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THE ART NEWSPAPER Number 242, January 2013
Found! The heart of LA One of the oldest clichés about Los Angeles is that the city’s endless sprawl has no core to bind it. However recent award-wining research found that the city does actually have “a structural core centre”—albeit a very long one. Dubbed the “Wilshire/Santa Monica Corridor”, it is “comparable in function to New York’s Manhattan or to Chicago’s Loop [and is] a coherent unit composed of Santa Monica, Westwood, Beverly Hills, Fairfax, Hollywood, Koreatown and downtown”, says Samuel Krueger, who produced the report for his masters degree at the University of Southern California. “I get tired of people saying that LA is not a real city, so I wanted to show that it has a centre just like any other city does,” Krueger told his university newspaper. Rather than focusing on employment hubs or commuting patters, he mapped urban clusters consisting of restaurants, entertainment amenities, hotels, “trendy hangouts” and high culture across the Los Angeles metropolitan area and found that a contiguous urban band runs through its centre. C.B.
Hollywood West Hollywood Koreatown Beverly Hills Downtown
PARKING: COURTESY OF SAMUEL FREEMAN
LA Louver’s Peter Goulds on the shifting centres “Since I started our gallery in 1975, there have been nine art centres. La Cienega [West Hollywood] from the 1950s was still going then, and West Hollywood from the 1960s kept on for a while. At that time, every single artist except Ed Ruscha lived in Venice or Ocean Park; this area is where the artists lived and worked, and where collectors and writers visited. We chose the gallery’s location on this basis, and because rents were so affordable. Now, 35 years later, property prices have gone up astronomically, and the value didn’t flinch during the recession of the 1990s. A lot of artists were working in Santa Monica, and a lot of East Coast galleries moved in near Colorado Avenue [Santa Monica], around the mid1980s. Bergamot Station [Santa Monica] became popular with galleries such as Rosamund Felsen, Frank Lloyd, Patrick Painter and Shoshana Wayne in the 1990s. Then there was a whole move downtown in two phases: one in the 1980s where Cirrus Gallery remains, and then to Chinatown in a second wave in the early 2000s. When that started to disintegrate in the mid-2000s, Culver City began to solidify. Now, Bergamot Station is getting ready to close while Hollywood is becoming a new centre, which will ultimately take away from Culver City. The grass is always greener, and eventually, in my opinion, everything will be downtown. We built and own our 8,000 sq. ft Frederick Fisher-designed gallery in Venice, and we have recently acquired a 13,000 sq. ft building, which will become our art storage and private viewing facility. For now, we are planning to stay in the neighbourhood in which we have resided for the past 37 years.”
Hugh Scott-Douglas: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari Blum & Poe
Private museum set to launch by the beach Brian and Eva Sweeney will put their collection on public view in El Segundo
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new privately owned exhibition space is due to open on 27 January in El Segundo, between Los Angeles International Airport and Manhattan Beach. Husband and wife Brian and Eva Sweeney were looking for storage space for their growing art collection two years ago when the former local mayor, Eric Busch, approached them to make their collection available to the public instead. The resulting institution, El Segundo Museum of Art, was founded with $3m in capital investments from the Sweeneys and additional support from the energy conglomerate, Chevron, and the cable television company, DirecTV—two of the largest employers in the city. The museum is being run by the Artlab21 Foundation, a non-profit organisation set up by the Sweeneys. The museum is governed by an advisory board chaired by Anthony Owen, the managing partner of the private investment firm Dom Capital Group. The board is looking to raise funds to support additional programmes. “The more money we raise, the more programmes we can undertake,” Eva Sweeney says. Most of the exhibitions will be drawn from the Sweeneys’ collection, which includes Impressionist works by Monet and Pissarro, early 20th-century works by Klimt, Kandinsky and Klee, as well as Modern works by artists including Rauschenberg and Warhol. The works in the collection are not for sale. So far, the museum has garnered strong community support. The Otis College of Art and
The Sweeneys’ El Segundo Museum of Art has financial backing from Chevron and DirecTV Design is collaborating on its artist-in-residence programme and the museum is working with the local school system to bring its students to the space. Exhibitions in the 4,000 sq. ft space will combine classic, Modern and contemporary art, as well as shows with a conscience (there will be quarterly exhibitions focused on sustainability and communication). The inaugural show, “Desire” (until 31 March), will focus on the idea
Artists talk spaces Sectioned off A Los Angeles native, artist Mark Bradford’s studio in South Central Los Angeles, which measures 17,220 sq. ft, is divided into an area for largescale painting, studio storage and a parking lot where large-scale sculpture can be stored. “I prefer compartmentalised spaces for working because, quite frankly, I am very compartmentalised. One vast space doesn’t work for me,” he tells The Art Newspaper (right). The artist’s mural-sized abstract collages and installations are assembled from signage, advertisements and posters which he layers with paint, twine, and glue, and then repeatedly sands down. “I enjoy working here because it’s warm, and the paper dries quickly. You can get big spaces and be totally isolated in your fortress. I can wall myself up in my own Disneyland.”
Opened up The artist Sterling Ruby, known for his biomorphic ceramics, urethane sculptures and large-scale spraypainted canvases, is expanding his empire in Los Angeles, with plans to develop a second studio space measuring 92,000 sq. ft southeast of
that “everybody loves nature, but people also destroy it,” Eva Sweeney says. The show includes 16th-century landscapes through to more recent works by artists including Alex Katz and Peter Doig. The second exhibition, “Truth” (14 April-11 August), will examine gender issues and feature work by Albrecht Dürer, Pablo Picasso, Gustav Klimt, Lawrence AlmaTadema and Stephan Balkenhol. “We want to set a standard, so that people know that this is not so much a place where you show arts and crafts, it’s really a serious fine art exhibit space,” Eva says. Carren Jao
Parking pays downtown Los Angeles in Vernon. Ruby’s current studio sprawls across three-quarters of an acre in Vernon with separate workshops for sculpture, drawing, paintings and ceramics, among other media. Ruby opens up his spaces to patrons’ groups such as the Centre Pompidou Foundation, the US fundraising arm of the Paris-based museum.
Headed out The UK-born sculptor Thomas Houseago has ambitious plans for his studio complex, a 20,000 sq. ft space in Silver Lake, a hilly neighbourhood northwest of downtown Los Angeles. The artist, who makes huge Picasso-esque primitive figures, has said that he aims to open up his studio to the adjacent Rattlesnake Park (according to the Financial Times, Houseago also wants to install a sculpture trail on a property he owns in Tujunga, north of Los Angeles in the San Gabriel foothills). His workshop comprises a drawing studio and hangar-like hall that used to be a shooting range. “I’m really lucky because in LA my studios are kind of indoor-outdoor spaces. You can see the sky and other buildings, so I work mostly now with the idea of outdoors,” he is reported as saying. Gareth Harris
Jack Pierson Regen Projects
When planning a move in 2010 from Bergamot Hills to the gallery cluster around Culver City, gallerist Samuel Freeman found a 5,000 sq. ft building on South La Cienega Boulevard (right), the same stretch of road that houses a dozen other galleries including Blum & Poe. One of the major attractions was the extra parking lot included in the $1.75m price. Freeman negotiated a deal, buying the space for $1.6m, and immediately sold the parking lot for $635,000 to the company that had been renting it. But, according to the codes of the city’s planning department, the proposed 4,000 sq. ft gallery would have needed 16 parking spaces in order to qualify as a commercial building. After the sale of the parking lot, there were only nine spaces remaining. The problem was solved by Freeman’s architect, Warren Wagner, who made use of eight “parking credits”— phantom parking spaces that had been granted to the property by the city as a special exemption in 1953. Scarlet Cheng
Kathryn Andrews: DOA/DOB David Kordansky Gallery
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• The artist’s first exhibition with Blum & Poe (right) is to be
• Pierson’s work, which has often dealt with language and
text, has also frequently had a nostalgic attitude towards the Hollywood of days gone by. His more recent work, however, focuses on the Hollywood of today, and the artist has teamed up with a graphic designer from the film production studio Lionsgate to create some of his works.
• Kathryn Andrews’s first solo exhibition at the gallery (right)
focuses on the legacies of Minimalism and Pop, drawing on readymade imagery as a way to emphasise a work of art’s materiality. The show features six sculptures, three for the floor and three for the wall, each of which uses reflective surfaces to lure the gallery visitor into the works as an active viewer. P.P.
www.blumandpoe.com
www.regenprojects.com
www.davidkordanskygallery.com
composed of three bodies of work, each of which deals in some way with photography. Altogether, the works draw inspiration from the famed 1920 silent film from which the exhibition takes its name. What brings everything together is Scott-Douglas’s interest in space and its distortion.