Peter Frank

Richard Haley

Larry Bell, Richard M. Haley

Peter Frank
Larry Bell is not simply repeating himself. Having made his rep, here and elsewhere, in the ’60s with his subtly, almost imperceptibly tinted boxes, Bell returns to the format and puts a new spin on it. It’s not simply that these 20-inch glass cubes are coated with a fine application......
Stanley Dorfmans Guantanamo Blues (2005)

Stanley Dorfman, Timothy Isham

Peter Frank
Before Stanley Dorfman wound up here, the South African native landed in mid-1950s St. Ives, the southwest English fishing village at the center of the British abstract scene, where he painted more or less geometrically. After a harrowing return to his native land just as apartheid was starting, Dorfman returned......
Roy Dowell

Roy Dowell, Lee Mullican

Peter Frank
The arresting idiosyncracies that have powered Roy Dowell’s paintings and drawings and collages and combinations thereof for the past two-plus decades mark him as a California artist. But Dowell’s steadfast allegiance to the collage aesthetic and the principles of abstraction (however he might warp them) betray his ancestry in European......
Myron Stedman Stout

LACMA at 40

Peter Frank
While you’re at LACMA getting verklempt over the Klimts, leave a little time, at least, to feast on what the museum has actually been given of late, notably for its 40th birthday. You have English and Ashcan portrait paintings, a Tiepolo Bible scene, exquisite prints by Hiroshige and Hokusai, a......
John Frame

Joseph Piasentin, The Likeness

Peter Frank
Without abandoning his luscious colors, sensuous surfaces and boisterous compositions full of endearingly buoyant circles and orbs and pinwheels, Joseph Piasentin is getting slyly nasty on us, nudging that cute quotient just past the threshold of bearability. Certain of his latest paintings experiment rather edgily with excess — excess prettiness,......
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Step Into Liquid, Chris Martin

Peter Frank
Step Into Liquid, Chris MartinThe painterly methods and resulting images constituting “Step Into Liquid” don’t just run in rivulets, they splash and clot and dribble and smear and get very, very messy in visually coherent ways. Don’t think rain, think mud — but when it comes to color, don’t think......

10 Emerging Artists

Peter Frank
1. Yun Bai The recent New York transplant paints and collages sweet things out of nasty. Look closely at those flowers.2. Lecia Dole-Recio Intricate, rhythmic structures as much cobbled together from scraps of cardboard or Scotch tape as painted and drawn.3. Amir Fallah Editor of art-style alternazine Beautiful Decay, Fallah......

At the Museums

Peter Frank
Crowd pleasers, crowd teasers and a few crowd seizures are in the offing for L.A.’s fall-winter museum season. Tut’s still hangin’ — okay, lyin’ — in at LACMA until November 15. But the heat has moved over to the main complex, where “Pioneering Modern Painting; Cézanne and Pissarro, 1865-1885” has......
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Not Necessarily the Usual Suspects

Peter Frank
1. UCLA Hammer Museum. Seriously but not self-consciously cutting-edge, contemporary and historical. Coming: top-to-bottom renovation. 2. Laguna Art Museum. Meta-hip, swinging between the trenchant (Sandow Birk’s L.A.–Bay Area “war” paintings) and the reflective (still looking at and making California art history). 3. Cal State Galleries. From CSULA’s Luckman Gallery to......
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La Serpenta

Peter Frank
DIAMANDA GALAS at the Knitting Factory, November 11 Diamanda Galas is more than a voice. That voice remains her calling card; sprawling over several octaves, segueing effortlessly between disparate musical traditions, turning every trick in the Extended Vocal Technique repertoire as if EVT were a mother tongue, Galas’ voice is......