3 days in LA part 1

Bergamot Station

We were in LA last weekend for Angelika's opening at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery. I was in Denver for a few days of work, then headed out to LA from there on Friday morning. I hadn't heard about the snowstorm in NY until I got to the airport. I felt very fortunate to be heading in the other direction, particularly knowing that the mess out East would straighten itself out by the time I was ready to return.
Our leisure time both before and after A's opening was filled with looking at art....what a change.
On Saturday morning, we went over to Bergamot Station, a collection of over twenty galleries housed in a former undustrial area encircling a parking lot in Santa Monica.
We stopped into most of the galleries, and saw some very good shows. I snapped some images of the work I found most interesting. Patrick Painter Inc. has separate spaces at Bergamot.

Hope Atherton at Patrick Painter East

The East gallery featured a show of paintings by Hope Atherton that treated the representational subjects with a natural abstract approach.

Albert Oehlen at Patrick Painter West

Painter's west gallery featured the "Leg Show" a group of leg-centric work by Tim Berresheim, Albert Oehlen and Matthia Schaufler which was the initial incarnation of a recurring theme of the ubiquiteness of the German artist. The day before, A was having a conversation with another artist about the current tide of German artists that are supremely visible in LA exhibits currently. It could be that my krautsense is more highly attuned given my domestic situation, but in any case there indeed seemed to an inordinate number of German's represented in the exhibits we saw.

The two most effective exhibits were also very entertaining: Jean Lowe's papier-mache installations at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, and a survey of the work of Scott Grieger at Patricia Faure Gallery.
Both artists appropriate the familiar and send it back to us with a twist.

Jean Lowe at Rosamund Felsen Gallery

Lowe's exhibit spanned three rooms all with intricate constructions. Her collection of fully stocked bookshelves are capable of keeping you engaged for hours perusing the volume of titles riffing on subjects through out the entire Dewey Decimal system.

Scott Grieger at Patricia Faure Gallery.

The Grieger exhibit covers work from 1969-2007 in a variety of media that pointedly references recent art history. There is a group of photographs recreating famous artworks by Robert Irwin, Rauschenberg, Barnett Newman where Grieger cast himself as the replacement for the essential element in each piece. In other pieces, he creates works that could be supposed to be the result of fantasy mashups of artists like Johns+Judd and Newman+Stella.