L.A. is a nice place to visit, but it’s even better when L.A. comes to you. Culver City gallery owners Christine Le and Beau Basse packed up the cream of their 2010 crop, along with a few guest artists’ gems, and set up shop on the third floor of New People, a super modern mini mall in Japantown. The mall’s SuperFrog Gallery is the perfect, wide open space to showcase this stunner of a collection.
Paintings by artists reaching star status fill the room, including German duo Herakut in one of their first S.F. appearances. Their raw drawings of wild female figures are framed alongside large paintings, which are filled with enough fire for five people, let alone the two who created them. Strategically placed nearby, a painting by Andrew Hem could be having a lively dialogue with Herakut’s work. Hem is interested in the idea of the butterfly effect and how it is analogous to his life as an L.A. artist, which might’ve been very different had his parents not fled Cambodia when he was young.
Alexandros Vasmoulakis, “Yesterday We Reached Our Apogee”
I was most excited to see Seonna Hong’s work in person for the first time, and her delicately detailed paintings on linen and paint chips depicting tiny girls and houses navigating a flood did not disappoint. It’s easy to see why Hong is a new favorite of mega artist Takashi Murakami. (He bought her entire show at his gallery in Japan!)
