Pacific Dreams: Currents of Surrealism and Fantasy in California Art, 1934-1957

Arts & Photography

Oakland Museum

UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center

Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art

History & Criticism

Hammer Museum

For painters faced with the metaphorical death of painting, the way forward has indeed been puzzling. nevertheless, the territory continues to be explored. As Luc Tuymans put it, "Painting is a way of thinking and constitutes an enormous archetypal pattern which artists constantly fall back upon." Through 84 stunning reproductions, The Undiscovered Country addresses the ability of painting to tackle issues of representation now that, in the broader culture, the representational function is occupied almost exclusively by photography. Chronogical, it begins in the 1960s with paintings by John Baldessari, Fairfield Porter, Gerhard Richter and others, which range in approach from painterly to conceptual. The argument continues with figurative painting from the 1970s by Philip Guston, and proceeds via influential paintings of the 1980s and 1990s by Thomas Lawson, Kerry James Marshall, Luc Tuymans and others. Also discussed is a group of younger contemporary painters including Mamma Andersson, Mari Eastman and Thomas Eggerer. The Undiscovered Country does not position painting as a threatened medium, nor as one unjustly underrated, but instead looks carefully at the work of a number of painters who have thoroughly examined their own practices, and who continue to find approaches to representation that can only be resolved through painting.

The Undiscovered Country

Individual Artists

"Colorful, figurative, funny, and abstract; Thing uncovers the most innovative contemporary sculpture from the up-and-coming generation of 20 Los Angeles based artists. The book includes a broad selection of works and adresses a wide range of sculptural pratices, probing the formal and conceptual trajectories of sculpture. As Los Angeles has become a defining force in international contemporary art, this book and accompanying exhibition, though focusing on Los Angeles, provide a compelling view into the state of sculpture today."

Thing

Thompson, Matthew

Philbin, Ann

Miles, Christopher

Chang, Aimee

Elaine, James

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Published to accompany the Hammer Museum's Summer 2007 exhibition, Eden's Edge, this exploration of art made in Los Angeles during the past decade crosses generations, mediums, and materials to link 15 artists of singular personal vision, whether internationally established or not-yet-discovered. The artists--who include Ginny Bishton, Mark Bradford, Liz Craft, Sharon Ellis, Matt Greene, Elliott Hundley, Stanya Kahn and Harry Dodge, Monica Majoli, Rebecca Morales, Matthew Monahan, Lari Pittman, Ken Price, Jason Rhodes, Anna Sew Hoy and Jim Shaw--all track, via their work and vision, a persistent consciousness of change and contradiction. The works collected here are intensely crafted and conjure richly imagistic worlds in which landscape and figure fracture and metamorphose. Together, they establish a generational continuum, integrating newly emerging artists with their more established peers. This clothbound volume includes a critical essay by curator Gary Garrels that contextualizes both the exhibition and the artists' work within the art and culture of southern California, the international art scene, and the trends of the last decade. It includes an entry, a biography, a selected exhibition history and a bibliography for each of the 15 artists.

Eden's Edge: Fifteen L.A. Artists

GARRELS, Gary

For nearly thirty years, starting in the 1960s, Franklin D. Murphy was a dominant figure in the cultural development of Los Angeles. As chancellor of UCLA and later as chief executive of the Times Mirror company, Murphy channeled more than a billion dollars into the city's universities, museums, concert halls, and libraries. The Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, one of his landmark projects, is also one of the UCLA campus's great treasures. Standing as a model for sculpture gardens internationally since its dedication in 1967, the Murphy Garden features seventy-two important modern and contemporary sculptures in a five-acre site designed by landscape architect Ralph Cornell. This fully-illustrated catalog documents the entire Murphy Garden collection and provides a scholarly entry for each artist—a sampling of which includes Deborah Butterfield, Alexander Calder, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi, Auguste Rodin, and David Smith. Three essays—by Victoria Steele, Cynthia Burlingham, and Marc Treib— focus respectively on the role of Franklin Murphy in the garden's planning and execution, the acquisition of the sculptures, and the garden's significance within the history of sculpture garden design.

The Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden at UCLA

Sculpture

For Oranges and Sardines, curated by Gary Garrels of Los Angeles' Hammer Museum, six contemporary abstract painters--Mark Grotjahn, Wade Guyton, Mary Heilmann, Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl and Christopher Wool--present a recent painting alongside the work of other artists who have impacted their work. The conceit is clever, considering that artists are often an invaluable source of information on other artists. The result is a constellation of diverse works by the aforementioned six painters and their influences, who include Paul Klee, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Eva Hesse, Pablo Picasso and Dieter Roth. This well-illustrated volume examines--through the eyes and minds of artists--how art can illuminate art. Featuring sharp design by Los Angeles-based Green Dragon Office, it includes in-depth interviews between Garrels and each of the six featured contemporary artists.

Oranges and Sardines: Conversations on Abstract Painting

Since 1999, the Hammer Museum's Hammer Projects series has furnished international and local artists with a laboratory-like environment to create new work or to present existing work in a new context. Published to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the series, this volume compiles all 80 of the projects featured so far--by artists including Amy Adler, Edgar Arceneaux, Fikret Atay, Walead Beshty, Paul Chan, Aaron Curry, Tara Donovan, Nathalie Djurberg, Tony Feher, Mark Grotjahn, Mark Handforth, Arturo Herrera, Elliott Hundley, Jim Isermann, Runa Islam, Jesper Just, Emma Kay, Margaret Kilgallen, Barry McGee, Paul Morrison, Paul Pfeiffer, Hiraki Sawa, Simon Starling, Kaari Upson, Kara Walker, Phoebe Washburn, Pae White and Sun Xun--alongside texts by Hilton Als, Regine Basha, Aaron Betsky, Nayland Blake, Alex Farquharson, Russell Ferguson, Malik Gaines, Tim Griffin, Massimiliano Gioni, Dave Hickey, Vasif Kortun, Libby Lumpkin, Midori Matsui, Linda Norden, Raphael Rubinstein, Laurie Simmons, Dean Sobel, Ali Subotnick and Steven Vincent.

Hammer Projects: 1999-2009

Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A.--an exhibition curated by Ali Subotnick at Los Angeles' Hammer Museum--features nine idiosyncratic Los Angeles-based artists spanning several generations, including Lisa Anne Auerbach, Julie Becker, Llyn Foulkes, Charles Irvin, Hirsch Perlman, Victoria Reynolds, Kaari Upson, Jeffrey Vallance and Charlie White. These artists have in common the aim of transporting viewers to an alternate reality with work that gets under your skin and sticks in your head yet incorporates a degree of self reflection. They eschew the dreamy California cliché of superficial comfort and glamour to instead focus--in profoundly disturbing yet often humorous ways--on the world in which we live. Ali Subotnick is a curator at the Hammer Museum. In 2006, along with her frequent collaborators Maurizio Cattelan and Massimiliano Gioni, she co-curated the 4th Berlin Biennial.

Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A.

156pp.  Illustrated in color and b/w.  A huge collection of prints from the famous surrealists.

Visionary States: Surrealist Prints from the Gilbert Kaplan Collection

Riva Castleman, Robert Rainwater, Timothy Baum et al

Eden's Edge: Fifteen La Artists

Bradford, Mark

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