stillness and solitude, Kenna does not include people in his photographs because “they become too magnetic and suggest a more definitive relationship… I’m more attracted to artwork where space, and even subject matter are more mysterious and elusive than specific.” He also prefers making his photographs with long exposures in the early morning hours or in the evening and night. According to curator Peter Bunnell, this brings the work “even further into the realm of imagined time,” or as the artist describes it, a place where “time equalizes itself.” Kenna has consistently photographed at the intersection of nature and enduring creations of civilization, such as the gardens of André Le Nôtre, the monolithic heads of Easter Island, and the monastery of Mont Saint Michel. In his most recent body of work, he interprets another timeless meeting of the elements and history in Venice, Italy. In addition to the Venice work, Craig Krull Gallery will also feature photographs Kenna made of the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, which are also currently on view at the Palazzo Magnani in Reggio Emilia.

Concurrently, the gallery will present an exhibition of new paintings by Connie Jenkins entitled, Fossil Reef. These works represent a continuation of a series that the artist began about six years ago when she spent her first week on Santa Rosa Island with National Park biologists that were conducting intertidal monitoring studies on the Channel Islands. Most of the paintings in this exhibition are based on photographs of tide pools that Jenkins made over the past six years at Fossil Reef on the northwest side of the island. Although the artist might be identified as a photo-realist painter, she notes that the work is about “the perceptual interstice between abstraction and illusion—that particularity of the arrangement of shape and value and color that triggers pattern recognition.”

Finally, the gallery will feature the photo-assemblage work of New Mexico artist, Matthew Chase-Daniel. Like the other two artists, Chase-Daniel engages with a given place for extended periods of time. His process of combining multiple images into grids results in a landscape of both detailed and distant perspectives captured over time. Intertidal zones are a recurrent subject for Chase-Daniel who compares his work to the experience of walking along the shore gathering shells and occasionally looking up at the horizon.

Hilary Brace: Recent Drawings
Marc Bohne: Paintings

June 5 - July 10, 2010

In reviewing Hilary Brace's drawings, the New York Times said, "once in a while you come across an art of such refined technique that it seems the product of sorcery more than human craft...” Starting with the smooth surface of polyester film darkened with charcoal, Brace works in a reductive manner by removing charcoal with erasers and other hand made tools. Despite the photographic veracity of her technique, Brace composes her images without premeditation, through an explorative process that allows them to unfold in unanticipated directions. Her subjects are based upon clouds, water, mist and mountains, but she takes these forms to sublime and unimaginable new heights. As Christopher Knight remarked in the Los Angeles Times, her work is “like a Vija Celmins drawing made Baroque, [it] conjures ephemeral poetics of light and space.” For all their vastness and grandeur, Brace’s drawings are relatively small and intimate. As Leah Ollman observed in Art in America, these drawings “put those two realms – the private and the cosmic – within reach of each other.”

Concurrently, the gallery will present its first exhibition of the paintings of Marc Bohne. Based in the Pacific Northwest, Bohne visits and then revisits landscapes of particular resonance to him from California to Montana. For this reason, he explains, “I could never be a plein-air painter…it is important for me to process my perceptions, which often need time to form.” Acknowledging “metaphysical threads” to the natural world, Bohne distills these sensations into structured compositions. The objective, he suggests, is to “see deeper into the layers of the landscape, uncovering its harmonies and dissonances, the physical and spiritual tensions.” His oil paintings on panel are not detailed renderings of a place but rather what Emerson called, “a correspondence of the outward world to the inward world of thought and emotions.” For Emerson, “nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word.” For Marc Bohne, that language is translated into form, texture and tone.

Michael Light: InterMountain
Marc Valesella: Not Negotiable

April 24 - May 29, 2010

  Craig Krull Gallery is pleased to present two photo-based exhibitions that investigate our relationship with the inhabited, arid American West.   Michael Light: InterMountain and Marc Valesella: Not Negotiable will open on April 24th and continue through May 29th.  These exhibitions consider our impact on the extended ecosystem of the West in terms of development, resource extraction, and environmental changes.

     In his previous exhibition here, Michael Light presented images of the vast grid of Los Angeles at night.  His new work moves east from California towards Utah, Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming and Colorado.  Light continues his clear-eyed examination of the way we inhabit and alter our surroundings through a 4x5" aerial view camera from his self-piloted light aircraft or rented helicopters.  His perspective addresses what critic Stephen Vincent calls "the mythology and consequences of American westward expansion." The mammoth hand-made photo books that Light creates (measuring 36x44" when opened) are a response to the efforts of 19th century photographers such as Timothy O'Sullivan. These pioneering photo-chroniclers of the West created volumes of photographs for government sponsored geological surveys that were intended to identify resources and attract settlement. The photographs in this exhibit range from images of the world's largest excavation at the Bingham Copper Mine near Salt Lake City, to the wholesale transformation of Wyoming's Green and Powder River Basins by relentless natural gas and coal extraction, to the architectures of economic stratification in Phoenix.  The exhibit will also include two of Light's most recent photobooks, one in color focusing on the Snake River and Twin Falls, Idaho and the other a black and white journey above snow blanketed environs of Denver.   A component of the exhibition will be on view concurrently at The Gallery at The Archer School for Girls (11725 Sunset Blvd. L.A.).  A reception for Michael Light will take place at Craig Krull Gallery on Saturday April 24th from 3-5pm.  The reception at the Archer School for Girls will be held the same afternoon from 4-5:30 with an artist talk to follow at 5:30. (Reservations for the talk can be made by calling 310/873-7043.)

     In conjunction with the Michael Light exhibition, the gallery will present a series of photographs by Marc Valesella entitled Not Negotiable.  The title refers to a statement made by then President George H.W. Bush during a 1992 Earth Summit.  When asked why he was resistant to making changes that could help the environment, the President replied that the American way of life is “not negotiable.”  Valesella’s black and white 20x24” photographs, made with an 8x10” camera, document dark and desolate landscapes of Southern California that have been ravaged by wildfires in an era of repeated annual droughts and some of most devastating fires on record.

Richard C. Miller: Over the Long Run
Vintage Carbro Prints, The Hollywood Freeway, and L.A. IN B/W

February 27 - April 17, 2010

In the spring of 2009, Richard C. Miller’s photographic career was given long overdue recognition in the form of an exhibition at the Getty Museum.   As a practitioner of the exceptionally stable color process known as carbro printing, Miller’s work was positioned adjacent to an exhibit of one of the masters of that technique-- Paul Outerbridge. Carbro printing, a difficult and time-consuming process requiring the layering of cyan, magenta and yellow pigment separations, was exploited by Outerbridge and Miller for both commercial and fine art applications.  In fact, a career breakthrough occurred for Miller in 1941 when he submitted a carbro print to the Saturday Evening Post. The image depicted his daughter Linda praying at the Thanksgiving table while peaking at the turkey.  It became one of the first color photographs to displace Norman Rockwell on the magazine’s cover.  Miller’s color work from the 1940s included several other similarly staged scenes such as Linda being surprised by a chick popping out of an Easter egg that she’s painting, as well as nudes, still-lifes, a series of women in wildly colorful, feathery, and fruit-laden hats, and dozens of images of a young model named Norma Jeane Dougherty (who later became Marilyn Monroe.)

Miller’s black and white work was equally significant, and in some ways, ahead of its time. From 1948-1953 he photographed the building of the Hollywood Freeway, not on assignment or for other commercial purposes, but because he was in awe of its monumentality.  As he said, “…this is how the people must have felt when they first saw cathedrals in Europe…the first day the four-level opened, I drove around and around just to experience it.”  The early images of construction, however, are more about displacement, bulldozed neighborhoods, and dirt fields scattered with construction debris and random dying foliage.  Writing about this body of work, the author Judith Freeman noted that, “no one was making pictures like these back then, and no one would have appreciated them at the time.  In Miller’s photographs we find the precursor to the work of the New Topographic photographers Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams and Joe Deal.”   

In addition to his carbro work and Hollywood Freeway photos, the exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery will include a trove of vintage pictures from the 1930s-50s of Los Angeles at night, the city’s grand boulevards, self-portraits boxing, the Good Humor Man, beaches, parking lots, gas stations, Steinbeckian views of the Central Valley, James Dean on and off the set of Giant, a selection of striking portraits including some of his best friend Brett Weston, costume parties at Edward Weston’s Wildcat Hill, pictures made while driving, the dunes at Oceano, and aviation photos made while working at North American.

Don Bachardy: Self Portraits 1959-2009
Mark Swope: The Los Angeles River

January 17 - February 20, 2010

Craig Krull Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of self-portraits by Don Bachardy, one of the most celebrated portrait artists of our time. Recognized for his extraordinarily deft, fluid, and graphically concise portraits, Bachardy has rendered such figures as Aldous Huxley, Dorothy Parker, Cecil Beaton, Fred Astaire, John Huston, Fritz Lang, Ray Bradbury, Bette Davis, Igor Stravinsky, Natalie Wood, Joan Didion, Ed Ruscha and Jack Nicholson. His portraits are always from life, never from photographs.

in Los Angeles in 1934, Bachardy met his lifetime partner Christopher Isherwood in 1953 and they remained together until Isherwood’s death in 1986. Their home in Santa Monica Canyon became a salon for the local art world as well as a mecca for artists, writers and musicians visiting from abroad. A documentary on their life, Chris and Don; A Love Story, was produced in 2008.

The exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery will present a selection of self-portraits created by Bachardy over a 50-year period, from 1959-2009. A passionate observer with an innate need to create, Bachardy notes that, “my self-portraits are most often done when a scheduled sitter has cancelled a sitting at the last moment. If I have a strong urge to work and can find no one ready to sit at short notice, I sometimes set up a mirror and paint myself.” This is a humble statement from an artist whose distinction in self-portraiture could be compared to Rembrandt or Van Gogh. In 2005, Bachardy was given a retrospective of his work at the Huntington Library, which also owns the archives of Christopher Isherwood.

As a compliment to the Bachardy exhibition, we will present a small selection of vintage Polaroid portraits of Marlon Brando, Richard Pryor and others made by the late Lucy Saroyan, the daughter of author William Saroyan.

Concurrently, the gallery will present an exhibition of photographs of the Los Angeles River by Mark Swope. The son of noted TIME photographer John Swope, the younger Swope is a native Angeleno who has developed a keen sense of place in his photographic work. Swope’s interest in a paved urban river that has become “unincorporated, dormant and desolate” reflects an aesthetic and theoretical approach associated with the New Topographic photographers such as Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz. Writing about this work for the Natural Resources Defense Council, Daniel Hinerfeld has observed that the photographs appear to make “no attempt to glorify the river.... In some of his photographs the river is barely noticeable amidst the urban tumult. In others, the river shares the frame equally with the conduits of our industrial age: freeways, train tracks and high-tension wires.” A portion of the proceeds from this exhibition will benefit the NRDC.