January 2013

Since 1997, photographer Jason Schmidt has been making intimate portraits of artists around the world as part of his ongoing project Artists. Selected from over 500 photographs that currently make up this series, the 23 images on view represent several generations of artists working in an array of disciplines-painting, sculpture, video, performance, and installation-all of whom are based in Los Angeles. Schmidt photographs each artist in a context that is significant to his or her work, whether the studio, the gallery, or the wider world.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, presents The Panza Collection and Selections from Major Gifts of Beatrice and Philip Gersh, Rita and Taft Schreiber, and Marcia Simon Weisman, now on view through January 14, 2013 at MOCA Grand Avenue. The exhibition celebrates the core of the museum's internationally renowned collection, which evolved as a result of the acquisition of The Panza Collection in 1984, considered at the time as one of the world's most important acquisitions of contemporary art and a turning point in the museum's early history. This exhibition also marks the first time since 2000 that almost the entire Panza Collection has been presented at MOCA. Installed by MOCA Senior Curator Alma Ruiz, The Panza Collection and Selections from Major Gifts of Beatrice and Philip Gersh, Rita and Taft Schreiber, and Marcia Simon Weisman features 92 works, comprising paintings, sculptures, and works on paper that serve both as evidence of the intellectual and emotional challenge that is involved in collecting and as a testament to exemplary civic patronage and its enduring legacy in the cultural growth of Los Angeles.

Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949–1962 focuses on one of the most significant consequences of the rise of abstraction in 20th-century painting: artists' literal assault on the picture plane. Responding to the social and political climate of the postwar period—especially the crisis of humanity resulting from the atomic bomb—artists in the United States and abroad ripped, cut, burned, or affixed objects to the traditionally two-dimensional canvas. Painting the Void marks the first time that these strategies have been considered together as a coherent mode of artistic production. The exhibition presents an opportunity to reconsider the profound repercussions of this approach in the realm of painting: from artists’ early experiments with the materiality of gesture, to the expansion of the medium to incorporate performance, time-based, and assemblage strategies. The exhibition focuses in particular on many of the earliest experiments of artists who moved the two-dimensional medium of painting towards the three-dimensionality of sculpture.

Ben Jones: The Video is the West Coast solo museum debut of the artist's work. The exhibition features new videos and paintings that build upon the artist's previous work using the extracted and abstracted forms of technology and pop symbols of our time to create irreverent, surrealistic, and introspective narratives and environments, often defined by their kaleidoscopic arrays of day-glo colors. With a fluid sense of material, Jones has worked with traditional art media like painting, drawing and sculpture, but also animated music videos, produced zines and costumes, furniture and web art, cartoons and music.