Favorites at the Palm Springs Art Museum

Last week's free Thursday evenings at the Palm Springs Art Museum, attracted a large group of locals and tourists with two great special exhibits. One featured Southwestern Indian textiles (think wall-size Navajo rugs) and Antibodies: The Works of Fernando & Humberto Campana, 1989-2009, a retrospective devoted to a pair of Brazilian brothers who create whimsical, outrageous furniture (click here) from every imaginable material.

They were also checking out the great permanent collection, including San Francisco Bay Area glass sculptor Oben Albright's Nate from 2009, where a tourist with a hoodie consented to be photographed for their staredown.



Nearby was Cuts, Czech Art Glass from 2006 by Ales Vasicek.



Gunther Gerzso (1915-2000), a Mexico City artist completely new to me, was represented by a couple of striking abstract paintings from 1964, Tres Formas: Ancient Forms above and Rojo y Blanco: White, Red, Green below.



Gerzso was born in Mexico to German immigrants during the Mexican Revolution, was shuttled back and forth between art-loving relatives in Switzerland and his mother and various stepfathers in Mexico City. He became a successful production designer for the theatre and cinema in both the U.S. and Mexico, and started a long painting career in the 1930s, culminating in his abstract period in the 1960s.



Another favorite from the permanent collection hung nearby in the "Western Art" wing, Llyn Foulkes' 1983 The Last Outpost.




Upstairs at the museum is a 2007 funhouse pop sculpture called No title (stacked photos, butter) by Robert Therrien, which performs the uncanny visual hallucination of looking like it is rotating when you walk around it.



In the adjoining room is a favorite 1999 Anselm Kiefer sculpture, Nossis...



...facing Joan Mitchell's beautiful 1990 wall-size painting, Ground.



Rounding out the evening was the great LA-based artist Mark Bradford's 2011 Rat Catcher of Hamelin IV.