Mat Gleason

Sandra Vista Echoes Greatness

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It is a quirk, really, that oil on canvas is the gold standard of where the billionaires park their money to beat inflation. Paintings have a proven track record of lasting centuries when they are just left alone on a wall or in an attic. But the elemental truths that great paintings tell are not … Read more

Robert Irwin 1928 – 2023

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The artist Robert Irwin, a colossal figure in reductive Modernism, died today at the age of 95.  His list of accomplishments is almost as long as the demonstrable influence he had on how art itself is fabricated, displayed and revered. Here is one second-hand story of the man and a first-hand anecdote of my own. … Read more

RIP Downtown Brady Westwater 1948-2023

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One of the more frustrating fabulists to ever cross my path, Brady Westwater (born Ross Shockley) has died, reportedly after a lingering illness. He helped me out a few times in the 1990s, bought advertisements for friends in Coagula Art Journal as a way of lending me money and being “the good guy” in his … Read more

The California Locos Book

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  RENOWNED ART COLLECTIVE CALIFORNIA LOCOS RELEASE BOOK RENAISSANCE AND REBELLION BY DRAGO PUBLISHER IN ROME  The CALIFORNIA LOCOS, five Los Angeles artists whose work epitomizes West Coast culture, announce their final art events in L.A. for the foreseeable future ahead of a European tour that will take their exhibition schedule beyond the … Read more

Anselm Keifer at Gagosian Reviewed by A.I.

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There was an Anselm Keifer solo show entitled EXODUS at Gagosian Gallery on Wilshire in Los Angeles. The expansive space was once a private museum owned by two sleezy union-busting pieces of trash but is now this commercial gallery. As overwhelmed by the spectacle of fabrication as one might get, my attempts to write about … Read more

Randi Matushevitz: Tonic of Tension

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We went by Randi’s studio in downtown LA. Right in the heart of it. Seventh and Main, where U2 played on the roof in 1987. She had been working in her garage across town for a few years and the work she made there, painting and drawing, was on small and medium surfaces – but … Read more

Looking at (but not listening to) Sonic Youth

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Perhaps we all come to this… On one side we have a difficult truth: ART’s inadequacy of manifesting what was without stoking the sentimental and nostalgic. On the other is a longing, or perhaps expectation, that ART can unleash a profundity beyond language from its storehouse of images, something so great, so vast and often … Read more

Cal State L.A. Welcomes Weisman Foundation Formalism

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When asked, I tell people, mostly visitors to LA, that the Norton Simon Museum has by far the best collection in Southern California if not the West Coast. But I now must qualify this. If you just want to see twentieth century art, there is nothing that rivals the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation. Located in … Read more