LA Art Scene During the Lockdown

by: Edward Goldman

"This morning, I received delightful news from LA Louver Gallery about its online exhibition, featuring the works of the well-known LA painter, Charles Garabedian (1923-2016). This exhibition, Charles Garabedian: Outside the Gates, is done in collaboration with Betty Cuningham Gallery in New York."

There is a small exhibition in memory of Charles Garabedian (1923 – 2016) currently at Sidecar, the adjoining annex space of Betty Cuningham Gallery on the Lower East Side. Consisting of one painting on each of the room’s three walls (the fourth is a large window facing the street), it’s a quick reminder of the long life and prolific output of a Los Angeles painter whose work was filled to bursting with light, color, and a ribald empathy for his fellow human beings.

In the introduction to an interview for Hyperallergic Weekend published the year before he died, Jennifer Samet captures Garabedian’s personality and influence in a single paragraph:

He stays above the fray throughout our conversation, telling the stories of the myths he loves and travel adventures with friends, rather than explaining the work or aesthetic decisions. “You are a humanist,” his wife Gwen calls out to him, when she hears us discussing his personal relationship to Greek tragedy. Garabedian is humble but ambitious; the figures in his paintings are monumental but gawky – relatable heroes and heroines. It is hard to imagine the work of Dana Schutz, Judith Linhares, and Francesco Clemente without Garabedian’s example, although Garabedian would never claim to lead any school; he is too busy with the challenges and fun of the daily work, even at age 91.

We are sad to convey the news that artist Charles Garabedian died on February 11, 2016, at the age of 92. The cause of death was prostate cancer.

In deceptively cheery colors, 91-year-old artist Charles Garabedianreimagines famous tales of woe from classical mythology, where murder, torture, and madness abound. “Sacrifice for the Fleet,” now at L.A. Louver, hosts a series of new and recent works born from the artist’s fascination with Greek literature, Biblical texts, and Armenian manuscripts (he is the son of Armenian refugees). A proponent of so-called “Bad Painting,” Garabedian’s paintings possess an illustrative quality, with raw figuration and garish hues. 

If you've never seen works by Los Angeles based artist, Charles Garabedian, let me warn you before you step into LA Louver Gallery to see his latest exhibition. Garabedian's paintings and drawings illustrate dramatic and painful moments of Greek mythology and Christianity. And most of his characters are naked, frightened and rather ugly.

LOS ANGELES — “I can barely remember doing all this,” Charles Garabedian says to me as he flips through the pages of his own museum exhibition catalog, which I have brought along. We are talking in his studio: a no-frills, large street-level space on West Washington Boulevard in Mid-City Los Angeles, with paintings on paper in progress, and endless marks and grids on tabletops and walls—remnants of four decades of painting there. “Well, this thing looks terrible,” Garabedian says, amused, looking at one image, “…but this is pretty good. I guess I’ve done a lot.”

Big debuts make headlines, sell art, and often change the culture. Michelangelo sculpted the David before he turned 30, John Keats died at 25, and Mozart was composing by age 5. But creative men and women, from J. M. W. Turner and Paul Cézanne to Philip Roth and George Eliot, often produce their greatest work after middle age. Is experience—in life, in art, in love, and loss—necessary to create works that stand the test of time?