Sat, July 19th Art Adventure...

This past Saturday my wife and I decided to go for it, and hit all the major openings - 9 total. We fell one short, but we covered a ton of ground. We usually hit 4-5 shows a weekend on average, but we had our asst. watch the gallery for the day and decided to make a full day of gallery hoping. We started things off at 5PM with the 'Neo-Realism' opening at Culver City spot George Billis Gallery...

They had some beautiful works on display, including the below gem from Jorge Santos... it's like you were there on the boat with 'em - so much intense detail in his work.

After that, even though we had more shows still to see in Culver City, it was too early, so we made the treck over to GR2 in West LA to check out their 'Suggestion Box' group show...
Interesting show for sure, one of the highlights was Robert Bellm (he's a great show up now with Amy Sol and Ryan Jacob Smith - also in this show - up now at Limited Addiction in Denver)...

My wife Shawn checking out some rad lil' pillows from Giant Robot regular Susie Ghahremani (below)...

Then it was back on the road headed north up to New Image Art over in West Hollywood for Marsea's new show with Cody Hudson and Sean Cassidy...
As you can see from the pics, it was more of an installation based show of sorts, with lots of Cody's trademark circular collages/installs to take in...

And Cassidy's delecate assemblages that look as though they could fall apart any minute...

Hudson even got busy in the alleyway behind the gallery putting up some of his trademark circular installs that dot the landscape of the midwest where he's from...

After taking in New Image, it was time to head east to Echo Park to check out the amazing 'Big Kids, Little Kids' group show at Shepard's Subliminal Projects. The show brought together the artists of the collective known as Space 1026 from Philadelphia...
There's also a great book by the same name that the show itself was kind based around and was also curated by the author... special silk screened editions of the book by Andrew Jeffrey Wright, Shepar Fairey and Jim Houser were available opening night...

The wall above features some of the best new works from Jordin Isip that I've seen in sometime, really beautiful works from him, was nice to see...

If you haven't made it out to Shep's new spot yet, it's pretty beautiful and nicely laid out. Highlights of the group show were two gems from the one and only Barry McGee (see below) which were picked up as soon as doors opened... both sold at $5K each and I must admit that's a steal on the bottle. Considering they are already going for close to $10K at auction, and it's so seldom single bottles come up for sale these days, as they often sell as one large assemblage made up of many bottles...

After taking in the east side, we headed back west and down LaBrea to take in the legendary Dave McKean's new solo show at Merry Karnowsky Gallery. The show is not to be missed...

The large scale center piece works, rich with mixed media elements of collage, were just show stoppers. At $19K each, they were an investment, but the ammount of texture, richness of color and depth of narrative to each were just astounding. Easy to see why the man is so highly regarded by so many...

Many of McKean's books were available for sale at the gallery, and within moments of opening, a line quickly formed in front of the artist awaiting for an autograph (see below)...We ran into our good friends and mega-collectors the Spatz' at the McKean show... always good to see them. After that it was time to head on over to Culver City to take in Shawn Barber's new solo at BSFA...

By far the biggest crowd of the night, as this was Barber's 1st big LA solo show, and he's had a pretty amazing year, so there was a great ammount of anticipation for this show...

One of the highlights of the show was a stunning almost live size portrait of the legendary tattoo artist Bob Roberts...

Here's Bob Roberts getting frisky with my wife... dirty old man! In the painting, he's doing the ol' donute with two fingers on one hand and poking the ol' donut with one finger on his other hand (in the above pic, my wife is making the donute hole and... well, you get the picture)...

And the man of the hour himself with the piece of Bob Roberts... as amazing as that piece was it didn't hold a candle to the epic 5'x7' portrait of Kat Von D. (see below) - definitely the show stopper in every way... had a crowd in front of it most of the night taking in all the details throughout... Barber's NYC dealer Joshua Liner made it in for the opening as well, was super cool to catch up with him a bit. Due to catching up with Liner a bit longer than we had planned on, we missed the action over at Corey Helford, so we decided to head on down to catch the much over-hyped 'glow' event on the Santa Monica Pier. It honestly is barely worth mentioning here, and definitely not worth any photos. We were blown away at the utter lack of promised art - it was more a gathering of meat heads out to listen to DJs and drink... felt like a county fair or something like that... the one installation that was somewhat cool (a wall of water of sorts with lights projected upon it), still fell short, as the projections shown upon it, lacked any real substance or thought, more akin to the blobs that used to hold your attention at movie theaters back in the day... so much promise, oh well. It was well past midnight when we entered the fiasco by the name of 'glow', so we were more than happy to head on home after almost 8 non-stop hours of gallery action...
This weekend coming up is the almighty ComiCon down in San Diego. Can't wait for Mark Murphy's 'Superhero' show on Thursday and the release of Soto's new book... and Pushead's special signing... and Craola's new toy... and... and... don't miss ComiCon this year!!!