Peter Frank

Everybody loves Sam Francis’ work for its riotous, flowers-abloom palette. But Francis, steeped in Zen as well as painting, knew that nothing was more colorful than black and white. Furthermore, when Francis worked in the gray ranges, the rigor as well as the exuberance of his forms emerged like an......

Anselm Kiefer’s vast, bleak vision requires the scale of architecture or opera; the German artist’s gigantism indulges not a sense of his own importance but the obsessions of his vision. These obsessions range from cataclysmic destruction and natural rejuvenation to spiritual transcendence, as manifested in plant life, the Latin Mass,......

When Lothar Schmitz, a research physicist at UCLA, enters the studio, he doesn’t escape his day job. Rather, Schmitz’s art embraces a panoply of sciences, from microbiology to chemistry to environmental science. The Cologne-born installationist has made his mark locally with detailed topographical miniatures, rather like hypernaturalistic model-train landscapes, in......

Renée Lotenero’s sculpture, drawing and painting may not be strictly site specific, but they blend in quite specifically at their current location. Lotenero has picked up on the tile patterns that clad the gallery building and subjected them to her elaborate process of what appears to be literal deconstruction, realizing......

Nathan Mabry’s much-vaunted send-ups of cultural artifacture are as snarky as anything conjured by the mid-’80s appropriationists, but they’re even less P.C. — less deadpan, less distant, less respectful — revealing a world in which nothing is sacred enough to transcend the vernacularizing debasement of consumer culture. Pre-Columbian ceramics make......

The “little sister” of Los Angeles hard-edge painting, June Harwood has evolved from hard to soft edges since the 1960s. Now she is fusing the two supposedly opposite tendencies, and making it work. The hard edges have effectively come loose from their moorings, acting less as borders for areas of......

Political art, very hip two decades ago, is so unhip it’s hip again, partly thanks to the politicized climate (thank you, Dubya). But to judge from “Patriot Acts,” it’s also thanks to the emergence of a new generation of socially sensitive post- and/or neoconceptualists who know how to make statements......

Julian Schnabel the artist has learned a lot from Julian Schnabel the filmmaker. With regard to this latest series of paintings — actually, ink on polyester photo-transfers — what got learnt was that gesture should serve rather than supplant image. Schnabel’s legendary ego retains its stentorian voice in the size......

An exhibition pointing at the disappearance of numerous fauna doesn't simply preach to the converted; it can prompt the converted to action and can awake the convertible. Many of the works in "Endangered Species" are good enough to inspire viewers' care for their subjects, even when those subjects are objects......

Marrying high-concept New York minimalism to aw-shucks Northern California funk, Bruce Nauman introduced a kind of slacker enigma into the art discourse some 40 years ago that has pervaded almost everything since. Nauman's videos were among his most influential works, but — like all those jumpy, grainy, terribly long black-and-white......