Jellyfish at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles
Images courtesy of Kohn Gallery.
Kohn Gallery presents the group exhibition Jellyfish organized by Samantha Glaser-Weiss of prominent contemporary and historical works that respond to the output of artists working in the mid-to-late 20th century. Emphasizing tonality, and the relationship between physical medium and conceptual inquiry, the show comprises a range of work that includes painting, sculpture, installation and drawing. Artists included in the show include Carl Andre, George Condo, Dan Flavin, Rashid Johnson, Barbara Kruger, Donald Judd, Eddie Martinez, Richard Prince, Robert Ryman, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Austyn Weiner, Tom Wesselman and Christopher Wool.
As a whole, the exhibition looks to the formative years of the emergence of what would be known as the Pictures Generation, considering an attitude towards mass media and the conceptual nature of reproduction, seen in a variety of works by participating artists such as Andy Warhol, Barbara Kruger, Christopher Wool and Richard Prince. Further such as Rashid Johnson, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd and Robert Ryman explore relationships between minimalism and materially-based sculptural interventions across a wide array of mediums and presentation.
Rashid Johnson’s work Jellyfish, from which the exhibition takes its name, shows the repeated motif of the silhouette of a palm tree in a composition of soap, tile, wax and paint, suggestive of differing social experiences for an icon of West Coast American leisure, the palm tree. Likewise, pieces by Andy Warhol, Barbara Kruger and Richard Prince highlight notions of repetition and symbolism of mass culture, perhaps no better seen in Warhol’s Beatle Boots (Negative) from 1986, one of the artist’s very last works that touches on the foundations of popular culture, celebrity and consumerism that he began to explore in earnest in the 1960s. Kruger’s Sex / Lure from 1979 takes this dialogue further, exposing the constructs of sexuality, identity and power embedded within mass produced print imagery, in a prescient nod towards our image and multimedia-drenched contemporary culture.
