Chinatown's Chung King Road Opens 2016 With 6 Provocative Shows
Take A Stroll Down Chung King Road This Saturday Night!
As DTLA’s gallery scene heats up in 2016, Chung King Road in Chinatown is quickly becoming a spot for the city’s most subversive galleries. Long anchored by Mat Gleason’s Coagula Curatorial, the infamous road has been home to the highly respected Charlie James Gallery and Chung King Studios. In 2015 Paige Wery put outsider art back on the map when she opened Good Luck Gallery. Greg Escalante opened Gregorio Escalante Gallery in September to much buzz and packed openings. Rounding out the road is the newest addition, Sarah Gough’s Project Gallery, which made the move from Hollywood to Chinatown last October. The gallery pack kicks off the new year with five exciting openings and one celebrated extension. Artists range in age, medium, and style with everything from classic renderings of our world to hybrid assemblage, creating an exciting experience of what is to come for Los Angeles’ artist community this year!
Newcomers to Chinatown, Project Gallery has announced a solo exhibition of Los Angeles based painter Wyatt Mills. His series of new paintings and collages dominate the walls of the gallery and permeate our subconscious, broaching concepts of normalcy, status quo, and compromise. Approaching these works with varied techniques, including visceral brushstrokes, anamorphic perspective, and collage elements, Mills physically portray the anxieties, neuroses, and personal battles swirling through his subject’s heads. Any onlooker is forced to confront what their concept of “normal” is by showing them who they are - a reflection of everything they have taken on.
http://projectgallery.com
Brian Mains will be exhibiting a selection of nine new paintings and fifteen new drawings as a part of his continuing series “Intersection of Light and Darkness” at Gregorio Escalante Gallery. Mains highlights the dichotomy between the divine (light) and the destructive (dark), suggesting realms beyond what we can see, illuminating the destruction of flesh and giving physicality to spiritual transformation. He continues to explore themes of change and transformation as they relate to the human condition and desire for transcendence, themes that we are innately drawn to and desire to be explored.
http://gregorioescalante.com
Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present “Superfecta,” a solo exhibition by NYC and LA based artist Sadie Barnette. She comes to Los Angeles fresh out of her artist-in-residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, exhibiting a range of new drawing and painting works that explore the intersection of rules, codes, and specific vernacular with fantasy, escapism, and chance. By drawing on her childhood memories of Hollywood Park, Barnette’s life acts as a subtext to the works, ultimately using the meticulous renderings of the racetrack as a place to break apart the intersection of fantasy and real life.
http://cjamesgallery.com
Art Moura’s solo exhibition has been extended at Good Luck Gallery through February? Moura’s immersive hybrid assemblage pieces are made up of tangled, fetish-like figures, toeing the line between nightmarish and whimsical, possessing a beautiful brutality that can not be found anywhere else. Separation of art and life is not an option for Moura - art in its many different forms permeates the corners of his life, and the events in his life influence his work, helping to plumb the depths and pull from it these unique pieces.
http://thegoodluckgallery.com
Coagula Curatorial is partnering with Tulsa Kinney, editor in chief of Artillery Magazine and kicks off the new year by introducing Los Angeles to the top ten artists to watch. Artists include Jill Emery, Annette Hassell, Reagan Lake, Jennifer Lugris, Vanessa Madrid, Kate Oltmann, Jeremy Riggleman, Sam Source Photography, Michele Vavonese, and Daggi Wallace and have all been hand selected by Kinney.
http://coagulacuratorial.com
Chung King Studios is excited to host a new exhibition featuring paintings by Scott Trimble and photography by Osceola Refetoff. Curated by Shana Nys Dambrot and Refetoff, these works bring out the stylistic unlikeliness of their pairing while simultaneously highlighting the territories their work does share - haunting and richly textured, landscapes; striking palettes and graphic lines; and a feel for the awkward contours of the relationship between humanity and nature. The juxtaposition constructs an intuitive and eccentric visual diary of these artists’ casually profound, and very much ongoing, inter-studio conversation.
http://chungkingstudio.com