Los Angeles February 2023 - 2: Richard Heller Gallery, and Arches of Agony at Guest House

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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, opening the next day: Jackson Casady's Roadside Picnic, and Mark Zubrovich's Myths of the Dog-Man. I was treated to a visit to the office and store-room, concluding that nearly everything this gallery sells fits into my own 'scheme': colourful, wryly humorous, slightly worrying, pop-influenced... Jackson Casady's work was right up my street, though unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), too big for me to fit into the flat at this stage.








In considerable contrast, the next evening saw the opening of Arches of Agony, a group exhibition curated by Mamali Shafahi at Kour Pour's Guest House project space in Inglewood, a series of understandably dark comments on the situation in Iran and its impact (including actual physical violence) on Iranians at home and abroad. 


The highlight of this show, for me, was a set of twelve small paintings by Abbas Shahsavar and Maryam Ayeen, understated anatomical representations of muscles torn by bullets or other means. I was sorely tempted, but where to put them?







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