13ThingsLA: August 6

Boldly Go for your art calendar

Tim Biskup, Candy at Face Guts

It’s a good week to get out there, literally and figuratively, with new exhibitions and art-forward adventures in trekking and talking, at institutions and in public spaces from Glendale to grunionland. Seriously though, this is a comfy shoes and sunscreen kind of week. Enjoy enchanting exhibitions at Face Guts, Launch LA, and Advocartsy, plus walks and talks (and dancing) at San Pedro First Thursday, Barnsdall Gallery Theater, Skirball Center, Wende Museum, Matter Studio Gallery (with me!), The Reef, the ICA LA, Forest Lawn Museum, American Cinematheque at the Egyptian, and JOAN at Cabrillo Beach.

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Feature

Tim Biskup, Candy at Face Guts

Tim Biskup: Candy opens Saturday, August 9, 5-8pm at Face Guts. Tim Biskup is one of those curious-minded polyglots who is willing to engage with anything as long as it’s got a creative spark. His interests over the years have included music, architecture, painting and mixed media, graphite drawing, sculpture, printmaking, animation, publishing, home design, and all manner of studio and social experiments . But at the core of all this intellectual and optical buzz are his marvelous paintings—alive with his unique hybrid style of of biomorphic flourishes, heady atmospherics, melting geometry, telling gesture, recurring characters of figure, flora and fauna, and a luminous, nuanced, supersaturated palette. New paintings and sculptures lean heavily into that last bit this weekend. “I wanted the paintings to feel like candy,” Biskup says, “but like candy, they’re also bad for you.” It’s funny because it’s true—one of Biskup’s perennial investigations has been why the rarefied art world has been so set against color, joy, feeling, pleasure, and sometimes even beauty itself, the idea being that if it’s too appealing it can’t be taken seriously. If you’re here, you know what side of that noise we’re on, and why we can’t wait to see what yumminess Biskup has been cooking up lately. On view in Glassell Park through August 31; faceguts.com. —SND

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