Plus, a preview of LA Design Weekend and LA Gallery Week
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Top 3 This Week
Let Lindsay Preston Zappas curate your art viewing experiences this week. Here are our Top 3 picks of what not to miss. Scroll down for Insider stories.
At Wilding Cran downtown, Vanessa Beecroft’s exhibition celebrates the female form. Across ceramic, bronze, and plaster sculptures and paintings on canvas, Beecroft’s figures bend, lounge, and twist. In some cases, the figures’ heads are absent or overly simplified, so the focus instead seems to be on the specific physical energy of each form. Some feel stiff and formal as if they’re posing for a portrait, while others slump their shoulders playfully or twist in dancerly movements. In “(Untitled) Purple Figure,” a female form bends in half as if trying to scrunch her whole body within the bounds of the horizontal canvas.
Many of Beecroft’s sculptural works, by contrast, consist only of heads, some sitting on wooden pedestals, others on the floor. They feel disembodied — centering more on the cerebral identity of each subject rather than an embodied gravitas. The two bodies of work complement and contrast each other, together forming evocative portraits of the female form.
Walking into Tâm Văn Trần’s solo exhibition, Primordial Sounds of the Avatar, is like entering into a specific kind of universe — one that houses a particular cast of characters with an aesthetic that lands somewhere between prehistoric artifact and Nickelodeon. Several long white tables across the gallery house ceramic works that meld these two aesthetics — shimmering gold glazes and playful googly-eyed creatures share space with bone-like skull forms and gloopy deskilled shapes that look as if they’ve been weathered by time. This aesthetic combination literally melds together in the kiln as Trân creates alchemical surfaces that indeed recall early life forms converging in primordial waters. Titles such as “The Departure” and “Standing on Water” add a spiritual narrative element to the objects, as if they together chart out an ancient origin story.
A series of wallworks, made on canvas and paper, line the gallery. These employ a more restrained clay-colored palette and each includes one or two fragmented clay figures that look as if they’ve been excavated in an archeological dig. In Trân’s practice, archaic symbols share space with fantastical figures in a unique world-building that centers around sculptural materiality.
Over the next two weekends in LA, designers and art galleries will converge across two weekend-long programs. First up, is LA Design Weekend, taking place June 21st–23rd and touting an array of pop-up exhibitions, events, studio visits, and meet-and-greets. Highlights across the buzzy weekend include curated exhibitions that meld art and design such as Vessel, curated by Studio Anand Sheth, which highlights Bay-Area makers; and Mind Meld, in which artists and designers have been asked to collaborate on new one-of-a-kind objects. Plan your weekend atladesignweekend.com.
The following weekend, June 27th–29th, is LA Gallery Weekend, a program organized by Gallery Platform LA, a pandemic-era consortium of LA galleries. Across the weekend you can attend a launch event at the ROW DTLA and pop by an array of new exhibition openings, late gallery hours, conversations, and book launches. Plan your weekend at galleryplatform.la.
Vanessa Beecroft is known for her edgy 90s-era performance practice which often features clads of nude women or identically dressed individuals standing in a uniform formation. Yet, some years ago, Beecroft made a bold shift in her studio to largely abandon new performance work in lieu of painting and sculpture.
“Painting and sculpture is what I always wanted to do,” Beecroft says. “At school, “I felt my work, the figurative drawings that I was doing, was not avant-garde enough and I felt ashamed. I still feel embarrassed and uneasy about creating things that are so clearly tangible. And yet — I always wanted, since the beginning, to create a different world from scratch, out of nothing.”
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