13ThingsLA: December 4
The Body Problem for your art calendar
Isabelle Albuquerque X Robert Therrien, Installation View at Robert Therrien Studio, Los Angeles, 2024
A truly exceptional situation at the Robert Therrien Estate & Studio; a talk at Honor Fraser Gallery’s PST show; exciting photography presented by Alta Vista Arts, at Human Resources Los Angeles, via the Photographic Arts Council LA, and at Artbook at Hauser & Wirth; openings at Craig Krull Gallery / All-Bergamot Open House, Arcane Space, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and albertz benda; short films at the Skirball Center’s PST show, dance at the Wallis, music at Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood. And in personal news… we hit the 1000-subscriber mark here at our project, and not gonna lie, it feels pretty good. Thank you, everyone, you really are making a difference in keeping truly independent art writing alive in Los Angeles!
Feature
Isabelle Albuquerque X Robert Therrien, Installation View at Robert Therrien Studio, Los Angeles, 2024
REVIEW: Isabelle Albuquerque X Robert Therrien, now open at Therrien Studio. The invigorating work of the late sculptor Robert Therrien gets a surprising influx of new life, as the Estate and the artist’s longstanding industrial live/work studio host the intervention of sculptor Isabelle Albuquerque. Albuquerque (b. 1981) and Therrien (1947-2019) may at first seem to have little in common. Her most celebrated work riffs off using her own body as the model for a series of mixed media works with a witchy sense of humor and an omnivorous material curiosity that runs to the pelted fawn, the vulvic candelabra, fun little sex games, loneliness, and subversive empowerment. Therrien is best known for his absurdly outsized domestic objects—dining tables and chairs that tower above your head, precarious stacks of monumental plates and cooking pots, steel wigs that seem to lightly waft but are in fact dangerous wiry tonnages. But the reason this pairing—the first in what is promised to be a series of such on-site invitational participations in the Therrien archive—is so inspired is precisely because it succeeds in teasing out fundamental shared intrigues between the works, offering not only prima facie surprise and delight, but opening new perspectives on each of their practices—including and especially their best-known pieces. The sightlines are epic, with unexpected connections across abstraction and image playing out between, for example, the power of heavy black pigment to redefine forms, the way shimmering chrome can be intimate and musical, the way thrusting a grounded body toward the sky is different when men and women do it, or the way a dripping pile of wax is even funnier with an obelisk of dirty dishes piled up behind it. On view south of Downtown through December 14; free; nicodimgallery.com. —SND
Isabelle Albuquerque X Robert Therrien, Installation View at Robert Therrien Studio, Los Angeles, 2024
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