Art

Mario Ayala has been busy in his home state. Back in summer, the Los Angeles-native, alongside Guadalupe Rosales and Rafa Esparza, created a love letter to lowrider culture up at SFMOMA. While earlier this month, he also presented several new paintings as part of a group show at CONTROL that pays tribute to LA's rich lineage of airbrushing. Running concurrent to the latter, Ayala has unveiled a new solo exhibition that harks to LA's history of craftsmanship, as well as using humor and satire to address social struggles in imaginative ways. Housed at David Kordansky Gallery, Rubber Biscuit comprises of a series of new acrylic paintings stretched on a variety of oddly-shaped canvases that are intimately autobiographical, while interrogating the absurdities and questions associated with ritua...

Mario Ayala has been busy in his home state. Back in summer, the Los Angeles-native, alongside Guadalupe Rosales and Rafa Esparza, created a love letter to lowrider culture up at SFMOMA. While earlier this month, he also presented several new paintings as part of a group show at CONTROL that pays tribute to LA's rich lineage of airbrushing. Running concurrent to the latter, Ayala has unveiled a new solo exhibition that harks to LA's history of craftsmanship, as well as using humor and satire to address social struggles in imaginative ways. Housed at David Kordansky Gallery, Rubber Biscuit comprises of a series of new acrylic paintings stretched on a variety of oddly-shaped canvases that are intimately autobiographical, while interrogating the absurdities and questions associated with ritua...

Takahiro Komuro is back with a new sculptural edition made in collaboration with Avant Arte. Cute but simultaneously creepy, the Japanese artist has created his own universe of characters that reference familiar pop cultural icons — be it Godzilla, a zombie or a giant robot — but crafted in a way to reintroduce these stories in a fresh new way. Following the Ground Dragon he released in 2022, Komuro has followed up with his own take on the legendary sphinx. Kira, which takes its name from the Japanese word ‘Kirakira’ (meaning ‘sparkling’), is cast in bronze and finished with a purple iridescent paint. Notably inspired by Greek folklore, Komuro mixes past with present by fusing the sculpture with mythological limbs, such as that of lion and eagle, with more modern signifiers like the sculpt...

Erin D. Garcia will unveil a new exhibition entitled GATES OF HEAVEN at HVW8 in Los Angeles. As his fourth solo show with the gallery, the self-taught artist presents a new body of work that oscillates between figuration and abstraction, pitting audiences into a strikingly chromatic series of paintings, that although static, feel alive. Over the course of his career, spanning KRINK-on-paper artworks to massive murals for the likes of adidas and Ace Hotels, Garcia has developed his own visual language. By deconstructing images to its constituent parts — line, color, and form — his abstracted works appear familiar and mysterious, each glance providing its own meaning. "There’s a play between ideals and imperfections," the writer Jimmy Jolliff noted on the show, "rollers, brush tips, and roug...

Folks, hold on to those stamps, they may be worth a massive sum one day. Case in point: an "Inverted Jenny" postal stamp, one of the rarest in the world, has just sold for $2m USD via Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries in New York. The stamp was originally printed in 1918 to commemorate the first regularly scheduled airmail route in the U.S., but the Bureau of Engraving and Printing misprinted the artwork — which depicted the Curtiss JN Jenny plane in the center, upside down. All but just one sheet of 100 stamps were destroyed, sparking a mythic interest for collectors around the world. “This is a historic moment for the hobby,” Siegel president, Scott Trepel, said in an interview with ARTnews. “The Inverted Jenny we sold today is the best example of the 100 stamps from the sheet. We have ...

2023 is the unofficial year of Picasso, as galleries and museums around the world are celebrating the prolific artist on the 50th anniversary since his death. On view in New York, Almine Rech is hosting a group exhibition dubbed The Echo of Picasso, bridging a dialogue between Picasso's legacy and the contemporary artists working today.The exhibition is presented under two frameworks: a look at Picasso's career while he was alive and challenged by his peers, while the latter part of the show focuses on the living artists who echo the Spanish artist's oeuvre. Drawing from its roster, works include a bronze sculpture by Claire Tabouret, a frantic cubist painting by George Condo, as well as works by Urs Fischer, David Hockney, and Jeff Koons.Decades on, "Picasso became a voluminous encycloped...