1. Paul McCarthy at The Box

Over his career, Paul McCarthy has made a name for himself as a kind of debased Renaissance man, creating massive, big-budget productions, but often appearing in his films with his pants off or covered in ketchup. His multi-genre practice often calls upon archetypes from American culture; Disney is a common motif. At The Box, a gallery run by McCarthy’s daughter, Mara, three series of works are on view. Each begins with a different archetype (pirates, Snow White, and Hitler) and explodes into an ecstatic blend of sculpture, drawing, and film. 

In one sculpture, inspired loosely by Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride (plus a sprinkling of the Iraq war), large plasticine figures sport white foam cowboy hats within a large float-like sculpture. One sits on top of a hodge-podge pedestal made from a phallic sculpture and two off-kilter sawhorses, and another appears to have a decapitated leg. Scraps of paper, melted wax, foam blocks, tools, and spindles of wire litter the installation.

The sculpture, Chop Chop, Chopper, Amputation (Affected) (2013-2016), is part of a larger saga, as the artist’s works often are. “What the final result should be was never clarified, it was an open-ended process,” McCarthy said of adapting the piece’s initial drawings into the sculptural work. “I viewed it as a form of theater.” 

A film from the same series, which also used the drawings as a type of script, plays in the back gallery alongside two other film projects. The exhibition allows the opportunity to dive into McCarthy’s twisted world, where popular cultural icons become filtered through the artist’s id, and come out as art objects that push cultural norms, opening up new pathways for understanding.

On view: October 9–December 18, 2021 | Open map

2. Joan Brown at Parker Gallery

At Parker Gallery, a rare collection of works by Joan Brown is a delightful foray into the artist’s early work. Brown, who began making work in the late ’50s Bay Area art scene, became known for a style of flat figuration — paintings in which female figures (often self-portraits) float within skewed perspective backgrounds and loud geometric patterns. One such work is included in the Parker Gallery show (Running at McAteer Park,1976), but the majority of the exhibition is dedicated to moodier works from the ‘50s and ‘60s, which delight with thick, impasto paint application and surreal compositions. 

Many of the scenes are pulled from Brown’s own day-to-day life, like Reaching for that Chicken at Jack’s from 1960, a work that appears abstract yet evokes a feeling of reaching across a table, with a pizza slice-like shape floating in the foreground. After a prolonged look at the crinkled impasto and delightful texture in the small painting Two Birds (1962), a loose image of two birds in profile slowly emerges, depicted by the artist’s marks, made into layers of thick paint. These and other works round out a surprising exhibition that celebrates the career of a notable artist who was fearless in following her own style, even as it shifted over the years.

On view: November 7–January 8, 2022 | Open map

3. Aaron Morse at La Loma Projects

At La Loma Projects, an exhibition of paintings titled Mineral Mythology by Aaron Morse pushes those titular words to their limits. Each painting is a dense soup of strata, flora, fauna, mythology, and archeology, pulling from everything and everything as if to suggest an intentional compression of time and space. In Wilderness (all works 2021), the composition is made of small vignettes, each pulling towards a different time period, place, and locale. A woman in the foreground wears a ‘70s-style dress, while in the background a more paleolithic figure romps through the wilderness. Tigers lounge next to geckos and black bears in shifting scales that belie any notion of actual scale. 

Cloud World (Mazeppa) pulls more directly from a specific source: the narrative evoked in a poem by Lord Byron of a young Mazeppa who is strapped naked to a horse after his love affair with a Countess is discovered by the Count. Other works, like The Sea, seem to zoom out on culture, nature, and the world at large, like some kind of ouroboros of evolution that celebrate the diversity of life and the wildness it contains.

On view: November 6–January 9, 2022 | Open map

Black Portraiture in America

As part of a five-city tour, the Obama portraits have come to Los Angeles. While the paintings themselves are notable, LACMA has also curated a companion show, Black American Portraits, which is drawing crowds to the adjacent galleries. The exhibition is a reframing of American portraiture from a long obscured Black perspective and features more than 140 artists, with a focus on depictions of Black subjects that celebrate love, abundance, and agency. Last week I talked to Greater LA’s Steve Chiotakis about the exhibition and the importance of BIPOC visibility within the genre of portrait painting.

Mining the Problematic

“We were sort of mining an area that’s problematic,” Paul McCarthy told writer M.H. Miller during an interview for T Magazine, referring to his A&E EVA ADOLF project, in which the artist and German actress Lilith Stangenberg portray a version of Adolf Hitler and his wife, Eva. McCarthy’s work often plays with taboos, leaning into uncomfortable subjects, and here, he uses Eva and Adolf (whose initials also mirror Adam and Eve’s) to investigate larger cultural phenomena. 

Miller writes that “the artist said that after Trump’s election, he was fascinated by the number of people he would hear comparing Trump to Hitler, tossing around the term ‘fascism’ seemingly without consideration for the history the word contains. [McCarthy] took issue with this, not because the comparison wasn’t valid, but because of how casually people made it.” 

“To a degree, Nazi Germany is a case of hypnotism,” McCarthy explains. “Like, they believed it. And it was easy to go, ‘They made Germany an evil population, because they’re evil by nature.’” This, he said, was absurd. “We’re all capable of it, right? Whatever was ignited in them can be ignited in us. And we see it. What are we watching right now?” He pauses and adds: “QAnon, dude!”