ART IN AMERICA 39
Herbert Ploberger:Dressing Table,1926,oilon
canvas, 17¾ by 27½ inches; in “New Objectivity.”SIGHTLINES
Paul Schimmel
The Los Angeles curator and
gallery director shares five recent
insights with Ross Simonini.Over the past 40 years, Paul Schimmel has become
one of the most important creative supporters of
Los Angeles art. He spent over two decades as the
chief curator of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary
Art; before that, he worked at the Newport Harbor
Museum (now the Orange CountyMuseum of Art)
and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. His
exhibitions have codified a lineage that has, histori-
cally, been as diffuse and hard to manage as the
city’s sprawling landscape. Less than a year after
resigning from MOCA in 2012, Schimmel joined
Hauser & Wirth as a partner; the new gallery’s
35,000-square-foot LosAngelesspace, Hauser Wirth
& Schimmel, opens in a former flour mill downtown
on Mar. 13. “I’m still surprised that it took 30 years
for a downtown boom in L.A.,” he says. This is a
city that does things independently. There are a lot
of lone wolves here.”Photos: Schimmel: Daniel Trese; Ploberger: ©Artists Rights S
ociety (ARS), New York/Bildrecht, Vienna; Bourgeois: Christop
her Burke, courtesy
the Easton Foundation,
New York/Licensed by VAGA, New York; McQueen: courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris.GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM
Stephanie Barron did a tremendous
job with her recent show “New
Objectivity: Modern German Art in
the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933,”
at the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art. It captured the complexity of
a nation in transition. It was a pivotal
moment in history that allowed for an
extraordinary rethinking of identity
politics, as well as the introduction of
aberrant behavior as a subject of art.
The exhibition, though supported by
documentary materials, really makes
its case through the artwork itself. A
dangerous, riveting show.POET LAUREATE
I’ve been re-reading Charles Bukowski
lately. I first met him when he came
to Houston for a reading at the Con-
temporary Arts Museum. I remember
him talking about the complex and
cynical side of L.A., a city that is con-
stantly reinventing itself and trying to
project a coherent and uplifting view.
Bukowski understood L.A.’s hidden
gems and its open challenges.Steve McQueen:Ashes(detail), 2014-15, two-channel
video projected onto a two-sided screen, 20½ minutes.CHAMELION
I’ve known Steve McQueen for a long time.
After studying film at New York University, he
understood that the art world was a better place
to think and develop the kinds of projects he
wanted to make. Ultimately he got to a point in
his career where he could be directly engaged
with both Hollywood and the art world, refer-
encing Buster Keaton and David Hammons.
He parodies and mocks what’s going on today.FIRST THINGS FIRST
Our opening show, “A Revolution in
the Making: Abstract Sculpture by
Women, 1947-2016” (Mar. 13-Sept. 4),
features 34 artists. There will be
10 Ruth Asawas, six very large-
scale Lee Bontecous and a dozen
pieces by Louise Bourgeois. But
the section of work from the ’80s
and ’90s will come as the biggest
surprise, with artists that people
are less familiar with, like Lygia
Pape, Marisa Merz and Liz Larner.
We’re also remaking Jackie Win-
sor’s breakthrough work from 1971,
a 20-foot-tall tree sculpture that
was only shown at the Nova Scotia
College of Art and Design.Louise Bourgeois:Untitled (he Wedges),1950,
painted wood and stainless steel, 63 by 13½ by
12 inches.HOMETOWN HERO
Mark Bradford’s nonprofit Art + Practice, in Leimert Park, has had some
fantastic shows recently, especially by Charles Gaines and John Outterbridge.
A+P is part of an important tradition in L.A. of artists engaging with how
the public receives and perceives their work. It goes back to someone like
Ed Kienholz cofounding his own space, the Ferus Gallery, or Jason Rhoades
doing his massiveBlack Pussy sculpture/installation on his own.