Cherry and Martin

We stopped in last Friday as part of the Culver City Art Walk.

They recently moved to this stretch of La Cienega with more art galleries than you can throw a stone at. If you arrive before 7 p.m., I recommend parking along Washington as there's very limited street parking in the neighborhood.

However, after 7, you can park along La Cienega.

From the doorway, we weren't initially attracted to go in because there seemed to be just paintings of flowers on the lefthand side. But once we stepped in, we saw all these trippy, very textured paintings on the right. They seemed almost space-y. Were these supernovas? Or nebulas? Or just random canvases with paint built up so much that you wanted to run your hands along it (no, we did not do that).

Very cool place.

This is one of my favorite Culver City galleries. I regularly stop in here and Blum & Poe across the street to see what's new. They also select interesting artists to showcase, and I always walk out feeling inspired.

Currently on view at Cherry and Martin is a small selection of works by Alan Shields, who I wrote about previously in the update to my review of Paula Cooper Gallery, in New York. To recap, he is a painter from the 60s and 70s who experimented with fabrics and techniques from the realms of crafts. I discovered a new side of his work here--some concrete poems, where he took words from ads or a newspaper, repeated them and mixed them up, and typed them out on a typewriter. It was interesting to know he did that but I prefer his paintings. There was one I really enjoyed at this show, a big rough and dirty canvas with a misshapen grid of splotches, concentrated in color in the center and wetly bulging outward, as if he'd laid out a bunch of watercolor ice cubes on the canvas and let them melt as they will. I don't know how he really made it. I should have asked the people who worked there. They were very nice.