A NEW TENANT

The sun has set on Nino Mier’s empire in Los Angeles, with solo shows by Kyle Staver and Rachel Goddard closing late last month. The embattled dealer, who got his start in Los Angeles, now has no presence there. (If you have not followed Mier affair, here’s some required reading). The big question since Wet Paint broke the news that he would be shuttering his five L.A. spaces has been: What will happen to them?

Last week delivered a partial answer. Two of those spaces will be taken over by Mier’s former director, Megan Mulrooney, who was hired by Mier in 2018 and left in May, around the time an investigation was published with allegations that he underpaid artists. (Mier has denied any wrongdoing, and Mulrooney has not been named in any allegations.)

Mulrooney took with her a handful of former Mier staffers, and her first shows will be with Marin Majic, an artist on Mier’s roster, and Piper Bangs, who was recently in a group show with Mier. They open this September.

That leaves three empty galleries. Wet Paint now has the surprising scoop on what’s happening to one of them.

Alex Ross, the disgraced former partner in New York’s Downs and Ross, told me that he has taken over the lease at 2700 West Avenue 34 in Glassell Park, which Mier used as a project space. For now, Mier’s name is still on the marquee. Ross will open his first show there on September 14.

“I may be super canceled, but I’m still a good dealer,” Ross told me at a recent opening in Los Angeles.

As some readers may recall, Ross was forced out of his old gallery by his business partner, Tara Downs, in 2022, amid the revelation that he had committed domestic violence against a romantic partner. (The gallery’s initial announcement said he was leaving to deal with his mental health; an email leaked to Wet Paint brought forward the details of violence.) Downs has been operating under her own name since early 2023, and Ross has been out of the art-world picture.

Until, of course, Frieze Los Angeles this year, when a rager thrown by three galleries was brought to a screeching halt when Ross was involved in an altercation, with my colleague Kenny Schachter writing that he allegedly “punched a partygoer before being subdued with mace.”

Ross didn’t share any additional details on his plans, and didn’t says whether any artists formerly associated with Downs and Ross would be working with them. (The duo launched several careers, including those of Jiang Cheng, Ivy Haldeman, and Rute Merk.) He also declined to confirm whether or not the gallery will bear his name.

A NEW CYCLE

Photo by Annie Armstrong.

If you weren’t at Regen Projects’ screening of the legendary third part of Matthew Barney’s “The Cremaster Cycle” (1994–2002) on Tuesday night, then where the hell even were you?

Okay, maybe like so many, you were on a yacht somewhere in Europe. (See below!) If you did not make it out to Santa Monica’s Aero Theatre, let me report on the affair—a rare evening with one of our most elusive and celebrated artists. 

For the uninitiated: Barney released the five “Cremaster” films out of order, and the third one came last.  “Having seen them all in succession, they only get wilder,” as Andy Cameron, who works with Barney at Regen, told me. It clocks in at 3 hours.

A pre-screening event was held at the nearby wine bar Sogno Toscano, where Barney chatted with fellow artists Doug Aitken, Georgia Gardner Gray, Horacio Alcolea Crespo, and Martine Syms, who did a talk with Barney before the film rolled.

I was not around for the Guggenheim‘s 2003 “Cremaster Cycle” show, where the full quintet was shown—a feat not repeated until 2015. Syms’s musical collaborator, Ben Babbit, and I commiserated about seeing some of the films via janky pirated files (and disparate Tumblr gifs): certainly not Barney’s preferred method of distribution. (Interestingly, I did a quick online sweep, and the cycle is no longer on Kenneth Goldsmith’s Ubuweb, once the go-to spot to view it.)

“I feel very indebted to the model that you set up to do this,” Syms told Barney, kicking off the talk. As you may recall, Syms debuted her own (markedly more coherent) feature-length film, The African Desperate, in 2022.

The two had a conspiratorial dynamic as they chatted. “To what extent do you feel like you’re trespassing when you make a feature?” Barney asked Syms.

“Whenever I can do something wrong or fail, I’m interested,” she said. “To most film execs, they don’t care that I’ve shown at MoMA. I can still feel the walls.”

Syms has gotten around those walls, though, and said that her next feature is well underway, following a “more traditional process.”

Barney, for his part, recently finished a five-channel video work titled Secondary, which is part of an ongoing show that is on view across four galleries: Regen, Gladstone Gallery, Sadie Coles HQ in London, and Galerie Max Hetzler in Paris. The film takes Barney back to his roots as a college football player (he famously went to Yale to play), and dramatizes the notorious 1978 Raiders vs. Patriots game, which left wide receiver Darryl Stingley paralyzed after a defensive blow from Jack Tatum.

For Barney, being on a film set recalls the feeling of playing on a football team. “I’d much rather work with a group of people,” he said. “It feels right to me as a form.”

The lights eventually went down, and the film commenced. At the intermission, I locked eyes with painter Lucy Bull, who pointed out the similarities between Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming Liang’s movies and Barney’s. “I was thinking about how [Barney] is one of the few artists making films who actually engages the format while it still feels like the same art,” Bull said, as about a dozen or so viewers exited before the second act. “I feel bad for the people leaving, clearly they don’t understand the format!”

Agreed. Those who left early missed Richard Serra’s fantastic cameo and the final visual collage, which brings the whole piece together via a series of erratic cuts. Here’s hoping we won’t have to wait so long to see it again in theaters. 

WE HEAR 

Courtesy a tipster.

A tipster sent along this leaked photo from the set of White Lotus season three. Looks like it’s going to be a good one! Among those pictured are Larry Gagosian, former MoMA chairman Leon Black, author Emma Cline, and collectors Bill and Maria Bell… Gagosian director Derek Blasberg reemerged into polite society following a pretty, er, crappy news cycle, for a Marc Jacobs fashion show at the New York Public Library (it’ll pass, buddy!)… Dealer Carlye Packer, whose most recent show closed in early May, has her space on Sunset Boulevard up for rent (She’s only moving, as she told me that they let go of the space “as a result of the space being overrun by illegal weed shops and a growing homeless problem in the area”)… and Smart Objects announced that they will be subletting their space down the street for the rest of the year while working on “personal projects”… In other Los Angeles news, a new high-end market, L.A. Grocery and Café, has opened in a former discount grocery store just down the street from upscale coffee shop Cafe Telegrama, meaning that the Melrose Hill gallery neighborhood has truly arrived…  “Subway Takes” personality Kareem gave Jerry Saltz a grilling on Boomer culture—I highly recommend a watch… Rivaled only by his remake of Jordan Wolfson’s Female Figure, I think this might be Jeffrey Dalessandro’s best action figure artwork to date…

 

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