Pictures of Shapes

Lawndale's 2023 Big Show, part 2

As I said in my first post about this year’s Big Show, the exhibit displayed a lot of painted portraits. My gut feeling is that the opposite of a portrait is an abstract painting. This doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny—after all, portraits and abstractions are both types of painting; they’re both two-dimensional artworks meant to be hung on walls. They are only opposite in the sense of abstract painting as seen in historical rebellion against such subjects as portraits. But this fight was fought over a hundred years ago and now is primarily of interest to art historians. It doesn’t feel relevant to artists making work now.

For some reason, the Big Show has a lot of abstractions in various media. One artist who is returning to the Big Show is Gabriel Martinez. His three pieces were among the highlights of last year’s exhibit.

Gabriel Martinez, Untitled, found fabric on stretched canvas, 2022

Martinez collects discarded fabric (mostly clothes) off the street. As a frequent stroller, it is always kind of astonishing how much discarded clothes I may find on the sidewalks of our city. Each discarded pair of slacks or tshirt is a story that we don’t know. That unknown history is intriguing; each swatch has its own story and these stories swirl around each other—at least in my mind, they do

Ammar Alobaidi, Foresight, acrylic on canvas, 2021

Ammar Alobaidi’s gigantic geometric abstraction Foresight belongs in the company of Martinez’s piece. A large, colorful, geometric abstraction, with little Miró-like touches, specifically the two black circles at the end of black lines.