ART CITIES:Los Angeles -Alex Israel & Bret Easton Ellis

The exhibition is a collaboration between the artist Alex Israel and the writer Bret Easton Ellis. For them the city of Los Angeles is both background and subject in their respective oeuvres. The incisive sense of desire and recognition that they share make them among today’s sharpest observers of the culture of pleasure, their art inseparable from the world in which it finds expression.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive

For Alex Israel, the American dream, as embodied by the Los Angeles mythos, remains affecting and potent. Channeling celebrity culture as well as the slick appearance and aspirations of the entertainment capital, Israel approaches his hometown with an uncanny coupling of local familiarity and anthropological curiosity. His work alludes to both California cool and calculated brand creation, embracing cliches and styles that exude the hygienic optimism endemic to the local scene. Bret Easton Ellis, a renowned Generation X author, became famous while still a college student for his first novel Less Than Zero, a portrait of amoral, decadent L.A. in the ‘80s. Over the next decade, he elaborated his jaundiced vision of a superficial youth society with a cast of toxic recurring characters in “The Rules of Attraction”, “American Psycho” or “Glamorama. Lunar Park”. Instead of choosing Ellis as his partner, Israel could have very well inserted his own quips into the work, just as Ed Ruscha, Barbara Kruger, and John Baldessari did before him, but he insists otherwise. He says. “I could not have written the text myself. I mean I could have written some things, but nothing like that. He’s a master of that.” Ellis wrote short texts. Then, Israel converted the selected texts into various fonts, resourced directly from the local landscape, and combined them with commercial stock images. The hyperfilmic results were adapted to the scale and medium of monumental paintings. This collaboration between Israel and Ellis, both natives of L.A., is no mere serendipity.. The current exhibition shows artist and writer at their most subliminal, comingling art as entertainment and entertainment as art: a bold new step in their ongoing distillations of the city of angels.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, Duration: 25/2-23/4/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com