Next month, David Kordanksy will inaugurate a new gallery, just south on La Brea, with a solo exhibition of work by Linda Stark. The intimate, sky-lit space will allow the gallery to present three shows at once, and to offer more programming than ever before.
Whitewaller caught up with Kordansky to hear about what he’ll present at Frieze Los Angeles, and learned why he’ll be in New York this month, too.
Portrait by Fredrik Nilsen Studio.
WHITEWALLER: In March, you’ll open a new expanded gallery. Can you tell us about the expansion and new space?
DAVID KORDANSKY: We’re growing the gallery, and all of its operations, by expanding down the block. We’re transforming the properties directly south of our building on La Brea Avenue into a third exhibition space and a courtyard for outdoor sculpture, programs, and events, plus a photography studio and storage. The new gallery is more intimate and focused than our current spaces. It’s a sky-lit jewel box; the volume is chapel-like. The design throughout, from the existing building to the new gallery, encourages a seamless, sensitive, and open relationship between indoors and outside.
Installation view of Calvin Marcus’s “GO HANG A SALAMI IM A LASAGNA HOG,” (November 1, 2019—January 11, 2020) at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, photo by Jeff McLane.
WW: What will inaugurate the opening?
DK: We’re opening the new gallery with our first exhibition of work by Linda Stark, a painter very close to my heart and my vision for the gallery. Now in her sixties, Stark is one of California’s great underknown treasures, an artist’s artist, a virtuoso of materials and ideas. She produces exactingly intimate pictures—sculptures, really, out of paint. They’re gems as well as talismans, enchanting in their material effects and evocations of the body and spirit, feminism and mysticism, the natural and unnatural worlds.
Installation view of Calvin Marcus’s “GO HANG A SALAMI IM A LASAGNA HOG,” (November 1, 2019—January 11, 2020) at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, photo by Jeff McLane.
WW: How will the expansion impact future plans for programming?
DK: The new gallery gives us flexibility, to feature three solo exhibitions at once, or new collaborations, or elements—drawings, prints, et cetera—outside an artist’s best-known works. It also provides space to host outside curatorial voices and visions, as well as the opportunity to offer one artist three galleries to run with. The courtyard opens this up further, with the potential for screenings, performances, readings, dinners, and many other possibilities.
WW: What will you present at Frieze Los Angeles this year?
DK: A group presentation of our artists from Los Angeles and beyond: Aaron Curry, Fred Eversley, Evan Holloway, Rashid Johnson, Tala Madani, Ivan Morley, Ruby Neri, Torbjørn Rødland, Mary Weatherford, and Jonas Wood, plus new friends. Will Boone is creating phenomenal painted bronze sculptures for Frieze Projects, including replicas of a coven of witches and P-22, Hollywood’s favorite mountain lion. At the gallery, we’ll have major exhibitions by Huma Bhabha and Lauren Halsey on view.
WW: Outside of the new gallery expansion and the fair, what are you looking forward to seeing and doing in Los Angeles this February?
DK: I’m actually in New York more than L.A. in February, for Mary Weatherford’s retrospective opening at the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs and Shahryar Nashat’s solo exhibition at MoMA, which is one of the inaugural commissions for the museum’s new live events studio. And then again for solo presentations at ADAA’s The Art Show, with Sam Gilliam, and Independent, with Nashat. In between, in L.A., I’m looking forward to spending time with my family—and finding a moment to rest. Having your city play host to a week of art fairs is as exhausting as it is exhilarating.
