There is a well-worn narrative of twentieth century painting that goes like this: From Cezanne to Picasso to Pollock, the illusionistic space of painting flattened more and more until the picture plane and the surface created by the paint itself became the primary subject matter, eliminating images altogether in favor of abstraction. While this teleology has some merit, the purity of the story is incomplete.[.....]

What happens at the moment when energy becomes material, and how can we even dream of documenting it? The question has wide-ranging implications, from the memories stored in everyday objects to the effects of prayer. Ranu Mukherjee’s solo exhibition at Frey Norris Contemporary and Modern, Absorption Into the Nomadic and Luminous, takes up these issues. A former painter who now works mostly with photography and[.....]

Is this a throwdown? It’s tempting to think so, since the title, Greater LA, is obviously a riff on the seminal P.S.1 survey Greater New York, and is installed in the same type of beat-up SoHo loft where major New York art history went down in the 1960s and ‘70s. But don’t get too excited. Any sense of bi-coastal competition erodes  quickly when you realize[.....]

For this edition of Fan Mail, Jason Gringler has been selected from a group of worthy submissions. If you would like to be considered, please submit to info@dailyserving.com a link to your website with ‘Fan Mail’ in the subject line. Two artists are featured each month—the next one could be you! Upon first glance, the large-scale works of Canadian-born, New York-based artist Jason Gringler may[.....]

Stitching together digital, sculptural and natural ephemera, Israeli artist Ilit Azoulay makes photographs that hover between the miniature and the gigantic. She gathers small abstract accretions of wire, plastic, shells or stone that have been cast aside, left in the shadowed hollows of street corners and alleyways. These finds are organized along with old pictures into groupings that follow the loose grids of shelves, boxes[.....]

Rosemarie Trockel: Drawings, Collages and Book Drafts presents almost 200 works at the Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh. Trockel’s explorations of artistic and social relations began in the 1980s, and her practice includes photography, film, sculpture and installation. Since 2004, she has embraced collage, opening the space for a recombination of ideas, motifs and materials. Hals, Nase, Ohr, und Bein (Throat, Nose, Ear, and Leg)[.....]

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley It makes a weird kind of sense that Elizabeth Taylor, who managed to move from sweetheart to sexpot to scandal then back to sweetheart more gracefully than any actress on record, would die the week of Tennessee Williams’ centennial. The playwright, not unlike the actress, had a remarkable knack for being glamorous[.....]