Josh Hartnett with Scott Campbell on opening nite…

Supertouch’s own tattooing god and master of low culture SCOTT CAMPBELL brought the thunder to Miami this weekend when his “Make it Rain” show opened this weekend at AL MORAN’s venerable O.H.W.O.W. GALLERY where A-listers JOSH HARTNETT and SERENA WILLIAMS rolled in to show their support. The proprietor of New York’s most premiere tattoo studio (that also doubles as an artist’s social club and illegal shooting range), Campbell brings the full scope of his authentic inkslinging influences to his first major solo show and the results have “wow factor” to spare. The highlight of the diverse collection of work are a series of laser-cut dollar bill pieces that feature imagery cut deeply into stacks of 100 single dollar bills with shockingly precise—and aesthetically pleasing—results. Equally impressive are Campbell’s beautiful monochrome ink paintings of tattoo-themed imagery. The real showstoppers, however, were the artist’s “implements of death” pieces which consisted of an actual ice pick, box cutter, and broken bottle all etched with decorative filigree, dipped in 24k gold and inlaid with rubies, garnets and sapphires. The results are killer bling—literally. Topping it all off, was the pièce de résistance: a real granite headstone that read “Wish You Were Here.” HAVE A LOOK: Read the rest of this entry »

Beijing-born and Queens, NY-based Chinese artist YI CHEN is a rising force in the world of modern figurative painting. His newest show “Beaut-Esque” that opened its doors at Culver City hotspot HONOR FRASER GALLERY this Saturday nite was full of gorgeous, color-dense examples of his playful and expert signature style full of playful references the modern masters (Picasso and Hockney spring immediately to mind), and loads of painting chops to spare. The artist uses culturally mediated images from advertisements and fashion magazines as inspiration for his work and sees his paintings and collages as metaphors for hybrid, mutated concepts of beauty borne from a global popular culture. This concept of hybridization and mutation formulate a tense balance in his work, combining enticing beauty and repelling grotesqueries that result in magnetic paintings. Chen begins his creative process by assembling collages of human (and sometimes mammalian) facial features cut out from popular fashion magazines. These collages of perfect/imperfect specimens are the foundation of his work. Like an artistic scientist, he disregards race, gender and age and selects individual characteristics and reconstructs them to form a new human species. These collages then become the figurative models for his lushly rendered oil paintings. All art-crawling denizens of the Southland should consider this essential viewing. HAVE A LOOK: Read the rest of this entry »

LA might not be ground zero for the next visual renaissance (at least not from how things are looking as of late), but it is home to some solid decorative art. Enter SYLIVA JI who’s been painting for some time now in a fun style that might be best described as Nagel Vs. Gustav Klimt on Dia De los Muertos. Her solid new solo exhibition “Haute Eopch” at Culver City’s COREY HELFORD GALLERY featuring Ji’s usual array of painted doomsday femme fatales opened to a packed house on Saturday nite where the looks made it worth the drive and the ratio of lovely ladies to men was advantageously high. HAVE A LOOK: Read the rest of this entry »

Supertouch buddy KAWS checks in with a visual update on ROSSON CROW’s incredible solo show “Focus” at the FORT WORTH MODERN that opened on Saturday nite. Hailing from Plano, Texas, the red Corvette driving LA-based bad girl of the art world is one of the most incredible young talents on the scene who kicked ass and took names with her first solo museum show in her home state of Lone Star. The big show features a small collection of large scale works that were quickly upstaged by the Texas Rose herself who showed up at the opening decked out in a red, white, and blue sequined showgirl’s outfit, exuding state pride right down to her Texas flag manicure. The DALLAS MORNING NEWS took rightful notice:

“Rosson Crow is having one of life’s sweetest moments, and she may be too young to fully appreciate it. Just three years out of Yale’s master’s program, the 26-year-old has moved from gallery level to museum soloist with her “Focus” show, which opened Sunday at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

This great career leap forward is happening only a few miles from her hometown of Plano, where she was known as Lauren. She became her more androgynous middle name when she launched her life as an artist … The high-glamour Crow is visually at odds with her large-scale paintings of defunct saloons, taxidermy shops and seedy nightclubs. She likes dark, raucous spaces that have a history, and she combs through archival photographs and American history books for inspirational images. She has incorporated photographs of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral cortège and the New York Stock Exchange at the turn of the century in her work.” Click HERE to read more.

A featured artist in LANCE ARMSTRONG’s upcoming Supertouch-curated “Stages” art show to benefit the anti-cancer LIVESTRONG foundation, Rosson Crow will be creating an original large-scale painting that will be premiered at the exhibition when doors open on July 16th at GALERIE EMMANUEL PERROTIN in Paris during the TOUR DE FRANCE. Stay tuned to ST for more updates coming soon. Meanwhile, HAVE A LOOK: Read the rest of this entry »

Controversial Algerian artist ADEL ABDESSEMED whose works depicting animals in often violent and fatal situations has brought his incomparable vision to American shores with his first NYC solo gallery show “Rio” at DAVID ZWIRNER. Opening last weekend to a crowd that included the awestruck alongside the aghast, the show’s crowing installation was a massive sculpture of twisted and intertwined plane wreckage that transformed the original vehicles into what closely resembled a trio of wrestling earthworms that inevitably brought to mind the crash landing of a passenger plane in the Hudson River this winter. The most divisive works, of course, could be found in the exhibition’s screening room where short films of animal fighting and abuse were screened in loops as an illustration of cultural violence not intended for the faint of heart. In fact, this is exactly the type of work Republicans usually trot out in front of Congress when lobbying against Federally subsidized arts programs. Explaining the show’s title, the artist said, “The show is called Rio, meaning river. I observe the world with the same fascination that my daughter, Rio, contemplates the big animals in the zoo that are thirsty and hungry.” Having roused the ire of Italian audiences with his “The Wings of God,” exhibition in Turin, Italy and the outright condemnation of pseudo-hippies in the Bay Area with his “Don’t Trust Me” show at the SF Art Institute (which was canceled before the scheduled end date), both of which featured similarly violent animal films, Abdessemed is boldly taking the fight for artistic expression to the front lines of the art world with the help of a gallery unintimidated by the current pervasive climate of fear and loathing. An impressive array of other conceptual works including “Music Box,” with a mechanism made from an oil drum, and “Prostitute,” a set of leather bound copies of the Bible, Torah, and Koran, each meticulously handwritten, page by page, by actual prostitutes rounds out the provocative show which, in these knee-knocking times, should be considered essential viewing for all. HAVE A LOOK: Read the rest of this entry »

This weekend in NYC saw the return of one of the city’s most elusive artists to the formal gallery scene when Supertouch’s own PHIL FROST premiered his new solo show “Paperweight” at JONATHAN LEVINE GALLERY. Creating over 65 works on paper—the majority of which clocked in at a comfy and affordable 22″ x 30″—the show was an explosion of color (and white out) from the so-called “street artist”, who, despite gaining notoriety for first plying his trade on city walls, has strived to elude the misnomer in his professional career. A show of this kind has never before been mounted for Phil, whose imagery usually begins on canvases before spilling over onto all matter of physical ephemera, from baseball bats and footballs, to old mattresses, glass bottles, BMX bikes, and even suitcases, and proved to be an amazing spectacle in its well contained uniformity. Of course, Frost’s fanbase was out in numbers to greet their art hero and art collector and onetime funnyman MIKE MEYERS even patiently waited his turn in line for a photo with Philly Phil followed by chants of “I’m not worthy, I’m not worthy,” obviously not in reference to his performance in “The Love Guru.” HAVE A LOOK: Read the rest of this entry »

Unfortunately for the frighteningly stagnant LA art scene most of the great shows of the last few years have been by non-LA artists. Luckily for LA, we get a regular stream of good shows by non-LA artists to keep us happy. The most recent of said exhibitions is by LA-born, but NYC-based painter KEHINDE WILEY whose new collection of figurative masterworks “The World Stage: Brazil” opened this weekend to a packed house at Culver City art hotspot ROBERTS & TILTON GALLERY. Choosing his subjects for this series from the notorious favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Wiley asked each to assume the pose of a local sculptural work on display in the city as a means of interpreting the country’s storied colonial history through the images of some of its most vibrant modern inhabitants. The results, as always with KW, were staggering and this new collection of grandiose portraits is exactly the shot in the arm the Southland needs to help kickoff the 2009 gallery season with a fresh breath of colorful optimism. HAVE A LOOK: Read the rest of this entry »

While the Chinese modern art market of recent years with its fast rising cult-of-personality art stars was ultimately born to fail—and with the recent economic meltdown, fail it has—the shining light of the red country’s art world continues to glow in the form of CAI GUO-QIANG. Drawing freely from ancient mythology, military history, Taoist cosmology, extraterrestrial observations, Maoist revolutionary tactics, Buddhist philosophy, gunpowder-related technology, Chinese medicine, and methods of terrorist violence, Cai’s art is a form of social energy, constantly mutable, linking what he refers to as “the seen and unseen worlds.” His newly unveiled retrospective, “I Want to Believe,” at the GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, Bilbao (the second stop on a global tour that began in 2008 at the Guggenheim NYC), presents the full spectrum of the artist’s protean, multimedia art in all its conceptual complexity.

Born in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China, in 1957, Cai studied stage design at the Shanghai Drama Institute. In the 1980s he emerged as a member of the burgeoning experimental art world of China’s postreform era. After moving to Japan in 1986, Cai tapped into a rich vein of international 20th-century art and critical thought. While living there, he mastered the use of gunpowder to create his signature gunpowder drawings and the related outdoor explosion events. These practices integrate science and art in a process of creative destruction and reflect Cai’s philosophy that conflict and transformation are interdependent conditions of life, and hence art. At once intuitive and analytical, his gunpowder drawings and explosion events are intrepid, conceptual, site specific, ephemeral, time based, and interactive—performance art with a new matrix of cultural meaning.

Cai has lived in New York since 1995. While increasing his participation in the global art system of biennials, public celebrations, and museum exhibitions around the world, Cai’s social projects engage local communities to produce art events in remote, nonart sites like military bunkers, a socialist utopianism influenced by Cai’s experience growing up in Mao’s Red China and during the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76. His recent work has expanded to include large-scale installations, allegorical and sculptural, that recuperate signs and symbols of Chinese culture and expose the dialectics of local history and globalization.

Designed by the artist as a site-specific installation, the Guggenheim’s exhibition presents art as a process that unfolds in time and space, dealing with ideas of transformation, expenditure of materials, and connectivity. The structure of Cai’s art forms are inherently unstable, but his social idealism characterizes all change, however violent, as carrying the seeds of positive creation. HAVE A LOOK: Read the rest of this entry »