by Jody Zellen Royale Projects, Los Angeles Continuing through June 6, 2026 Lynn Aldrich, “Grid Buster,” 1989, carpet padding, surge protectors, stereo arrangement of Gregorian Chant and vacuum cleaner noise, 10 x 17 feet. Courtesy of Royal Projects, Los Angeles. In many senses Lynn Aldrich's work is Duchampian. Her nuanced career spans more than forty years of witty and conceptually based works that ingeniously combine found materials, often including household objects, as well as common items from hardware stores. She transforms them into large scale sculptures that often become visual metaphors for the complexities of the natural world. Her expansive works are filled with visual puns, art history, and scientific inquiry. Lynn Aldrich, “All the Colors Will Bleed,” 2026, mixed media wall construction with thread-spool elements. Courtesy of Royal Projects, Los Angeles. The works included in “Romance and Reality Will Kiss One Another” are both new and old. The centerpiece of the exhibition is “Grid Buster” (1989), a room-sized installation. This multifaceted piece takes its point of departure from the German painter Matthias Grunewald's “Isenheim Altarpiece” (c. 1512-16). A small reproduction of the work hangs on the wall and is illuminated by a single tiny light which is plugged into eight interlocked surge protectors hanging below it. On the floor is a huge orange, black and green plaid carpet with the shape of Christ's body removed. The cutout rises above, centered on an adjacent wall, a silhouette mimicking the crucified body. Although created in 1989, the work feels very current as it deals with dissociation and issues of power, religion and faith. In “All I Know So Far” (also 1989) Aldrich cuts apart and horizontally stacks sections of 'flat cactus' paddles, reshaping them into rectangles. They are presented on a wooden shelf bookended by bronzed baby shoes. In this curious juxtaposition, the prickly surface of the cactus and the title “All I Know So Far” implies a potential for danger. Lynn Aldrich, “Backyard Bird Count,” 2026, mixed media construction with colored rods, wire, and framed landscape image. Courtesy of Royal Projects, Los Angeles. Alongside these older pieces are two recent works: “All the Colors Will Bleed” and “Backyard Bird Count” (both 2026). For “All the Colors Will Bleed” Aldrich created a rectangle with more than 100 small, square paint chips. Attached to each chip are like-colored threads. The individual strands move from the edge of the work to its center, where they become a chaotic interwoven pile — a massive tangle of threads — in the shape of an oval. “Backyard Bird Count” combines three sets of pointed fence pickets in varying tones of gray into a rectangle framing a section of astroturf that contains a smaller painted landscape. Attached to the surface of this combine are numerous bird swings (wires with plastic bars) in varying sizes and colors. The implication is that caged birds inhabit an artificial space that also mirrors the 'real' world. Reading the materials list for Aldrich's works provides insight as to the context and content for the pieces. “Parch” (2010), “Free Refill: Never Thirst Again” (2023) and “Desert Prophet” (2026) are made with steel downspouts — vertical conduits connected to gutters that direct water away from the foundations of buildings. Aldrich combines these generic forms, often personifying or combining them to resemble plants or animals. The titles subtly reference water or its lack to direct the reading of the works toward climate change. Lynn Aldrich, “Rose Ghost,” 2015, tulle and plastic. Courtesy of Lynn Aldrich. “Rose Ghost” (2015) is a large circular wall relief made from numerous layers of light purple, nylon tulle held in place by similarly shaped thin sheets of clear plastic. This cut out shape is inspired by the rose windows of Chartres Cathedral. Aldrich's work is simultaneously solid and ephemeral, a ghost-like presence that suggests impermanence in direct contrast with the original. Circular forms are also seen in “Cloud of Unknowing” and “Through the Oculus” (both 2026), where Aldrich collages tools for measuring, images of planets, architectural details with rounded openings, and hand-drawn or painted shapes in shades of blue. Throughout the gallery space Aldrich weaves between past and present. Always aware of the relationship between form and function, she continuously transforms the ordinary — be it garden hoses, tree branches, found postcards or wooden dowels — into something extraordinary and beyond expectation. Her human scaled pieces resonate both formally and conceptually. They are at once familiar, yet also other worldly, and offer multiple pathways for contemplation. Jody Zellen is a LA based writer and artist who creates interactive installations, mobile apps, net art, animations, drawings, paintings, photographs, public art, and artist’s books. Zellen received a BA from Wesleyan University (1983), a MFA from CalArts (1989) and a MPS from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (2009). She has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1989. For more information please visit www.jodyzellen.com.

by David S. Rubin Wönzimer, Los Angeles Continues through May 22, 2026 Lawrence Gipe, “In Commemoration of Gardi Sugdub (Vanishing Island),” 2024, oil on canvas, 72 x 96”. All images courtesy of Wönzimer. Art is political, it is often said, yet there are clearly artworks that are Political, with a capital ‘P’, where specific social and moral issues drive the art. Such is the case with the works of the thirteen artists in “DegreeZero: Utopia/Dystopia,” a thought-provoking exhibition curated by participating artists Lawrence Gipe and Constance Mallinson. The curators’ thesis centers on the idea that utopia and dystopia are related to one another, two sides of the same coin like yin and yang. They are interdependent and fluid, with most versions residing in the liminal areas. Topics addressed by the participants include ecological concerns, identity politics, colonialism, and surveillance. Gipe and Mallinson call attention to environmental maladies in their own large representational paintings but bring different temperaments to their respective works. Although Gipe often bases his paintings on black-and-white photos of historical places or events, the source for his “In Commemoration of Gardi Sugdub (Vanishing Island)” (2024) is a full-color aerial view of a Caribbean island that is packed border to border with architecture and currently is in danger of sinking into the sea. Due to the enlarged scale, bold colors, and thick impasto, Gipe’s painting at first appears to be an abstraction. When we scrutinize it further the image resolves into a disturbing reflection on overpopulation and the planet’s diminishing resources.= Constance Mallinson, “Gordian Knot,” 2026, oil on canvas, 48 x 48”. Mallinson’s “Gordian Knot” (2026), by contrast, joyfully conveys a sense of optimism. Set against a black background, it is a lively composition of twigs, leaves, and everyday detritus arranged to resemble a festive Christmas wreath. Rather than pushing towards despair, the work seduces us into considering that the overabundance of waste is a problem to be mitigated through such methods as recycling. Kaya & Blank, “Crude Aesthetics Heliograph #4,” 2026, heliograph plate with crude oil from the La Brea Tar Pits, 4 x 6”. Other artists examine our present-day situation by turning to history. This is exemplified in small works that pack a powerful punch by Mark Steven Greenfield and the team Kaya & Blank, who call attention to the detriments of massive oil consumption in Los Angeles. The artist duo photographed highly trafficked areas like freeway overpasses and fast-food drive-throughs and printed the images on tiny reflective metal plates using the medium’s original heliographic process to develop the images. The technique involves coating a plate with petroleum tar and processing the image in the sun. The artists cleverly tied their choice of material to their subject matter by working with oil from the La Brea Tar Pits. Greenfield also repurposes an art historical format, the Old Master gilded altarpiece. The works here combat racial stereotyping of Blacks and enlighten us about important historical figures that the Western canon has omitted. Each subject is meticulously painted within a circle surrounded by a gold leaf field. Each single figure sports a halo that conveys a saintly stature. Keith Walsh, “Socialist Workers Party U.S. and Descendents,” 2021, ink, color pencil and vinyl emulsion paint on paper, 71 x 43”. One of the most riveting works here is a history lesson in itself. Keith Walsh’s “Socialist Workers Party U.S. and Descendants” (2021) is a visually dynamic, precisely hand-painted charting of far-left activism in the United States from 1945 to the present. Whereas reading conventional historical diagrams might prove tedious, Walsh’s painting achieves the opposite effect. Rendered in black and red on white (colors associated with Russian political posters of the early 20th century) and incorporating portraits of some of the left’s key figures (such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), the composition is incredibly animated. Works by Hilary Baker and Ben Jackel employ sparse visual vocabularies. The barren landscape in Baker’s “Aspen Grove Estates” (2023) serves as a haunting reminder that it has become increasingly difficult for the painting’s bewildered animals to find the food they need for sustenance. Jackel’s “Bat” (2017) is a sleek sculptural replication of a drone that quietly calls attention to threats posed by new technologies whose destructive force is only beginning to be understood. Austin Caswell and Lynn Aldrich juxtapose uncommon materials to focus on the cyclical nature of environmental growth and decay. Caswell’s sculpture “The Dressing and the Drift” (2026) is a disconcerting arrangement of a decaying tree branch and a displaced rock, a metaphoric allusion to nature itself being out of order. Aldrich’s “POST-EXTINCTION START-UP” (2019-26), constructed from fake rock pump covers, pet caves, and pools, imagines a future civilization and the possibility of rebirth. Another way to explore contemporary issues is through fictitious narratives, as exemplified by Umar Rashid’s painting of a generic battle scene where Black warriors are represented as equestrians wearing polo shirts, a symbol of social and economic status from which people of color have long been excluded. Marcos Serafim employs digital technology in his video/installation performance “semipermeable: syringe” (2024-ongoing), which examines the prevalence of selective processes in determining who would receive medical treatment for HIV/AIDS or be allowed to cross the U.S./Mexico border. At the exhibition opening the artist performed the work live, manipulating sound via computer as an audience witnessed a jarring, psychedelic vision of intermingling mostly male bodies, mostly male, alternately shown receiving medication from a syringe and kissing. Beihua Guo, “Beihua Shoots the Bomb,” 2025, stills from single-channel video, 5 min. 48 sec. Liz Cohen and Beihua Guo take a yet more performative approach by inserting themselves into their narratives. Cohen’s intriguing photographs celebrate her mixed heritage (Colombian, born to Jewish and Catholic parents) while championing female empowerment. In “Black Execution” (2010), she poses in a bikini to show off her toned body (having worked with a trainer), while standing next to a hybrid automobile that she made (having studied auto mechanics) by converting a German sedan into an American low rider. Appearing as an enthusiastic photographer in his video “Beihua Shoots the Bomb” (2025), Guo brings a welcome note of levity to the exhibition. As Dr. Strangelove reincarnated, he takes us on a hilarious journey as he documents atomic bombs exploding all around him. Let’s hope that on Earth One it doesn’t come to that. David S. Rubin is a Los Angeles-based curator, writer, and artist. As a curator, he has held positions at MOCA Cleveland, Phoenix Art Museum, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, and San Antonio Museum of Art. As a writer he has contributed to Art and Cake, Art in America, Arts Magazine, Artweek, ArtScene, Fabrik, Glasstire, Hyperallergic, and Visual Art Source. He has published numerous exhibition catalogs, and his curatorial archives are housed in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. For more information: www.davidsrubin.com.

by Matthew Kangas Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle Continues through May 16, 2026 Norman Lundin, “Studio Floor and Wall,” 2025, oil on canvas mounted on archived panel, 19 1/2 x 30”. All images courtesy of Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle. Subjectivity of vision is one qualifier for legitimate realism, and Norman Lundin’s new paintings express that in spades. Seen in an exhibition titled “Landscapes, Mostly, Other Things Too,” Lundin’s breadth of vision and subject matter has never been more evident or elegantly expressed. To each traditional genre he explores — landscape, still lifes, figures — he brings a deeply personal, often brooding and ominous insight that obliquely reflects the darker elements of the time we inhabit, including environmental danger, strained personal relationships, and the tendency to escape into worlds just this side of fantasy. Now approaching 90, Lundin has had a lifetime of international achievements both as a painter and as an admired teacher, with numerous visiting residencies piled on top of his 40 years at the University of Washington School of Art. His tenure there was somewhat at odds with the 1920s School of Paris ties of department co-founders Ambrose Patterson and Walter Isaacs and their students’ postgraduate studies with Fernand Léger in Paris. Lundin’s closest friend on the faculty, Francis Celentano, was a pioneering Optical Perceptualist. Could their influence have had an effect on the bracingly formal compositions of their younger colleague despite his hyper-traditional training in Norway and at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Cincinnati? Norman Lundin, “Coffee Pot and Two Cups,” 2026, oil on canvas, 36 x 48”. Examining the 19 paintings on display, all done just in the past two years, the formalists’ shadow is unmistakable. Gridding up the picture plane, as in “Studio Evening,” “Studio Floor and Wall” (both 2025) and “Coffee Pot and Two Cups” (2026), Lundin’s pictorial strategies seem haunted by his late colleagues in a way that only strengthens their staying power and adds to their mysterious content. Still life and landscape elements are so separated from one another that they tempt a symbolic reading. Colors are restricted, too, as if in a Cubist palette, so that a bright red band on a paper cup sticks out and a thin white line of sunset above the ocean beach doubles as a pure horizontal line regardless of the landscape depicted. A captive of realism due to his training and teaching, Lundin has escaped tedious repetition of subject by varying each encounter with nature or the studio, averting strict identification in favor of delicately placed objects and closely observed outdoor scenes, increasingly darkened by weather, wildfire smoke, and the solitude of a studio. Norman Lundin, “Wetlands Stream,” 2026, oil on canvas, 36 x 60”. The studio window is a constant in the new interiors, often seen late in the day, prodding us to gaze out at indeterminate skylines or adjacent buildings and construction sites. In turn, these take on the role of formal organizers, pulling each painting together in ways that go beyond the mundane subjects of the scene: tables, coffee cups, water carafes and cardboard boxes. For example, in “Across the Studio” (2026) a white plastic detergent bottle sits on a table between a cropped stepladder on the right and three paintings to the left stacked against the wall with their backs facing us. Seemingly random, the composition is a perfect balance among the elements. Two smaller cardboard boxes peek out from behind the ladder. Redefining a still life, Lundin inserts objects of autobiographical significance. They render the composition a quiet tour de force and a talisman of the artist’s activity within the privacy of the studio. In “Box and Three Jars” (2025), the centered cardboard box atop a black table holds the jars above a white can against a gray background. To a modernist, the “Homages to a Square” series (1950-1976) of Bauhaus master Josef Albers are inescapable historical forerunners. With “Light Bulb and Drapery” (2025), the light bulb acts as a pun for effusive artificial light throughout, and the drapery is an oblique homage to Lundin’s old friend, stripe-painter Celentano. Norman Lundin, “Lightbulb and Drapery,” 2025, oil on canvas, 34 x 50”. The new landscapes are familiar but tinged with a gloom that is the formal result of smoky late-afternoon or evening skies and smoldering forests nearly set on fire. Together with the still lifes, they, too, offer potentially symbolic readings of nature in peril. In a crowd of younger eco-conscious landscape painters, these recent views lift Lundin beyond his realist and modernist legacies with great ease that makes for a late career triumph. Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas.

by T.s. Flock Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington Continuing through October 25, 2026 Eric-Paul Riege “ojo|-|ólǫ́” installation view, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle. 2026. Photo: Jueqian Fang. What still distinguishes museums from privately owned galleries is the possibility, fragile and ever-threatened, of a non-transactional encounter with objects, in which value is understood in terms of intensity of attention and depth of experience. If museums can still lay claim to any form of legitimacy beyond their being levers of aesthetic ideology and intellectual speculation, it resides in their capacity to slow down the incessant flow of produced meaning and to resist the human compulsion to transform everything first into a sign, and then into an asset. Eric-Paul Riege, “ayo sis’ 8, 2025. Courtesy of the artist, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN, and STARS, Los Angeles, CA. Photo: Jueqian Fang. Museums may also claim legitimacy as archives for research, but this assumption lacks examination of the objectivity of the archival impulse — that compulsion to collect, preserve, and catalog. Whether devoted to fine art or to natural history, the museum is a theater where history is written through the arrangement of displays, systems of classification, and especially by what is omitted. That is imperial ideology in its purest form. This critique is key to the intellectual framing of Eric Paul Riege in his show “ojo|-|ólǫ́” (pronounced oh-ho hol-ohn). But the real substance of the show is its emotional core and its sense of humor. It is a delicate tour de force that centers the human element (contact, mark-making, intimacy, and openness) while still engaging in incisive critique. Riege’s large-scale soft sculptures include finished arrangements and more modular pieces that can adapt to the setting. For instance, in one chamber you have a monumental pair of “earrings” titled “jaatłoh4Ye’iitsoh.” Earrings carry a great deal of significance in Diné culture as markers of identity, heritage and connection to other planes. In the chamber across the hall, a series of oversized Concha belts titled “ayo sis’ 8” hang in a row. These were made from abysmally bad reproductions of Concha motifs printed on shower curtains that Riege found online. Eric-Paul Riege, “yoo’4yay,” 2018-19. Courtesy of the artist, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN, and STARS, Los Angeles, CA. Photo: Jueqian Fang. The most salient example of Riege’s use of modularity is in a nearby chamber that is challenging to curate because it connects to the small opening room of the exhibit, a chained-off staircase to the museum’s lower levels, a hall to the rest of the exhibition space, and a door that leads to James Turrell’s skyspace, “Light Reign” via a small outdoor bridge. From the chamber’s high domed ceiling Riege has suspended a long sculpture, “yoo’4yay,” composed from many different elements of his formal vocabulary (balls, discs, cylinders). It feels very much at home there. I use those words “at home” cautiously, and somewhat ironically, because a museum is never truly a home. It is either a place of circulation or a grave. In the United States, indigenous artists bear an additional critical weight in this relationship. Their history is not merely that of a bygone past as imperial record would prefer it to be, but of a present still haunted by ongoing displacement and erasure that they continue to resist. As is necessary, strategies differ from one indigenous artist to another. Some, such as Duane Linklater, adopt a conceptual rigor, dissecting the very structures of museum-based knowledge. There are those, such as Nicholas Galanin, who choose irony, turning institutional codes back upon themselves, and those — Demian Deinéyazhi comes to mind — who strike with critical directness, refusing any form of mediation. Rare is the retort capable of combining humor, intellectual generosity, and firmness — a stance that yields neither to cynicism nor to complacency. This is the precise and beautiful balance struck by Riege in “ojo|-|ólǫ́.” Eric-Paul Riege “ojo|-|ólǫ́” installation view, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle. 2026. Photo: Jueqian Fang. Cultural destruction manifests in layers, in nuances, and in contradictions. Like any profound violence, it distorts the one who wields it just as much as the one who must endure it. Riege’s heart-centered approach seeks to liberate everyone in this dynamic. That precludes a hierarchical attitude in favor of humor and hospitality. Viewers are thus encouraged to touch and interact with sculptures in certain rooms. So bringing it back to the idea of an artwork “being at home,” if it feels more that way, it’s because we are also permitted to feel more at home. Deeper in the exhibition, there is a room featuring a video that becomes a pivot for these various ideas through an unlikely medium: home shopping. Riege was inspired by the appearance of QVC hostesses displaying jewelry by Navajo artisans, or at least plagiarized from them. As mentioned above, such objects are treated as ornamental rather than aesthetic, and it was macabre to see cultural symbols being hawked in a manner that was at once precious and detached. In the video, Riege is dressed in regalia referencing the Navajo deity Spider Woman, the spiritual ancestor of all weavers, as it was from her that they first learned how to weave. Riege channels Vanna White more than Spider Woman, laying objects out and then sweeping them away with theatrical gestures on a table-cum-altar. In the galleries on the opening weekend, Riege enacted a durational performance in the same attire, interacting with looms and the soft sculptures in the gallery in a much clearer embodiment of his spiritual great-great-etc-grandmother. Eric-Paul Riege “ojo|-|ólǫ́” installation view, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle. 2026. Photo: Jueqian Fang. Too often, the gravity of such subjects crushes any attempt at lightness. Riege’s audacity reveals humor as a way to disarm certainties, to carve out openings within the dominant discourse rather than to escape into frivolity. This apparent benevolence in no way diminishes the strength of his convictions; on the contrary, it renders them more penetrating and more difficult to dismiss. The regalia worn in the video and performance is what is first seen as we enter the exhibition. It faces a large reproduction of a weaving comb, “bee adzooí — 11 toes,” rendered in imitation leather. The title refers to a Diné myth linking extra digits to the weaving tradition. Riege comes from a long line of weavers and was also born with eleven toes. The tradition proscribes leaving one’s comb stuck in an unfinished work, and that brings us to an affecting story Riege told during the press tour. When looking through the gallery archives, Riege found an unfinished woven work with the comb still embedded in it. This is not something that would have arrived in the collection voluntarily; one need not be an animist who believes that all things contain a spirit to understand the gravity of this. Like the pathos inspired by seeing skeletons lying beside each other in Pompeii, this became an unintended funerary object, seized from its context and its creator, now assuredly long gone. This was an object of devotion turned into evidence of violence in such a banal fashion that no one had really noticed it before. Eric-Paul Riege “ojo|-|ólǫ́” installation view, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle. 2026. Photo: Jueqian Fang. So yes, our institutions transform care into symbolic capital, curiosity into posturing, and attention into an exploitable resource. The ideologies behind the institution dictate the rules of the game that curators and artists must play, no matter how sincere they may be. A radical modesty is both an appropriate and a subversive response in a world obsessed with hierarchy. It calls for a shift in the locus of authority, moving it away from the power to consecrate and toward the capacity to connect and to care without overdetermining meaning. Above all, it must emphasize belonging with over belonging to. Nothing should feel at home in a museum, but artists like Riege at least use such a platform as a stage to welcome us back home to each other and to the pure impulse to create — not archive — because we simply cannot survive without each other in a world devoid of the meanings we determine together. T.s. Flock is a writer and arts critic based in Seattle and co-founder of Vanguard Seattle.

by John Zotos Erin Cluley Gallery, Dallas, Texas Continuing through May 9, 2026 Anna Membrino, “Dew,” 2026, acrylic on canvas, 65 x 65”. All images courtesy of Erin Cluley Gallery, Dallas. In Anna Membrino’s approach, landscape painting starts with photographs of the natural world. Then, with a technique involving collage and digital alterations on a computer screen, she arrives at an image worthy of the intense shifts in scale, color, and surreal mystery that has defined her output over the last ten years. The images are surreal to the degree that they depict a reality with a color scheme all their own. It’s a presence replete with memories, anxiety, bliss, and/or dreams. Her major works always require a large-scale format, which in a work like “Dew” averages around 65 by 65 inches. Anna Membrino, “Steep,” 2026, acrylic on canvas, 69 x 69”. For these new paintings, Membrino has inverted her point of view. Previously we beheld a scene as if walking onto a theatrical stage, where the vegetation and other elements form a perimeter around a clearing. Now Membrino places us among, or behind, the elements that form that visual border, obstructing the view onto a vast space beyond. By doing so, the scale of the elements closer to the surface are perceived as larger than in reality. This resembles the cinematic use of such a conceit by Raul Ruiz in his neo-surrealist film melodramas, where flowers and vegetation move around the actors, engulfing the frame and disorienting the viewer. Anna Membrino, “Drift,” 2026, acrylic on canvas, 65 x 72”. In “Steep” (2026), a vertical stalk with leaves sprouting in all directions firmly occupies the foreground in a deep, detailed, pulsating blue. It resembles a bamboo tree that has taken up most of the center left area of the canvas. After trying to peer beyond the tree, we see farther into the background. There are a series of rolling hills in a lilac-purple hue that bathes them in sunlight, surrounding a watery lagoon in blue that also reflects the rays of light. In the deep background there is a hint of light red, a sign that dawn approaches. We either delve into memories of consciousness on the shore of oblivion, like the instant we wake from a dream, or suddenly lapse into sleep. Anna Membrino, “Blaze No. 5,” 2026, acrylic on canvas, 16 x 12”. In  the largest work, “Drift” (2026), we peer through a vantage point in the center of the composition defined by long vegetative stalks capped by leaves rendered in a light turquoise. Bathed in light, the flora navigate the canvas from the left, around the top, and to the right, circumscribing the visual field and obstructing a clear view of the sky in the background. Visible below is a water feature surrounding a span of land in green. The hint of a horizon line intentionally gives “Drift” a measure of depth missing in other paintings like “Steep” and “Dew,” where obstruction and confinement complicate Membrino’s ever-changing relationship with nature. What never varies is the idea that the viewer stands in for the general human presence. There remains no evidence of the human figure in these paintings, or any suggestion of how the landscapes may have fallen prey to human agency. Unlike in the physical world, where we’re hard-pressed to find untouched nature — primarily because it only exists as something culturally identified — Membrino’s hyper-realities may offer a temporary escape from the actuality of our painful present. John Zotos  is an art critic and essayist based in Dallas.

by Jody Zellen David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, California Continuing through April 25, 2026 Elizabeth Murray, “2.B.!,” 1990, oil, matchsticks, canvas and wood, 68 1/4 x 49 x 4 1/2”. All images courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles. The surprising yet somehow inevitable pairing of Elizabeth Murray (1940 - 2007) and Betty Woodman (1930 - 2018), two artists whose beautiful, idiosyncratic works made them icons of their generation, opens up new avenues of discovery. Woodman, a ceramicist and Murray, a painter, were both exceptional colorists who created abstract works utilizing eccentric shapes and patterns to explore the relationships between composing in two- and three-dimensional spaces. They experimented with hybrid forms. Murray's canvases were hardly ever just rectangles, and Woodman's ceramics often included a painted element mounted on the wall. Both women were known for layering geometric and organic forms to build their complex, nuanced and idiosyncratic pieces.  The exhibition unfolds like a conversation or a dialectic in which we contemplate the relationships between the works. Within two modestly sized spaces are paintings and sculptures spanning the years 1982-2015. Installed to highlight formal relationships (and not chronologically), the objects prompt the eye to zig-zag across the walls, at first taking in all of Murray's bombastic painted reliefs, then scanning Woodman's more delicate, freestanding and wall-based ceramics. Eventually we hone in on where they intersect. Is it through texture? Color? Shape? Or the fracturing of surfaces? Betty Woodman, “Reaching,” 2012, glazed earthenware, epoxy resinb, lacquer, acrylic paint and canvas, 26 x 46 1/2 x 1 1/2”. Murray’s “2.B.!” (1990) hangs next to Woodman's “Reaching” (2012). “2.B.!” is a three-dimensional oil in which Murray collaged together cut-out canvases that form a backwards letter "B," a reversed number "2," and a bright pink exclamation point. The work takes its point of departure from the graffiti lettering that covered the walls and subway cars of New York in the 1970s and 80s. It also references the soliloquy in Shakespeare's “Hamlet” in which the words "to be, or not to be" are spoken. In “Reaching,” Woodman adheres flat fragments of curvilinear earthenware glazed in white, red and black to a canvas painted with an array of subtly colored concentric rectangles. The orange lines that fill the "B" echo the black lines of glaze in Woodman's ceramic shapes. Another notable relationship transpires between Woodman's “Balustrade Relief Vase: 96-20” (1996), and Murray's “Midnight Special” (2000), installed across the wall from one another. In “Balustrade Relief Vase,” Woodman breaks apart vase forms and assembles the varied pieces on the wall. The shapes appear to dance as we try to reconstruct the object. Murray's large painting shares a similar palette to Woodman's ceramic deconstruction, as well as its spirit of light-hearted composition. Murray's work is filled with intestine-like shapes that encircle her oval canvases. Elizabeth Murray, “Moonbeam,” 1995-96, oil, canvas and wood, 109 x 63 x 6”. Murray's “Moonbeam” (1995-1996) and Woodman's “Santa Barbara” (2005) use different subject matter while engaging in another compelling dialogue. In “Moonbeam,” Murray brings the outside in. Her paintings often depict abstractions of domestic interiors. This one is essentially a bed with two pillows that twist and turn in on themselves. The bedposts curve into the painting and hover over the pillows as collaged elements. A painted green-yellow line that cuts diagonally across the composition is the moonbeam of the title. Like many of Woodman's other pieces, “Santa Barbara” is a combination of painting and ceramic. In this work, she depicts a quasi-interior space. A light blue and pink painted backdrop is bisected by a washy black horizontal band. In front of this is a ceramic vessel in two parts from which emerges swirling fragments that boil to the top of the wall. Looking at Murray’s work and then at Woodman’s, one sees spectacular formal similarities, especially in both artists' use of shape and color. Betty Woodman, “Santa Barbara,” 2005, glazed earthenware, epoxy resin, lacquer, paint and canvas, 95 1/4 x 84 3/4 x 9”. At work are forces drawn from Cubism and Abstract Expressionism, as both women were interested in breaking forms apart and putting them together anew. They reimagined traditional art mediums, never denying their interest in formalism while pushing boundaries and often exploring the relationship between the artwork and its placement. The blurring of positive and negative space and traditional figure/ground relationships were key to both artists' practices. While never denying their femininity, they created large, extravagant works filled with vigor and energy, as well as an undeniable delicacy and intimacy. Both employed abstract language, delighting in visual pleasures, and were dedicated to their chosen media while rebuffing accepted aesthetic norms, opting to chart their own paths. Seeing their works together allows for a conversation that examines similarities and differences in themes and approaches pertinent to both artists. The comparison is enriching. Jody Zellen  is a LA based writer and artist who creates interactive installations, mobile apps, net art, animations, drawings, paintings, photographs, public art, and artist’s books. Zellen received a BA from Wesleyan University (1983), a MFA from CalArts (1989) and a MPS from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (2009). She has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1989. For more information please visit  www.jodyzellen.com .

by Michael Shaw Perrotin, Los Angeles, California Continuing through April 25, 2026 JR, “The Wrinkles of the City, Istanbul, Hasan Saltik Eye, Turkey,” 2015. All images courtesy of the artist and Perrotin Los Angeles. Having never previously seen JR’s work in person, taking in his mini-retrospective, titled “Horizons,” I’ve still fallen short of experiencing the quintessential JR: a large-scale black & white mural. Most typically these are photographs of an individuals’ eyes, sometimes full face, looking directly out at the viewer, ideally several of them clustered together. Made with “ wheat past[e] and gigantic mono photographs ” the media itself is about as unsophisticated as it gets, but not so the results. One of several murals reproduced here, as a now upscale framed photo, features the party-space host Jim Budman’s eyes and brow glaring out at us in the Venice neighborhood of L.A. Another is of a loving older couple resting atop a roof in downtown L.A., presumably only visible if you were in a higher rise building nearby, or in a helicopter. Both were part of his “ Wrinkles of the City ” series from 2011. As it quickly becomes clear, these murals were designed as much for reproduction — including, naturally, on social media — as for the in situ experience. JR, “Giants, Kikito, October 7th 6:40 p.m, Tecate, Border Mexico-USA,” 2017. JR had the foresight, the ambition, and even the community-engagement skills to launch his iconic cropped portraits, first in his native Paris but soon into urban landscapes around the world, with a high virality quotient. My introduction to his work (from afar) was a powerful collection of eyes, along with partial and occasional full faces, spread across a favela in Rio de Janeiro, an action he called “ Women Are Heroes ” (2008). Fast forward to “Horizon,” which samples various works from the last 15 years, and those earliest gestures of insurgency and rebellion have been diluted, even neutered, by the realities of the market and JR’s ascendency in it. Like Bansky, JR’s work compresses the divide between street art and high art, and he’s become nearly as well-known as Banksy in the process. Another quality these two artists share is their accessibility. It just isn’t possible to have that level of notoriety without being both easily digestible and inducing a degree of sympatico with a mass viewing audience. Two projects from “Horizons” stand out for comparison in their divergence: one for its use of the human figure, the other without. The former, “ Giants, Kikito ” (2017) was produced at the U.S.-Mexico border in the city of Tecate. This black-and-white photo-mural cutout is of a towering toddler peering over the border fence, his fingers appearing to rest upon it. One of the exhibition’s photos embraces this illusion, while another exposes the mural’s intervention: an aerial photo showing the thoroughly scaffolded structure Kikito was built onto, and its actual proximity a good 50-or-so feet from the border fence so as to capture that ideal scale. Additionally, there’s an eight-foot-tall ink-on-wood-fencing object, with roughly the same perspective of the 1st photo, though in this version we see a man atop the scaffolding, just to Kikito’s right. An adorable child (whom JR met with his family in Tecacte) bridging the literal and symbolic gaps of this perpetual geopolitical showdown, melts our hearts and presumably melts this arbitrary borderline along with it. Using a toddler as opposed to an adult is a far narrower tightrope to walk. JR, “Giants, “Death Valley, Billboard, March 5, 2017, 3.03 pm, California, USA,”, 2017, color photograph, matte Plexiglas, aluminum, wood, 42 15/16 x 68 1/2”. Nearby is “ Giants, Death Valley, Billboard, Mars 5, 2017, 9:46 am, California, USA ” (2017), a unique framed color photo of a black-and-white billboard of a section of mountains, which is in turn a trompe l'oeil image that mimics an actual stretch of the Death Valley mountainside behind it. The piece, rather than being an outlier in JR’s work due to the landscape subject — and which owes at least a little something to the legendary conceptual photographer Kenneth Josephson — is part of a significant subset of such projects. It came out of a collaboration with the popular band Arcade Fire for one of their albums. This is where one may be inclined to slam JR for selling out, and yet, at the same time, what big-time photographer worth their salt doesn’t manage to cash in on their commercial bankability? It’s really just a framing issue (literally and figuratively): Arcade Fire, in addition to being popular is well respected, and one could just as well say that the band is providing the artist with a creative opportunity as vice versa. At least compared with JR’s other tromp l’oeil work, and despite its conceptual backbone, “Giants” lacks the populist charm of its human-spun counterparts. JR, “Tehachapi, The Road, Anamorphosis, #1, USA,” 2022, color print, mounted on dibond, matte Plexiglas, 40 9/16 x 60 1/4”. Another notable project documented here is his work with Tehachapi, a prison a couple hours north of L.A. in Kern County, officially known as California Correctional Institution. A video screening shows JR photographing some of the inmates from above on a rolling scaffold, interspersed with individual inmates telling some of their stories, and his meeting with the inmates as a group. These portraits (only shown in the video, which is not included in the exhibition), cast the inmates as saintly and give them a wide breadth of humanity. To describe them as ‘repentant’ would be the obvious characterization, but there’s room for various interpretations. One unique photo (the fact that more than half the photos in “Horizons” are unique as opposed to editions is a noteworthy choice), “ Tehachapi, The Road, Anamorphosis, #1, USA ,” (2022), was a collaboration with the inmates, who wheat-pasted the exterior walls of the prison with an image of a road leading out of it. The actual windows of the prison become portals thanks to the easel-like armatures in the mural, a gesture that gives the prisoners a voice, if only a symbolic one. The community building and direct social contact JR (and his team) engaged in is incredibly admirable and, going back to bridging street art and high art, this is, in a sense, bridging the wealth of the high art world with the social and financial powerlessness of prisoners; not in the same place, of course, but the overlap alone is commendable. JR has long since transcended his graffiti-artist roots, and now it’s hard not to see him as suffering from a savior syndrome. It’s not to say that artists with means cannot or should not give back to the community, spread the wealth, etc. Of course not. It’s that when they do, it’s often all we can think about. And that’s the takeaway from these experiences, these activations, of “Horizons.” Their power and consequence can only be moved so far from their original context before they become shells of themselves. Michael Shaw  is a Los Angeles-based artist and activist. His work was recently included in the exhibition “ Meshuganah ” at A Very Serious Gallery in Chicago, as well as the exhibitions “ Sociality ” at LA Tate gallery in 2023, and It’s My House!  at the Porch Gallery in Ojai, CA, in 2022, and has been exhibited throughout the U.S. He is the recipient of a Culver City Arts grant in 2023, a Puffin Foundation Grant and the Rauschenberg Emergency Grant in 2022, the Center for Cultural Innovation’s Quick Grant in 2021, and the New Student Award at Hunter College, where he received his MFA. Visit Michael Shaw’s website .

by Liz Goldner Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California Continuing through September 20, 2026 Andy Moses, “The Deep,” 2005, acrylic on canvas over concave wood panel, 54 x 100 x 5”. All images courtesy of the artist. Viewing these dozen paintings by Andy Moses is to share in an aesthetic vision that looks at how art can affect and shape our own visual perceptions. The work addresses the relationship between abstraction and landscape, and is achieved through broad sweeping brushstrokes, often inspired by the Pacific Ocean near where the artist grew up. Living by the water, watching the colors and light in the atmosphere had a profound effect on Moses. As a budding artist, he decided to build paintings that feel alive and animated, to have viewers to see their colors and tonalities change, while using their imaginations to connect them back to nature. He employs pearlescent paints, which contain tiny mica flakes that cause the colors to shift slightly or change appearance based on the viewing angle. He also thins the acrylic paint down “to the consistency between milk and a milk shake,” then uses an elaborate technique of tilting the canvasses, causing the paint to flow, creating the feeling of spontaneity in the finished pieces. Andy Moses, “Permian Basin,” 2010, acrylic on canvas over concave parabolic wood panel, 45 x 90 x 4 1/2”. Often working with concave canvasses, Moses produces works that simulate, “looking out from the water and seeing the curve in the horizon and the light dancing on both the water and sky,” he explains. He also began visiting the California desert two decades ago, observing the horizons and the play of light on both land and sky. “I really think of these paintings as a way of representing this sense of universal horizons, but they are still very much about color and gesture leading back to abstraction.” The earliest painting here is the tondo “Beyond the Cirrostratus” (2003). As the only all white pearlescent painting in the show, it is a shimmering example of paint attracting and reflecting the light in the room, becoming a spiritual mirror. Andy Moses, “Boreas,” 2011, acrylic on canvas over concave parabolic wood panel, 45 x 90 x 4 1/2”. “Siren Song” and “The Deep” (both 2005), comprised of deep blues and grays with striations of green on concave canvasses, are among Moses’ earlier representations of the atmosphere, looking out toward the ocean. Aesthetically minimalist, they are examples of his early forays into using paint, rather than reflective industrial materials, to capture the spirit of Southern California’s 1960s and 70s Light and Space art movement. Moses grew up in a SoCal community of Light and Space artists who worked with resin, glass, neon and other materials to reflect in their art the shimmering aspects of the area’s celebrated sunsets and seashore atmosphere. Inspired by this powerful art movement, Moses’s creative practice evolved towards paintings that employed the medium itself with its shifting colors, his technique of pouring the paint, and his shaped canvasses. His body of work creates similar effects to those of the original Light and Space era as it emerged more than 50 years ago. Andy Moses, “Geomorphology 1601,” 2022, acrylic on canvas over concave wood panel, 57 x 90 x 5”. “Permian Basin” (2010), executed on a concave parabolic wood panel, demonstrates the artist’s evolution in his pouring technique to create spontaneous striations. In various shades of red and blue, the painting evokes a brilliant desert sunset. The similar “Boreas” (2011) emphasizes the artist’s penchant for experimenting with color that simultaneously affects our perception, mood, and imagination. “Geomorphology 1601” (2022) features primarily golden hues with secondary shades of light blue and pink. A highlight of the neighboring Frank Cuprien exhibition, his painting “The Golden Hour, Laguna Beach” (c. 1923), with its depiction of golden waves rippling into the shore at dusk, could have inspired Moses’ work of a century later. Andy Moses, "Geodesy 1008," 2024, acrylic on canvas over circular wood panel, 48" diameter. Two recent circular works, “Geodesy 1228” (2022) and “Geodesy 1008” (2024) display Moses’ continuing ability to creating deftly designed vortex-like images that draw the eye towards their centers. Their stunning designs demonstrate his penchant to risk optical experimentation, rather than repeating the style of paintings that were already popular.  Altogether the 12 paintings in the show, rounded out with the mountainous “Metamorph 1502” (2017), create a visual chorus of works that metaphorically sing together in harmony. Liz Goldner  is an award-winning art writer based in Laguna Beach. She has contributed to the LA Times, LA Weekly, KCET Artbound, Artillery, AICA-USA Magazine, Orange County Register, Art Ltd. and several other print and online publications. She has written reviews for ArtScene and Visual Art Source since 2009.  Liz Goldner’s Website .

by David S. Rubin   Michael Kohn Gallery , Los Angeles, California Continuing through April 25, 2026 Bruce Conner, “NEON NIGHT, WICHITA, KANSAS,” 1963, ink on paper, 26 1/8 x 20”. All images courtesy of Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles. The Beat Generation is currently having a moment in Los Angeles. Although the timing is partly coincidental, Marc Selwyn Fine Arts is exhibiting works on paper by Jay DeFeo, Parker Gallery and The Box are presenting a major Wally Hedrick retrospective, and Michael Kohn Gallery is showing Verifax collages by Wallace Berman and drawings by Bruce Conner. Conner was something of a renaissance man in that he was proficient in several mediums. Although best known for his macabre assemblages made from detritus and his pioneering experimental films, the latter of which are on view in a tangent exhibition at the Marciano Foundation, Conner devoted much of his artistic practice to drawing. Conner’s initial preoccupation with the medium can be traced to 1963, when he became intrigued with a new kind of pen that had just hit the market — the Pentel water-based felt tip “magic marker.” In one of his first attempts at working with it, Conner produced “NEON NIGHT, WICHITA, KANSAS” (1963), a black-and-white composition of rigorous, gestural hatching. Named for the city where the artist spent his youth, the imagery evokes images of trees or foliage and the movement of nature’s forces, yet it also emphasizes the autonomous pen marks, analogs in ink to the visible brushstrokes in DeFeo’s ultra-thick, highly textured oil paintings of the late 1950s. Bruce Conner, “UNTITLED (JULY 24, 1965),” 1965, felt-tip watercolor pen on Rives RFK paper, 10 x 10”. Like many of his Beat contemporaries, Conner was interested in exploring his spirituality, which stemmed in part from a transcendent experience he had as a child. In the 1960s a good place to engage in spiritual pursuits was Mexico, where he lived in 1961-62 and shot footage for his 1967 film “LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS.” In addition to exploring psychedelics, he also learned about the mandalas and related cosmologies of ancient Aztec and Mayan cultures. His Mexican sojourn was pivotal in shaping his drawing practice. By 1965, Conner had developed a methodology of making a drawing a day using automatism, the process favored by Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists of working spontaneously, with no predisposition of what the final composition might look like. Created organically through meditative mark-making, “UNTITLED (JULY 24, 1965)” (1965) sports a wood grain pattern like those in Max Ernst’s frottage drawings made by rubbing sheets of paper placed over floor surfaces. Bruce Conner, “UNTITLED,” 1972, ink and Yes glue on paper, 22 1/8 x 20”. Due to the strong contrasts between the drawn marks and the undulating crevices of white paper, Conner’s drawing is activated by optical vibrations, which for him signified states of higher consciousness. They would have been right at home in “The Responsive Eye,” a landmark Op Art exhibition held the same year at the Museum of Modern Art. Additionally, Conner’s inclusion of the drawing’s date in the title bears a striking parallel to the work of his New York-based contemporary On Kawara, who was by then making a daily painting of each day’s date. Bruce Conner, “INK BLOT DRAWING,” c. 1992, ink on paper, 23 x 6”. Perhaps the most significant examples of Conner’s felt-tip drawings are the mandalas, such as “UNTITLED” (1972), where an abstract field of energy made through repetitive mark making is contained within a circle, with areas separated by concentric rings formed by leaving areas of the white paper unarticulated. While contemporaneous with the conceptual targets of Jasper Johns and the formal ones by Kenneth Noland, Conner’s mandalas are spiritual and cosmic. From a Jungian perspective, they represent a visualization of the totality of the self. On a metaphysical level, they suggest the infinite and the sublime, which more closely aligns them with the painted abstract “zips” of Barnett Newman or the translucent planes of paint saturation by Mark Rothko. In 1975, Conner developed another approach to meditative drawing that he would continue through his later years. Beginning with a blank sheet of paper, he would make several accordion folds to create vertical registers. Then, he would apply small droplets of liquid ink within each column, folding it over and then opening it so that a bilateral inkblot, akin to the familiar Rorschach test, would be formed. The blots could then be tweaked further using a pen or a brush. Most of the examples on view here were made during the final decade of Conner’s life, at which point he often attributed them to “Anonymouse,” “Anonymous,” or “Emily Feather,” pseudonyms that reflected his objection to the art market’s tendency to emphasize an artist’s name over their work. It is probable that he used his real name simply for the drawings that he liked the most, which could explain why he used it for the striking, if not mesmerizing “INKBLOT DRAWING” (c. 1992) and “INKBLOT DRAWING (DECEMBER 4, 2000)” (2000). In both examples, the extreme verticality of each column, along with the crystalline ink impressions, suggest Gothic ecclesiastical architecture, the Garden of Eden, or heaven’s “Pearly Gates.” In that respect, Conner’s ink blot drawings seem to be in perfect harmony with the work of the American modernist Joseph Stella , whose paintings of gardens are also cathedral-like, and the 19th century French playwright Victorien Sardou , whose automatic drawings of the “celestial residences” of historical figures, which were purportedly created through “dictation” from spirits, possess a similar structure and delicacy. Bruce Conner, “INK BLOT DRAWING (DECEMBER 4, 2000),” 2000, ink on paper, 6 1/4 x 11”. Drawing served Conner well as a vehicle for communion with the cosmos, ultimately resulting in a personal visual language that is accessible to anyone through its sheer beauty and open-ended interpretability. David S. Rubin  is a Los Angeles-based curator, writer, and artist. As a curator, he has held positions at MOCA Cleveland, Phoenix Art Museum, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, and San Antonio Museum of Art. As a writer he has contributed to Art and Cake, Art in America, Arts Magazine, Artweek, ArtScene, Fabrik, Glasstire, Hyperallergic, and Visual Art Source. He has published numerous  exhibition catalogs , and his curatorial archives are housed in the   Smithsonian Archives of American Art . For more information: www.davidsrubin.com .

by Liz Goldner Long Beach Museum of Art , Long Beach, California Continuing through May 31, 2026   Robert Williams, “Heralding the Entry of King Infinitus,” 2021, oil on canvas, 30 x 36”. All images courtesy of the artist. The obsessively creative Robert Williams, now age 83, has spent a lifetime exercising a sensibility that embraces the apocalyptic, the grotesque, and the caustic. Much of Williams’ imagery springs from his dreams and memories of a difficult childhood spent mostly in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where as a teen he was a juvenile delinquent who was expelled from high school, inherited his father’s interest in cars and hot rods, and discovered his unique talent for depicting chrome. The foundations of Williams’ style, long termed “lowbrow art,” blend an old master style of figuration combined with dystopian imagery, psychedelia, and popular illustration. Its roots lie in his youthful apprenticeship with car detailing master Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and the underground comics movement of the late 1960s, in particular “Zap Comix.” The nearly 60 works in “Fearless Depictions,” spanning the last twenty-five years of the artist’s output, come at you in a delirium of mad, relentless monsters. Robert Williams, “Auditory Sadism,” 2013, oil on canvas, 16 x 12”. Williams is also a prolific writer in a cockeyed existential manner. His essays describing his paintings are an integral part of the show, going well past the usual wall labels. His open-ended descriptions leave us free to interpret the paintings’ equally elaborate messages. Here are some of my favorite paintings from the show, from which I’m guessing you will come away with your own greatest hits. At the entrance to the show, “Heralding the Entry of King Infinitus” (2021) immediately accosts us with its repetitive interpretation of an unnamed, mad blonde-haired king (unnamed and by no means a portrait, but who might that allude to?), clad in royal purple, as courtiers and sycophants announce his presence. The magic of this piece is that the king is not a singular figure, but a relentless succession of identical monarchs dominating the canvas well into the distance. Among Williams’ nearly incomprehensible descriptions of the king, he writes, “King Infinitus lives in the Kingdom of Astroperpetuity. But for our purposes, the king exists in an impure space-time setting.” Robert Williams, “Death by Exasperation,” 2010, oil on canvas, 36 x 30”. “Auditory Sadism” (2013) centers on a young man lying in a field with his hands covering his ears, blocking out the relentless sounds coming from seven open jaws with red, snake-like tongues, all yelling at him. The distraught figure is a stand-in for anyone who feels bombarded by constantly changing media messages, from podcasters and pundits who compete for our attention, and from anyone who launches into seemingly endless verbal onslaughts. Williams writes, “In this picture, the graphic noise is so silently earsplitting that the viewer can hardly see over the incessant tirade.” “Death by Exasperation” (2010) is a parody of the Lewis Carroll nonsense poem, “Jabberwocky,” from “Through the Looking Glass.” Williams’ painting features a purple Jabberwock collapsed on the ground and under the care of a modern medical team, as an enormous red Non Sequitur dominates the scene. A stern doctor stands calmly before the composite creature, as a nurse attending the fallen Jabberwock glares at him in the midst of the commotion. The artist brings the Victorian-era nonsense poem into a whole new realm of the absurd. The poor Jabberwock is appropriated to become a part of Williams’ own menagerie of fantastic illusionistic creatures. Robert Williams, “Justifiable Concern,” 2020, oil on canvas, 30 x 36”. “Justifiable Concern” (2020) could be a little league baseball player’s — and his mother’s — worst nightmare. The boy in his baseball outfit and his well-dressed 1950s-style mom are shopping in a sporting goods store, where they are confronted by “a bloated red devil feigning insufferable agony. His swollen, distended belly is erupting in several places, violently expelling its writhing contents,” as Williams writes. The devil is expelling a variety of miserable cartoon characters, including pirates, devils, clowns and an Indian, while the mom covers her son’s anguished face with her hands. The surreal apparition reads as a product of both mom’s and son’s imaginations, as though it reflects a disagreement, one that continues to preoccupy them. “The Intruder,” 2023 continues the devil in the sporting goods store story, as it explodes the myth of the picture-perfect family preparing to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner together in their well-appointed dining room. The mother, father, son, daughter, grandmother and grandfather are confronted by a cartoonish interloper made of piping and studs with a long nose and tongue. It gleefully comes through the front door even as it lifts the home off of its foundation. If the family appears to be one from out of a storybook, the invading creature exposes deep secrets and fears. Robert Williams, “The Intruder,” 2023, oil on canvas, 30 x 36”. Throughout the show Williams appeals to our fascination with imaginative details and the blended pleasures of comedy and horror. Sixty years on, so much has changed for this paragon of everything lowbrow who enhances our understanding of the underbelly of our world, which has become as dystopian as it was during the counterculture movement that first brought Williams to public attention. Liz Goldner  is an award-winning art writer based in Laguna Beach. She has contributed to the LA Times, LA Weekly, KCET Artbound, Artillery, AICA-USA Magazine, Orange County Register, Art Ltd. and several other print and online publications. She has written reviews for ArtScene and Visual Art Source since 2009.  Liz Goldner’s Website .

by Matthew Kangas Fountainhead Gallery , Seattle, Washington Continuing through March 28, 2026 Matthew Dennison, “Augrest Vestal,” 2025, oil on canvas, 48 x 48”. All images courtesy of Fountainhead Gallery, Seattle. Largely self-taught after a brief stint at the Portland Museum Art School, Matthew Dennison has carved out his own civilization of peculiar people. Set in hemmed-in indoor-outdoor spaces, Dennison’s scenes are deeply subjective conceptions free of anecdote, even as they allude obliquely alluding to his narrative painting of previous years. It’s tempting to contextualize Dennison into a folk-art or outsider art niche, especially since many of his paintings are framed by found recycled doorways or humble painted architectural moldings. As we gaze into these container frames, we encounter another world equally ambiguous, both in narrative, site, and, more significantly of late, gender. While the artist’s early works were representational and figurative, for example of swimmers and animals, the current work creates its own race of androgynous beings, neither male nor female. They are shorn of hair and grouped in embracing pairs, neither siblings nor parent-child dyads. As a result, their appeal is dependent upon our own ability to sympathetically absorb the artist’s constructions of unfamiliar people. Without reference to race, poverty or other social issues, so common in figurative art today, Dennison’s canvases — painted with his hands in gloves instead of with brushes — declare their individuality through their sheer hermetic qualities: who or what is going on here? Matthew Dennison, “The Sound,” 2026, oil on canvas, 24 X 24”. The twelve pictures on exhibit vary in size from two to four feet. Since the imagery is continuous from scene to scene, their scale does not matter much. The larger ones do take on a more public tone, daring us to participate in the drama of the characters, who are always straight-faced, never staring at one another or out at the viewer but preoccupied by their glances beyond the frame’s edge. For example, “Augustea” initially seems to depict a woman and child but, look again, and it’s a small adult. Two other figures inhabit “Memoric Field,” and yet more pairs occupy floating space in the largest work, “Augrest Vestal.” “Scientist” hints at the folly of scientific certainty in an age that challenges its authority, while “Zolly Dother” puts someone in a bright pink dress who could be in drag or be transgender. Matthew Dennison, “Thust Cloudeo,” 2026, frame on, oil on panel, 29 x 17”. Highly prolific, Dennison has had annual shows of his work throughout the Northwest and across the Southwest and Midwest since the 1990s. Dennison’s reputation extends well beyond the clubby wrap-around comfort of Portland. In lieu of a well-deserved museum retrospective, it’s difficult to speculate on the growth or evolution that brings him to the current works. Widely written about in journals from his native region to Maine and Iowa, and included in institutional collections in Kansas and Michigan, it could be that Dennison’s art is geographically misplaced in the Northwest. That leads to the impression that he is better linked to a group of artists he has hinted at admiring, the American Magic Realists of the 1940s. Besides Jared French, Paul Cadmus, and Ivan Albright there is, more pertinently, George Tooker. The latter’s blank-faced staring figures are trapped on subway station platforms, in closets, and in confining chapel-like alcoves that prohibit interaction but bind individuals together into socially disparate crowds. I regard Dennison as an unknown, unacknowledged descendant of those Magic Realists. Unlike him, they were all obsessed with the crisp designs of Renaissance art, but nonetheless they have served as the closest antecedents for this Portland outsider artist more than half a century later. Matthew Dennison, “Bethed Core,” 2025, oil on canvas, 48 x 48”. With such a persistent, not to say resistant, uncertainty of meaning, the ambiguity of Dennison’s aesthetic was underscored by the artist in an interview when he noted, “I like the sense of mystery … what is going to happen next? There is a little bit of the unknown and I always want to know what the next thing is. I think that is kind of what my work is about.” Narrative anticipation rather than the usual pleasures of the eye is what drives interest in Dennison’s work. Matthew Kangas  writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on  Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas .

by Matthew Kangas Portland Art Museum , Portland Continuing through February 28, 2027 Mark Rothko, “Woman Reading,” c.1933. The selection of paintings and works on paper assembled to commemorate the opening of the new Mark Rothko Pavilion at the newly expanded Portland Art Museum could also be titled “Rothko before Rothko.” It focuses on art made in Portland where his family, the Rothkowitzes, settled in a large Russian community after they fled Latvia in 1913. With loans from the National Gallery of Art, Rothko’s son, Christopher, the Mark Rothko Foundation, a few private collectors, and the museum’s own holdings, the survey contains revelations not necessarily highlighted in earlier omnibus Rothko shows, except for the 2012 retrospective. The erstwhile Oregon resident (1903-1970) had his first museum show there in 1933, at age 30, ten years removed from Yale, which he left after his sophomore year for New York City. Part of the original New York School or Abstract Expressionists, Rothko’s art has always stood apart for its unique qualities devoid of messy gestures and concern with a content he described, in a famous essay that he co-authored with Barnett Newman, as “tragic and timeless.” Mark Rothko, “Beach Scene,” c. 1928. With his return to Portland in 1943, we see the artist addressing local color in a still life with prescient floating background areas (“Untitled” 1945), and in a portrait of his first wife Edith Sacher titled “The Craftsman,” (1938/1939) in which a jeweler is surrounded by her worktable and tools. “Woman Reading” (c. 1933) might also be a portrait of Edith. Both paintings are dominated by darker colors, close-value tones, and straightforward poses. They highlight the dark lighting, moody colors, and, significantly, uncomfortable control of the human figure that will soon be jettisoned. Of greater interest is the black-ink view of downtown Portland from the West Hills (“Untitled” c. 1930), with its slashes evoking a forest and buildings off in the distance. More revealing and telling of the few influences the artist admitted to is “Beach Scene” (c. 1928), painted the year he met Milton Avery, whose own beach scenes and broad areas of solid color foretell Rothko’s floating “clouds” and muted palette. The group of four reclining women also echo comparable figure groups by Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso, which Rothko doubtless would have seen in New York. Mark Rothko, “No. 16 — Green, White, Yellow on Yellow,” 1951, oil on canvas, 67 5/8 × 4 5/8”. Copyright © 1998 by Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. All images courtesy of the Portland Art Museum. “Untitled” (1947) is among the first of the Rothkos now widely recognized as his individual hallmark. Barely three feet high, its dusty pink shifts from light to dark, top to bottom, covered over with two flat oblong shapes with feathery edges. It is supplemented by another early treasure, “No. 10” (1949), which announces what he called “multiforms,” six hovering yellow, green and red shapes over an orange background. The acute attention paid to surface activity, formal placement of the blocks and the overall success of the composition affirm the artist’s growing talent for abstract painting that alludes to mysterious worlds devoid of any figuration or landscape residue. It is joined nearby by the beautiful “No. 16 — Green, White, Yellow on Yellow” (1951), in which the challenge of perfect levitation and unexpected chromatic harmony is fulfilled by increasingly thin washes of paint. Whether they comprise what Rothko intended as “metaphysical or symbolic meaning” is in hindsight debatable. Such intentions become less certain as the works are seen over a half-century later, unmoored from his and Newman’s dead-serious manifestoes. Across the walkway is a somewhat hidden tribute show, “Abstraction after Rothko.” It highlights works from the museum’s collection, including many paintings once owned by art critic Clement Greenberg, whose collection the museum acquired in 2001. The group reinforces the case for the significance of the New York School, Rothko, and the other artists Greenberg championed. Kikuo Saito, “Kitchen Opera,” 1985, acrylic on canvas, 65 x 68 1/2”. © 1985 Kikuo Saito/Courtesy of Salander-O-Reilly Galleries, New York. Half of the 26 paintings, sculptures and photographs pay oblique homage to Rothko’s breakthroughs of solid color areas, diluted paint, and rejection of anecdotal or political subjects. Paramount among the works are Jules Olitski’s “The Prince Patutsky — Red” (1962), Kenneth Noland’s “No. One” (1958), and “Spaced Out Orbit” (1973) by Helen Frankenthaler. All three are painted in acrylic as opposed to Rothko’s bravura treatment of oil. They function as centered targets rather than distributing shapes but still pay tribute to Rothko’s attention to color. Noland’s concentric circles of red and yellow enclose a black-and-blue “eye,” all shifted off-center to proclaim the artist’s here-and-now allegiance to the painting’s presence, in contrast to the shy, shifting arrival of Rothko’s shapes and colors. Similarly, Olitski’s white circle over red contains black and purple curves while Frankenthaler’s is the most austere of all, a multi-colored horizontal slab across a white background. Of the overall grouping, Kikuo Saito’s “Kitchen Opera” (1985) most closely resembles the older artist’s quiet fields. Joined by the spectacular 13-foot-wide “Beta Omicron” (1959-61) by Morris Louis, the Noland, Olitski and Frankenthaler paintings all serve as evidence of the Greenberg-approved transition from Abstract Expressionism to the Rothko-influenced Color Field School. Matthew Kangas  writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on  Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas .