13ThingsLA: June 5

Better Homes & Gardens for your art calendar

In this issue: Reviews of current exhibitions at LA Louver, Luis De Jesus & Regen Projects. Recommendations include picks from Marta, Tufenkian Fine Arts, Nazarian/Curcio, the Hammer, Lowell Ryan Projects, Lauren Powell Projects, the Bendix Building, Heidi Duckler Dance, Angel City Press, and Highways. PS: I will be leading a conversation with the artists behind the new slate of exhibitions at TAG on Saturday, June 8, if you’d like to come by and say hello!

Featured:

Rebecca Campbell: California Love, 2023, oil on canvas, 80 x 106 in. (Courtesy of LA Louver)

Review: Rebecca Campbell: Young Americans at LA Louver is on view through July 20; artist talk with Sara Cochran Wednesday, June 5, 7pm. Liminal is an overused word these days, yet what else is adolescence but a transom, a space between. Anyway, here are some children you can “hold without judging,” as master painter Rebecca Campbell again turns her magic bag of technique to depictions of youth, and relatedly to the splendor of verdant blossoming nature—both eternal metaphors for life, growth, loss, and return. And both, at least the way Campbell does it, are not only allegorical intimacies indicative of true personal experience, but also pliant armatures on which to hang her absolutely wild, opulent, radiant, daring, poetically sighing, carefully considered, energetically expressive, polyglot, multidextrous, chromatically-charged, abstraction-inflected, uncanny valley, flat out gorgeous way of dealing with oil paint. Translated through Campbell’s colorific language of eye-movement theory and emotional chord-striking, the resulting works feel individual (that red dress!) but are in fact all about the same things—what it feels like to be alive, and what you can do with paint. Many of the most affecting works do not show figures at all—but the flowers, grasses, plants, and one absolutely legendary lemon tree are no less protagonists in this story of becoming. There’s a Spotify playlist Campbell made to get you in the mood—tip: bring your earbuds along because it makes a lovely soundtrack for the paintings. On view in Venice through July 20 (check their summer hours); lalouver.com. —SND

Rebecca Campbell: In Between, 2024, oil on canvas, 80 x 120 in. (Courtesy of LA Louver)