Louis Stern Fine Arts

Since 1944 my painting has been concerned with the “magical”: the metamorphosis of the unreal into reality and, vice versa, reality into the unreal – and reality beyond itself into extra existences. – Lorser Feitelson, c. 1961 Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present Lorser Feitelson: Magical Forms. This exhibition features works from Lorser Feitelson's series of the same name, which acted as the direct precursors to the artist’s celebrated Magical Space Forms paintings of the 1950s. They represent an important transitional moment in Feitelson’s career, bridging the intellectually and emotionally charged figural content of his earlier paintings and the coolly rational Hard Edge abstract work that he focused on in his later career. In the mid-1940s, Feitelson (1898-1978) began to embark on a remarkable departure from his highly symbolic and carefully composed Post-Surrealist work and from the deeply personal allegorical paintings that immediately followed. In stark contrast to his previous work, which focused on representing familiar objects and the human figure, Feitelson now sought to invent novel abstract forms that contained no direct reference to any known image. While his later Magical Space Forms series removed all allusions to volume and three-dimensional space, Feitelson rendered his Magical Forms as fully defined, non-specific physical entities inhabiting tangible yet unearthly environments. Described within a structurally legible visual framework, the exaggerated strangeness of these uncanny forms provides a conduit for emotional expression of the inexplicable. These disquieting forms, while entirely invented, arouse vague, disjointed flickers of remembered images, contorted to the point of unrecognizability. Sinister shapes resembling knife-sharp jaws, flattened tissue-thin, feel no less hostile as they advance from a shadowy interior space. Stretched pelvic forms appear engaged in clandestine conversation or straddle multiple competing horizon lines, balanced implausibly on spindly appendages terminating in sharp points. The scale and volume of the forms are as ambiguous as their intentions, vacillating between naked malice and self-contained disregard. These paintings uniquely convey the malaise and anxiety of the aftermath of World War II and the dawn of the Atomic Age, which occupied the artist’s mind amidst the works’ creation. This series, in Feitelson’s words, “metaphorically expresses the deep disturbance of our time: ominously magnificent and terrifying events, hurtling menacingly from the unforeseeable.” Works by Lorser Feitelson are included in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among numerous other public and private collections. Louis Stern Fine Arts is the exclusive representative of the Estate of Lorser Feitelson.

Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present a series of rarely seen works by Doug Ohlson (1936-2010), created during 1969 and the first half of the 1970s. The paintings, consisting of brilliant orbs of brushed and aerosol paint that hover on richly colored backgrounds, represent a transitional phase in the artist’s career. Acting as a vehicle for his developing investigations of chromatic relationships, these process-based works facilitated Ohlson’s changing focus to color as his primary subject matter. The works on view grew organically from the concerns of Ohlson’s celebrated late-60s Panel paintings, monumental arrays of thin vertical canvases which examined tension, harmony, and their resolution through perfectly refined placement of colored square forms. As he continued to create studies for the series, the squares gradually morphed into loose circles and their geometric arrangements became less rigidly defined. The complex relationships among the colors captured Ohlson’s attention as he began to experiment with aerosol, which allowed for purer and denser applications of the paint spots and an alchemical interaction between the fuzzy outer halos and their background hues. As the artist continued to experiment with this modality, his forms began to overlap and abut one another, creating overall cohesive color fields with complex internal movement. Over the course of a long career embodying numerous artistic phases, Ohlson maintained a commitment to personal, romantic expression in his work. Critic Lucy Lippard declared Ohlson’s paintings “stubbornly poetic…retaining relational, private values, what Judd calls ‘old’ values.” This series of works may be arguably some of Ohlson’s most intimate. Painted as his marriage to fellow artist Jane Kaufman was coming to a close, they embody a period of great pain, reflection, and personal growth. Mirroring the concepts he was exposed to during his concurrent Jungian psychoanalytic therapy, the paintings are individual, progressive steps in a continuous and lifelong artistic journey of discovery – not ends unto themselves, but isolated moments within a constant process of evolution and reinvention. Works by Doug Ohlson have been exhibited widely throughout the United States and internationally, and are included the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Dallas Museum of Art; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., amongst others. A long-time faculty member at Hunter College, Ohlson was the recipient of numerous awards including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Louis Stern Fine Arts is the exclusive representative of the Estate of Doug Ohlson.

Throughout a career spanning six decades, Los Angeles-based artist Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999) held an enduring fascination with the structures and patterns underpinning the natural world and the universe beyond it. From her early scientific illustrations of flowers, seeds, and human embryos to the highly abstracted mountains, planets, and waterways she painted in her later career, Lundeberg’s work traces a unifying structural organization across terrestrial and cosmic orders of magnitude. Relying as much on calculated formal composition as on the subjective engagement of the viewer, Lundeberg’s work straddles the permeable borders between observation and memory, perception and imagination, and physical and psychological space. Louis Stern Fine Arts is part of PST ART as a Gallery Program Participant. Returning in September 2024 with its latest edition, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, this landmark regional event explores the intersections of art and science, both past and present. PST ART is presented by Getty. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit pst.art.

Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present Chromatic Conversations, a group show featuring 5 prominent color theorists based in New York: Gabriele Evertz, James Little, Doug Ohlson, Robert Swain, and Sanford Wurmfeld. The show opens Saturday July 13th and runs through August 17, 2024. Doug Ohlson (1936-2010) Republic, 1985 acrylic on canvas 60 x 60 inches; 152.4 x 152.4 centimeters LSFA# 12482

Matsumi Kanemitsu: Traction Avenue May 18-June 29, 2024 Opening reception May 18, 5-7pm Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present Matsumi Kanemitsu: Traction Avenue, a selection of late works by influential Japanese American artist and educator Matsumi Kanemitsu (1922-1992). The works on view were created in the last years of the artist’s life, during which he lived and worked in the historic Joannes Brothers Company Building at 800 Traction Avenue, located in what is now known as Los Angeles’s Arts District. Expressing the complex human experience of natural forces in sumi ink, watercolor, and acrylic, these works embody both the splendor and the perils of a sunset in a scorching desert, the churning waves of a Pacific storm, or rivers of rain in a summer deluge. This body of work represents the culmination of the artist’s prolific and diverse career and bears the legacy of his profound impact on cultivating a vibrant and thriving artist community in LA.