With exhibitions featuring copper-wire sculptures, burned canvases, ghostly nighttime paintings and more, here are the people to put on your radar this season.
Raphaele Cohen-Bacry
When the French artist Raphaele Cohen-Bacry moved to Los Angeles in 2003, “I was overwhelmed by a sense of unlimited space and possibilities,” she says, “especially coming from Paris, which is small, contained and very dense in art and history.” Frequent drives through Southern California’s desert parts proved particularly inspiring, and her upcoming exhibition, “Tribulations,” which opens in November at the Las Vegas-Clark County Library Galleries, opens a new window, gives form to the landscape’s “emptiness and grandiosity.” The exhibition also references Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and other epic tales in which gods, beings and places change form. Cohen-Bacry’s acrylic paintings are based on her collages, which are also on view. Alongside them are mixed-media works on paper slung from metallic bars so that they ripple as visitors move through the gallery.
“I explore how humans reinvent themselves in the face of adversity,” Cohen-Bacry, 57, says, “how they shift shape and mind-set to survive and to repair themselves.” In one swirling mixed-media piece, “Shipwreck” (2024), inspired by Ulysses’s 10-year voyage, fragmented limbs, floating torsos and disembodied, silhouetted heads morph into pooling water, ship parts and what look like crescent-shaped bales of hay. Also on view are about 20 statuettes made of salt dough that resemble disfigured idols. To emanate “an ancient feeling,” Cohen-Bacry experimented with partially burning the sculptures to make them look, she says, “almost like they were found underground after a fire or a volcanic eruption.”
Read more at New York Times.