Peter Frank

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Color Commentary

Peter Frank
Although the history of abstract art in Southern California has been a lot more complex than we’ve given it credit for, Karl Benjamin has been recognized from the git-go as one of its key figures. He merits retrospection — and rewards it, even in as truncated a view as provided......
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Grids Unlocked

Peter Frank
Tom LaDuke continues to explore the edges of perception in his paintings and sculptures — and to get closer and closer to going over those edges. Unlike his older pictures, which depicted mostly empty space, his new acrylics depict space emptily — that is, the actual contents of his spaces......
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Beauty of the Ordinary

Peter Frank
Bernhard Fuchs, Blue VW Van, Dusseldorf-Heerdt (2003)Bernhard Fuchs photographs cars. He finds them parked, even abandoned, in rural settings throughout Germany and into Austria, England and the Czech Republic. Vehicles — even ones as cheap and dirty as a Soviet-era Lada — aren’t considered disposable items by Europeans the way......
Bobbie Oliver

Three Hits of Ecstacy

Peter Frank
{mosimage} Supposedly, Clement Greenberg took lyrical abstraction, or “stain painting,” to the grave with him, but current painters with no previous allegiance to the Formalist Wars of the 1960s are re-examining the pleasures and challenges of letting thinned pigment dye the canvas. Bobbie Oliver’s formula is uncomplicated in this regard,......
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Ferocity in Two Flavors

Peter Frank
Johanna Went’s show at Track 16 isn’t one particular spectacle, like her famed punk-club blowouts, but a cascade of ’em, a veritable Went’s Greatest Hits — although in this case, all her hits are pretty great. A legendary cross between Paul McCarthy, Karen Finley, the Bread and Puppet Theater and......
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Pioneer Spirits

Peter Frank
A pioneer of light-art, installation and canvas-as-object, Lucio Fontana influenced art and thought with his “spatialist” concepts throughout postwar Europe and the Americas (he divided his time between Italy and Argentina). His practice of slashing or puncturing a monochrome canvas — a violation of the picture plane and a radical......
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Colorations

Peter Frank
Ned Evans, SandcastleVeteran local abstract painter Ned Evans has long conflated the rigorous and the sensuous, and the fusion in these latest paintings is probably his most seamless to date. Evans streaks sourball-candy colors inside clearly but not rigidly described vertical slats, piling and compiling these picket formations until they......
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Sonic Massage

Peter Frank
He’s from here and he started here (doing electroacoustic music at UCLA in the later 1960s), but his performances here have been few and far between. Z’ev, who has lived and gigged around the world, is starting to make up for this anomaly. He made a flurry of appearances a......
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Sancta

Peter Frank
The artists in “Sancta” remain on terra firma in a search for some kind of topospheric truth, as well as some new approaches to a time-honored artistic preoccupation — the landscape. Some can’t see the forest for the trees, but even their close-up photographs, drawings and paintings of floral and......
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Les Fleurs Du Mal, Paper Bombs

Peter Frank
The five New York artists in this all-woman show — on display, coincidentally, down the hill from the “WACK!” show at the MOCA Geffen — display only the most oblique feminist sensibilities. Perhaps Ginna Triplett’s dense webs of comic-bookish girl-heroes — Wonder Woman, Wonderland’s Alice — count as neo-gynocentric, or......