Any other business

I made this trip to Los Angeles for the fairs, but the best thing about it was catching the tail end of Tala Madani's big show, Biscuits , at Geffen Contemporary, presented by Tala herself. Both she and her work are fearless and funny, reminding me, incongruously no doubt, of Ivy Compton-Burnett. I mean, she deals with some of the worst, most shocking aspects of human behaviour, taking risks and breaking taboos, but nevertheless does it with humour. She's intelligent, articulate and passionate, about her work and about her country. Discussion of the current situation in Iran and how to help, over a casual lunch of German  wurst hot-dogs with half a dozen Iranian friends before she returned to the Geffen to sign catalogues, was intense. And it was a great show, including a room of magnificent, giant 'sky' paintings made specially for the space, though I didn't do a great job of photographing it... Art in America wrote about the show much better than I can. And ther...

Shortly before I left for Los Angeles, the Richard Heller Gallery there sent me my latest purchase, an extraordinary little oil painting on board, called Have Fun! , by Sean Norvet (pictured above). For my stay in LA, I booked a spartan, overpriced hotel on Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica, to the north of the airport and within walking distance of Frieze. As it happened, my lunch guest on the second day, an LA resident, chose a restaurant (Lunetta) just ten minutes' walk along the boulevard. Over breakfast in the hotel, I opened Google Maps to see if there was anything I could visit locally to while away the time until lunch, and spotted a place called ' Bergamot Station Arts Center '. I looked it up to get details, and it turned out to be a cluster of galleries, including, believe it or not, Richard Heller, just north of the restaurant. So after breakfast, off I went, clutching my camera. The gallery was just setting up two new exhibitions, one in each of its rooms, openin...

This year, as Dastan, Tehran, were showing Mamali Shafahi alongside Iranian duo Peybak, and Mamali was also curating a group show of Iranian artists, I decided to use some of my soon-to-expire airmiles to fly to Los Angeles for the Frieze and Felix art fairs. Housed at Santa Monica airport, in a large 'tent' structure and an old hangar, Frieze turned out to be, to my mind, surprisingly bland and conventional. The few exceptions were mostly galleries I've bought from or have friends at - Dastan, Antenna Space, Gaga, Mendes Wood... which raises the issue of my objectivity: I don't know if I liked them because I know them, or the other way round. One I did like, however, without having any relationship with it, was Jeffrey Deitch, showing a fun exhibition of works by Peter Shire (see above), just next to Dastan. Here, The Art Newspaper includes Mamali Shafahi at Dastan among its photo picks from Frieze LA. And here , artnet.com features Mamali among its artists to watch f...