Carmichael Installation I
Carmichael Installation II
Theatrical Painting (Small), 24” x 24”, paint on wood
Baroque and Rococo Spatial Paintings
- 52” x 48” x 24”, paint on wood
- 20” x 16”, paint on wood
Peeping eyes painting, 6’ x 6’, paint on wood
Untitled,Varios dimensions, paint and various materials
Panel Painting (small, Jack Goldstein), 20” x 24”, paint on tryptic panels with hinges
Untitled, Large, 48” x 72”, paint on wood
Tiny paint debris, 6” x 6”, paint on wood
Untitled, Large Installation (Derived from the Anatomy of the Heart) 60” x 60” x 68”, paint on wood, as seen in installation images
https://arrestedmotion.com/2013/06/preview-maya-lujan-carmichael-gallery/
ART, LTD. REVIEW
LOS ANGELES
MAYA LUJAN
SOLO EXHIBITION AT CARMICHAEL GALLERY
Maya Lujan exhibited New and even newer work in a single exhibition with two headings “Spatial Series” and “Theatrical Series” at Carmicheal’s new West Washington Boulevard space. The space was formerly a puppet theatre, that becomes important later.
Lujan, as a painter, creates work that, after a brief flirtation of symbolism, now falls, neatly enough, on the Abstract Expressionism continuum. But as her youth suggests, and a vibrant, often hilarious, eclectic and edgy concurrent curatorial effort at PØST demonstrated- there is more going on with her than that traditional idiom can contain. To begin with, there’s the matter of her technique. Her images are turbulent, gestural, topographical, energetic and loaded down with pigment- paintings in every sense. But despite the presence of impasto and even flat brushwork, her primary mode is to pool wet paint onto plastic sheets (or even the floor), smooth or crumple them, and peel the dried results and either pre-arrange them to her liking or re-introduce them to the panel or substrate they were poured on to begin with. In so doing, she redefines what it means to create space in a picture, by literally building basic relief architectures into her compositions.
The presence of several of these recent works is crucial to the understanding of the new work Lujan made expressly for the show, as a witty response to the history of the room. As mentioned, there was once puppet shows there, an in a nod to the chipper theatricality and sometimes creepy nostalgia of this eccentric art form. Lujan revisits her technique and employs it to render spatially articulated paintings, in which the “sheets” fulfill the role of proscenium drapery. By referencing recognizable structures without rendering them, she creates an intoxicating paradox at the nexus of abstraction and imagery but still working in its absence. The symmetrical dangling of folded red and gold patina in Theatrical Painting (Italian Renaissance), 2013 has both a classical and slightly seedy Burlesque feel. The intimate scale of Untitled, 2013 creates an inviting emptiness behind the sweet brown and gold curtains. In the most effective piece, Transition, 2013, the relatively vast space behind the frozen billows of faded red spills form below a swath of pulsating color against a black, receding platform, bulging far enough to make an arm-sized opening in the scenery. By proposing a scintillating challenge to the definition of what paintings can be, Lujan concocts a thoroughly charming brainteaser.
-SHANA NYS DAMBROT
Preview: Maya Lujan @ Carmichael Gallery