February 12, 2025 Just over a month later…
Eaton fires were January 8 for us in Altadena, and there’s a show with those who were affected on February 13. It’s great to see the community is coming together during a time like this.
I love that Adam and my name are together.
This is one of the only pieces that survived, only because I had given it to my parents to hang in their home about six months ago. It lived / lives in the bathroom. Luckily, it is also one of my favorites. I made it in 2015 during a summer at grad school. Put it in the show that is on February 13 for the weekend. All of my other work in our home and storage from my life is gone. Good I have a few left.
January 26, 2025 - Sculpture that survived, sort of.
Went walking around what was left of our home, on a Sunday morning after a light rain. Not much to see, but did find that this one outdoor sculpture that lived in front of our home, and it survived. I brought this back from New York after grad school and my thesis show. At least one made it.
January 8, 2025 - My studio. Eaton Canyon Fire, Altadena.
Found our home and studios on fire just a little over 12 hours after we evacuated.
December 30, 2024 - Walter Pichler and Friedrich Kiesler
To the left as you walk in.
I thought I’d end the year on the best show I had seen all year. This one, Vienna, Belvedere 21, July 2024. We hiked up the hill from the other Belvedere locations in the summer heat, I had to see this show. Worth every sweat.
As you walk in, here it starts.
All the things I like in a sculpture, here.
Huge amount of work here, sculptures, photographs, drawings. I like how the work travels visually through architecture, clothing, science/fiction, and just awesome sculpture. Hits me on multiple levels.
And here….
Sort of traveling between mediums, easily, good.
Drawings here, also photographs.
Very happy to sit and stare for hours.
Reminds me of Czech modernism and Kafka too. Always a good sign to me. I’m addicted to these ideas right now.
Way more I could show here, but I’ll leave it at that.
Happy New Year.
- Caiti
December 23, 2024 - All Cats, All the Time - (Part I), Paris, D’Orsay from Manet/Degas exhibition 2023
Manet
December 13, 2024 - PST in Palm Springs!
A 360 degree departure from Prague, here is a show we went to earlier in September this year: Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945-1990. You can’t get further from cold Prague then the heat of the California desert! This show is co-curated by Michael Duncan, and this show is part of the PST ART: Art & Science Collide. We arrived in time for the opening and curator walk through. Some of my favorite Light and Space artist’s work was in the show, thanks to Adam’s good friend Michael Duncan for putting them in and expertise. Plus some bonus artists I wasn’t as familiar with and super excited to learn about, these JPL and CalTech influences and discoveries were in part related to many of these artists’ works - it is a show worth going to see!
Robert Bassler resin.
This was in the artist’s bathroom before being in the show. Just goes to show that artists live with the artworks a lot before they are let out sometimes. I wouldn’t mind going to the bathroom and being near this piece everyday.
And the piece below by Channa Horwitz, I gravitated towards since it had a relationship to music, it was one of my favorite pieces in the show! Small, understated and quiet, still very powerful.
Channa Horwitz, American artist 1932 - 2013 Time Structure Composition III Sonakinatography I. 1970 casein on graph paper.
December 2, 2024 - Time warp to Prague winter 2023
In some of the National Galleries in Prague, seven in total, you can stumble upon some that are not so crowded, (I like empty museums). The Peter Brandel show was up, and most people were there at one of the other galleries down the hill from the castle. But there were still some Brandel’s here - see my other site of only Czech art/architecture here: Slegrova.org
We went up to the Národní galerie Praha – Schwarzenberský palác, because I hadn’t been there yet. This was last winter, which is what reminded me of it (I’m glad I took pictures) The Baroque Gallery is one of my favorites, with only Czech painters I haven’t seen and you can view no where else.
Outside Národní galerie Praha – Schwarzenberský palác Winter 2023
As you first walk in.. and no one around!
Master IW, also Monogramist I.W., was a Czech or Saxon Renaissance painter, trained in the workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder, active between 1520 and 1550 mainly in north-west Bohemia.
A new Czech painter find!
I usually take a photo of the name next to the artwork I like. I always think I will remember, then cruelly forget, because I can’t remember names, dates, anything, that well. Not all the work I love is abstraction or the like. I also love weird paintings of people, especially detailed and well-painted odd ones.
I could keep going - I love it here so much. Just a view from behind the Master IW painting.
November 25, 2024 - Still on Auerbach
My friend sent me a clipping out of the Economist, still thinking about Auerbach. Where in LA can I go to look at his paintings? I will settle for books for now. I am surpirsed by his brighter paintings, I only know the dark ones.
The Origin of the Great Bear, 1967–8, oil paint on board, 115 × 140 cm
Here’s one of the bright ones above, super great.
Franz Auerbach
November 11, 2024
Weird, just a week ago - now yesterday. Auerbach. Still swallowing last week’s election. We are in for a wild ride. What a month.
Postwar, Modern show - New Art in Britain
November 4, 2024
I’ve always liked Paolozzi and finally got to see a lot of his work at Barbican in May 2022 for the Postwar, Modern show - New Art in Britain. This sculpture was “found” with other sculptures for a group show “This is Tomorrow” at Whitechapel in 1956 with the ‘Group Six’ - Paolozzi, Henderson, Smithson and Smithson. Here’s the show here at the Barbican https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2022/event/postwar-modern-new-art-in-britain-1945-1965
Check out install shots from the “This is Tomorrow” show here: https://www.tate-images.com/M01122-Installation-photograph-of-Group-6%27s-Eduardo.html.
Eduardo Paolozzi, Contemplative Object (Sculpture and Relief), c. 1951 Plaster with bronze coating.
Three more Paolozzi sculptures: St. Sebastian III (Figure with Words), 1958. And The Philosopher, 1957. Finally, St. Sebastian IV, 1957. All bronze.
I was struck by the texture and scale on all his pieces and the connection Paolozzi has made nearly 70 years ago, between the human sized, robot sized, sculpture sized. At this time, I was looking for something that I could resonate with how I was making and feeling towards certain formal sculptural issues and pieces that could bring such vulnerability and tension to the surface. I typically connect with sculptures with gross texture, and have never been up so close to Paolozzi’s work except for the public sculptures (namly the one near Pimlico station out of the tube as you walk towards the Tate) 1982 - which are huge and also more in the pop realm he worked in.
An image from the internet because I couldn’t find my photo in my photo library - I’ll keep looking. Such an awesome sculpture to come up from the tube and see. It was like a dream come true, because I had seen this piece so many times in photos and was surprised to see it this way by accident.
I appreciate Paolozzi’s ability to maneuver between his styles, not being stuck on one kind of working method because it was “popular” or “salable”. An artist who is his own, and gives me strength in the studio - as I think of him and his work.
The Catalogue from this show - it’s a good one. We always try to buy the catalogues we think we won’t be able to find in the US. It’s great, except that our luggage becomes extremely heavy! Totally worth it!
Speaking of texture….. and also in this show, some real great doozies.
Close up of Shell Building Site, Frank Auerbach 1959. Oil on board.
I also hadn’t seen Auerbach’s work upclose like this, and this painting was in this show (yes, one great piece after another!). Again, texture, the oil paint grit build up. More on Auerbach in a bit.
Sunday, October 27, 2024 - Notes on The Castle and The Hermitage show, LA, CA (2022).
Kafka wrote The Castle starting 1922, so I was reading it about 100 years later…reading Kafka you can’t quite get your finger on what’s happening, but you get it all the same… This book was a little different because it hadn’t been edited or finished at all. Part of its awesomeness.
The Castle, Franz Kafka, published by Max Brod in 1926 two years after Kafka died in 1924. It is his last novel, unfinished.
The hill up to work, on the way to Woodstock, NY.
…for one month in late summer 2016 I used to drive up route 28 between Tivoli and Woodstock, NY to work for a sculptor there. Humid, hot, uphill….I’d drive by “The Doll House”, and joke that I had to quarter up the abandoned house, and bring it back to LA for my future studio: https://ageandabandon.com/doll-house-kingston-ny/ Or, maybe just make a tiny home replication, a doll house and turn it into a project for a future work. I remember driving, stopping and walking around the entire house, trying to peak in to see what was inside. In the daytime, of course.
Map of my route, from Tivoli through Kingston and up the hill to Woodstock, NY.
Stock image from inside the dollhouse.
Five years later, at The Hermitage LA “And Falling Down the Slope..." the two worlds collided, which was weird to me then and still is now. (Note: Hermitage is actually a doll house, converted into a mini / tiny gallery space, where you have to duck to get into it). Meanwhile I had been reading the unfinished story roughly around 2020ish still mulling around about the "doll house” and castle structure I passed so many times and what it meant. What did it look like now? What would happen if I recreated it somehow…
From the outside of The Hermitage LA 2022
Inside, it is very little.
Installation view 2022. Photo: Paloma Dooley
The work evolved by questions of: what is finished, a story of nothing, a system falling apart. All the parts making a whole messed up little cluster. I thought about how much of my work I always questioned the finished state of an artwork and what constitutes its “finishedness”. The editing of a sculpture, can have the potential to destroy it. The Castle, was sort of a message I could relate to in the work, and I think the work made at this time really resonates with it.
“Variations On a Composition In a Space (Unfinished Sentence One)” 2021 Wood, Aqua Resin, resin putty, fiberglass, plaster, polymer clay, Flashe acrylic. 16 x 10 x 16 Inches. A studio view of one of many pieces from this body of work. Photo: Paloma Dooley
“Variations On a Composition In a Space (Prague Castle Revisited)” 2021 Postcard of Prague Castle, Gouache 8 x 11 x 1 inch.
a view of the Prague Castle, an image I love so much, and one that Kafka must have looked at so many times.
More on Kafka at a later date….
Tuesday, October 22, 2024 - D.F.D notes on exhibition at Ruth Gallery, Pasadena, CA.
Reflecting on the framing and negative space Giacometti uses here, feels so natural to me. This sculpture is almost a century old, yet feels really fresh as if it were made today.
Cage, Alberto Giacommetti 1930 - 31
This sculpture is from 2023 at Ruth Gallery. I named the show after reading R.U.R., short for Rossum's Universal Robots, a play by one of my favorite writers still, Karel Čapek. I was obsessed with how Čapek could foresee into this future we live in now, and observe machine’s role in human emotion or detachment from feeling, as machines become more and more prevalent in the everyday life.
D.F.D., Primus 2023 Plex, wood, plaster, aqua-resin, fiberglass, Flashe 26x23x8 inches. Photography: Paloma Dooley
