By Karen Ostlund
The LA Art Show will return to the Los Angeles Convention Center from January 23 - 27, 2019.
As the city (and west coast’s) largest art fair, and one of the most diversely programmed in the world, the LA Art Show features an encyclopedic lineup of exhibitors not only in contemporary and modern art, but also classical and other specialized art scenes that often command their own dedicated shows.
For its 24th year, the LA Art Show will focus especially on programming from the Pacific Rim.
LA Art Show’s Opening Night Preview and Premiere Party, which will be held on January 23, 2019, will donate a portion of its ticket proceedings to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Last year, the evening was attended by more than 7,000 VIPs and hosted by Jon Hamm. Previous hosts have included Emma Roberts, Amy Adams and Anne Hathaway.This year Kate Beckinsale and Gavin Rossdale will join the opening gala as hosts.
For the first time ever, Mizuma Art Gallery and Kamiya Co., LTD of Japan, Galerie Sabine Knust of Germany, and Corey Helford Gallery of DTLA will be joining the LA Art Show’s roster of exhibiting galleries. Mizuma will be showcasing new large-scale paintings Yoshitaka Amano, celebrated for his character art for the Final Fantasy series.
Returning heavyweights include Patrick Painter Gallery, Timothy Yarger Fine Art, and Pigment Gallery in CORE, Rofa Project, K+Y Gallery, Masterworks Fine Art Gallery and Denis Bloch Fine Art, in Modern & Contemporary, MS Rau and Rehs Galleries, Inc. in ROOTS, with Trinity House joining this section for the first time.
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Marta Minujín (Buenos Aires, 1943) is a multifaceted artist and a highly emblematic figure of Argentinian art since the 1960s. Hailed as one of the world’s greatest pop artists, her work has been shown across continents and in countries all over the globe. Two of her works will be exhibited in DIVERSEartLA: The Parthenon of Books, and Rayuelarte. The Parthenon of Books: The return of democracy to Argentina in December 1983 was the inspiration that led Marta Minujín to create a replica of the Greek Parthenon on the “9 de Julio Avenue,” a street located in Buenos Aires (Argentina). Mujín’s Parthenon has a metal structure covered with more than 20,000 books, many of which had been banned during the military dictatorship. The Parthenon of Books honors the world’s first democracy and the values of that era, which have served as the basis for today’s Western democratic societies. This work also stands as a symbol of the country’s prolonged need and renewed hope to transition back to democracy. Over time, Mujín’s thought-provoking work has become an icon of freedom of expression. In 2017, the artist was invited to present a new version of this project at the 14th Edition of Documenta, one of the world’s top contemporary art events that takes place every five years in Kassel (Germany). Her new work was praised and highly acclaimed by the critics, who saw in this powerful piece an emblem of democracy and global freedom. Rayuelarte is a playful and interactive intervention created by pop artist Marta Minujín in order to honor renowned Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, who wrote a book entitled “Rayuela.” Minujín reimagines Cortázar’s emblematic literary piece to bring to life an art piece that appeals directly to the participation of the public, for Rayuela is also a popular game played by children—and some adults—across the world. |
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| Andrés Paredes Presented by CCK - Buenos Aires, Argentina One of the leading art institutions in South America, CCK - Buenos Aires, Argentina will be exhibiting Memories of Mud, a multisensory experience created by Argentinian artist Andrés Paredes. The installation is a participative, multisensory experience comprised of clay domes that house fantastical landscapes. Viewers can only see this when they immerse their heads in ports at the bottom of the installation, creating an experience comparable to putting on a VR headset—except this is real. The exhibition utilizes scent, originally composed music and a careful system of indirect lighting to illuminate the artful environment. |
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| Ink Painting Presented by Baik Art (Seoul & Los Angeles), Kamiya Co., LTD, Gallery Kitai, Shumoku Gallery (Japan), East Art Center, Cospace and CM2 Space (China) Rarely seen on this scale outside of Asia, The 2019 LA Art Show will be showcasing a diverse and comprehensive array of Pan-Asian ink paintings throughout the fair, featuring artists from South Korea, Japan and China. Ink painting originated in East Asia as the tradition of using carbon-based black ink and calligraphic brush painting techniques. Ink is as synonymous with painting in the East as oil is with painting in the West. This survey of east Asian ink paintings will include works by the late Japanese legend Yu-ichi Inoue, new contemporary works by South Korean abstract landscape artist Chuni Park, Chinese artists Bian Hong, Li Huichang, Fan Peng, Li Zhihong and Yu Qiping, and Japanese artists Shiro Tsujimura, Morihiro Hosokawa, Mizuho Koyama, Reiko Tsunashima, Shoen Tominaga, Miwako Nagaoka, and more. |
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LITTLETOPIA Littletopia was conceived by Red Truck Gallery founder Noah Antieau and Juxtapoz Magazine co-founder Greg Escalante as a showcase of the best and brightest from the lowbrow and pop art movements, which originated here in Los Angeles. One of the only shows in the world to devote so much programming and space to this kind of work, thousands of attendees pass under Littletopia's custom archway each year to enter the LA Art Show's mecca for imaginative, new contemporary voices, and honor the visionary artists who came before. This year, the LA Art Show is proud to announce that Littletopia will be curated by Red Truck Gallery and Caro Buermann of Corey Helford Gallery. Fresh off their award for Outdoor Sculpture at the 2018 Lucca Biennale, cardboard art duo Dosshaus will be creating this year’s Littletopia archway. |
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| Virtual Futures: XR Showcase Presented by LACMA in conjunction with the exhibition 3D: Double Vision Curated by Britt Salvesen and Jesse Damiani Virtual Reality is one of the most eagerly discussed topics in contemporary culture, yet many in the art world are only starting to consider its impact—aesthetic, technological, psychological, therapeutic, economic, and so forth. This year, DIVERSEartLA offers four VR experiences that demonstrate the range of practices and possibilities that are defining VR in 2019. The tools for VR and AR creation and display—once the purview of engineers, available mainly in academia and the military—are now much more accessible to anyone with a story to tell: game designers, painters, screenwriters, documentarians, journalists, architects, choreographers, and many more. Often working collaboratively across several disciplines, this diverse community of creators is discovering the technology's potential, involving audiences in the very act of creation. According to consulting curator Jesse Damiani, "The advent of mainstream immersive technologies is the single greatest amplification of human capability since the discovery of fire, a paradigm shift so massive we've only just begun to taste its impact." Visitors to the LA Art Show's DIVERSEartLA can get a glimpse of the future as seen by four different creative innovators. |
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| Sarah Trouche performance (photo) Curated by Marisa Caichiolo Sarah Trouche is a French visual artist whose work centers around cultural and political issues such as migration and displacement. She invites us to question the major challenges we face today. Working across borders and cultures, Trouche explores through sculpture, dance, photography, installation, performance and video the complexities of place, identity, displacement, and ideological differences associated with migrant experiences and marginalization. For her new performance, Trouche is committed to research on women’s emancipation. Inspired by the history of France during the French Revolution and the movement of the sans-culottes, she decided to create a collective piece called “You should wear your revolution.” Dorian Wood seeks to glorify both the sanctity and irreverence of intimacy. Through the use of their corpulent body and booming voice, Wood revels in challenging the artist-audience separation, using subject matter informed by their own position in society as a non-binary person of color and an autodidact without a formal college education nor a strong alliance to any particular community. Their work has been showcased in concert halls and performance spaces around the world, including at such institutions as LACMA (Los Angeles), The Stone (NYC), MASS Gallery (Austin), Kulturhuset (Stockholm), and Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin). As a musician, they have released over a dozen recordings, among them two back-to-back albums, Rattle Rattle and Down, The Dirty Roof, showcasing a series of doomsday-themed songs that incorporate over 60 musicians. Their most recent album, XALÁ, marks the first time that Wood has recorded a full-length work in their mother tongue of Spanish. |
OPENING NIGHT PREMIERE, Wednesday, January 23, 2019 | 7pm - 11pm LAArtShow.com
SHOW HOURS
Thursday, January 24, 2019 | 11am – 7pm
Friday, January 25, 2019 | 11am – 7pm
Saturday, January 26, 2019 | 11am – 7pm
Sunday, January 27, 2019 | 11am – 5pm
LOS ANGELES CONVENTION CENTER - WEST HALL
1201 South Figueroa Street Los Angeles, CA 90015
