Christopher Miles

As a sculptor, David McDonald has routinely embraced the small and the modest. The quantities of materials he utilizes — bricks, plaster, cement, wood, paper, cardboard — seldom amount to more than what you might find in a scrap heap, in the bottom of a bucket, or left over on......

Judy Fiskin routinely traverses boundaries of class and culture, and not just the particulars of "high" and "low" cultural products but the discursive and infrastructural circled wagons of the contemporary art exhibition circuit that often is referred to as the "art world" – of which Fiskin, her gallery, and I......

There's a lot of Picasso going around these days, and the symptoms present themselves clearly in Mark Grotjahn's current show in the downstairs space at Blum & Poe. Here, a baker's dozen of paintings — made from oil paint layered up on cardboard that also has been layered up atop......

You don't have to look far to come across curious descriptions of the materials and media that go into works of contemporary art. Various combinations of cast petroleum jelly, cast polycaprolactone thermoplastic, self-lubricating plastic and other exotics make the list of stuff that routinely goes into the work of Matthew......

If you've spent any time looking at contemporary art over the last 15 years, you've likely seen the impressive handiwork of Konstantin Bojanov, but until now, you probably haven't had the opportunity to see his artwork. The Brooklyn-based artist, who studied filmmaking and sculpture in his homeland of Bulgaria and......

With such variety of work, one may initially perceive this show's connective tissue as simply the stats of those included: four young women artists, all based in Los Angeles, and all beginning to garner some national and international attention. But there's another connection among the four: a concern with the......

If you wait until the last minute to see the Rodney McMillian exhibition inaugurating Susanne Vielmetter's new space (on Washington just west of La Cienega), you'll actually see less of the show than if you go right now — that is, if all goes according to plan. That's because McMillian,......

Asking about the "seeming conflict, or antagonism, between painting's representational function and its self-reflection," the art historian and critic Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, in a 1986 interview, quizzed the painter Gerhard Richter on his bringing together of the two tendencies in his work. "But aren't they brought together in order to......

It comes as little surprise when you learn that Allison Schulnik got her degree (from CalArts) in experimental animation. Her paint — thick as tar but slathered on with a kind of liberty that would make the material expenditures of hot-mop roofers or cake decorators seem puritanical — seems as......

I can’t think of a better way to close this decade than to write about a show by an artist who, much to my honor, taught at the same school with me for the last 10 years. If that bit of info, and the added fact that I curated her......