Arts

Shakira, Shakira: The GRAMMY Museum Experience

• By Nina Sventitsky
• Photo By Rebecca Sapp

You don’t have to groove on Latin music to get the appeal of Shakira, the Colombian sensation. She’s sexy, energetic, and is known globally for hits like Hips Don’t Lie and Waka Waka. She has been a force in music for over three decades and has won three GRAMMY Awards and 12 Latin GRAMMY Awards. If you watched the 2020 Super Bowl, you saw her duke it out with Jennifer Lopez on stage. 

She has been credited with expanding the global acceptance of Latin pop music since the mid-1990s. She began as a pop artist, writing her first song at age four. She has written over 180 songs and is considered the most successful Latin female singer of all time. Part of her heritage is Lebanese descent from on her father’s side. She incorporates Latin and belly dancing moves into her performance repertoire. Shakira is being lauded in an exhibit that opened March 4, in the Latin Music Gallery at the GRAMMY Museum.

While you’re there, enjoy everything the Museum has to offer, including exhibits on Bruce Springsteen and The Rolling Stones, featuring photographer Jim Marshall’s work from when he followed the band around during its tour of Southern California. Peggy Lee’s career as a mid-20th century songstress is also featured. The GRAMMY Museum is open from 11am most days (10am on Saturdays).

For more, click here.

Living Paintings

• By Cynthia Lum
• Photo By Joshua White

Living Paintings, Refik Anadol’s first major solo exhibition in Los Angeles at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, will showcase the complete series of Anadol’s artworks that are based on California-related datasets. The exhibit will explore his fascination with the environments – physical, public, virtual, and multidimensional – that play an instrumental role in shaping his artistic vision. Merging collective memories of urban life and nature with groundbreaking machine learning and visualization technologies, Living Paintings invites a poetic and futuristic contemplation of purposeful human-machine collaborations.

Anadol’s AI Data Paintings and Sculptures extend a uniquely dynamic relationship between art, technology, and architecture into the future, activating multiple senses and evoking simultaneous belongings. The primary thread that runs throughout his groundbreaking visualizations of the unseen world is the utilization of data as pigment to create enriched immersive environments.

For this exhibition, Anadol will harness environmental data such as wind speed, temperature, and air pressure collected from sensors around Los Angeles, images of national parks in California (the largest dataset of this kind ever to be used for an artwork), and publicly available wind forecast data collected from the Pacific Ocean. By training these datasets with machine learning algorithms and visualizing them through his unique approach to fluid dynamics, Anadol presents entirely new data narratives.

The exhibition will also feature Anadol’s iconic Infinity Room. This iteration of Infinity Room pays homage to Los Angeles by translating its data into a mesmerizing immersive installation.

For details, click here.

Bombshell

• By Cynthia Lum
• Photo By Ellen von Unwerth

Bombshell at the Fahey/Klein gallery will present a selection of photographs from the queen of female sensuality, photographer Ellen von Unwerth. In her exhibition, Bombshell, the works on display revel in von Unwerth’s experimentation with archetypes and stereotypes that result in images that are spontaneous, playful, and alive.

Ellen von Unwerth’s 30-year storied career defined the aesthetic of the 90’s and 2000’s and has made her a staple of fashion photography. Von Unwerth’s flashy, kinky, and humorous photographs invite viewers to come along on a boisterous escapade. The story telling aspect of her creative process has allowed her to create images that are never static and beg the question, “what is really going on here?”  The inherent sexuality in her images is never without fun, and the subjects within her works are always powerful – positioned as control of their sex appeal.

In an interview with Playboy, von Unwerth states, “I think throughout history we talk a lot about emancipation, but when you look at many old movies, the woman was always portrayed as the Femme Fatale and was unapologetic. Like Brigitte Bardot: She was super sexy, flirty, but she had things in control. So being a beautiful woman who could, at the same time, have their life in their hands is the way I shoot women and see them. They have control and use their beauty, personality, charm, humor & intelligence to get what they want”.

Ellen von Unwerth’s Bombshell March 23 – April 29, click here.

Bardot

• By Cynthia Lum
• Photo Courtesy of Duncan Miller Gallery

Duncan Miller Gallery will showcase Bardot, a photography exhibit of the famed actress, singer and animal rights activist, until March 25.

Brigitte Bardot, the quintessential French film icon, has long held the fascination of fans around the world. The original sex kitten and superstar of the French New Wave cinema, she gained sudden global notoriety in 1956 for her steamy role in Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman. The film broke box office records and censorship taboos with its provocative eroticism and sexuality. Regardless of mixed critical reviews, the film made her an international star. Whether she was dancing barefoot on tables or singing about pleasure, or simply sitting around in tights and a striped top, the French beauty became synonymous with iconic glamour, hedonism and sexual liberation.

She became the embodiment of liberated feminine sexuality and caught the interest of French intellectuals, becoming the subject of Simone de Beauvoir’s 1959 essay, “Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome,” which described her as a “locomotive of women’s history” and declaring her the first and most liberated woman of post-war France. After divorcing her first love, Roger Vadim, Bardot went on to marry and have relationships with many famous lovers, prompting Andy Warhol to say, “Brigitte Bardot was one of the first women to be really modern and treat men like love objects, buying them and discarding them. I like that.”

Duncan Miller Gallery is located at 10959 Venice Blvd. Click here.