Ten Artists Trending at Art L.A. Contemporary
Monique van Genderen: The L.A.-based Van Genderen is known for her massive abstract paintings, which draw equally on modernist precedents and contemporary graphic design for inspiration. Her works have been compared to Helen Frankenthaler’s.
Uta Barth: A 2012 MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, Barth manages to create some of the world’s most beautiful, conceptually rich photographs without ever working outside her own home. She’s Berlin-born but Los Angeles-based—a fitting locale given the ubiquity of clean, pure light in her poetic images.
Adrian Ghenie: One of the foremost members of the Cluj School, Ghenie paints dark, brooding compositions that weave personal history and collective trauma. He’s on view at the fair with Mihai Nicodim, a fellow Romanian who gave him his first solo U.S. exhibition in 2006.
David Brooks: Brooklyn-based and ever-inventive in his sculpture practice, Brooks has worked with such prominent institutions as MoMA and The Met. His works (like the sculptures on view with American Contemporary) mine the fraught intersection between man and nature, asserting they are deeply Entangled.
Kristine Moran: The Canadian abstract painter holds her own in a two-artist booth with Daniel Faria Gallery. Describing the process behind her visceral, suggestive works, she has said: “As I’m painting, shapes, figures and creatures will emerge. It’s up to me to cull them into existence, allowing the story to unfold naturally.”
Despina Stokou: Stokou made her solo NYC debut last year with Derek Eller Gallery. In reviewing the Greek artist’s “bright, shaggy, acerbic paintings,” Roberta Smith wrote, “They bristle with scrawled phrases and cutout letters that convey the cyberbabble of everyday life,” and linked the painter with the legacy of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Cy Twombly.
Gert and Uwe Tobias: The interdisciplinary twin collaborators are best known for their large-scale, sumptuously graphic woodcuts that examine Romanian folklore—like the massive ten-footer Team Gallery is showing in L.A.
Hannah Whitaker: Whitaker is at the forefront of a new generation of photographers who are investigating abstract and camera-less techniques. Continuously experimenting with new exposure methods, she has described her practice as having “an obvious connection to painting...with all its drips and paint-like materials.”
Joe Reihsen: Angeleno born, bred, and based, Reihsen makes neon-hued paintings that carry delicate optical tricks, creating the illusion of smeared and excessive paint. His whimsically titled work has been described as soft “and dreamy without drifting into the world of carelessness.”
Wendy White: White’s distinctly urban aesthetic treats her canvases like city walls—palimpsests upon which to build layers of paint, graffiti, and mixed media. “Her paintings have a presence the reminds one of billboards and websites, something at once physical and disembodied,” Jerry Saltz once wrote.
