The Los Angeles Gallery That Found a Market in Great Experimentalists

It’s not that Young Chung and Kibum Kim dislike traditional paintings, but as the owners of the gallery Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles, they prefer artworks that can spin your head sideways. Their roster of 39 artists are known for eccentric practices that sometimes involve welding spacecrafts, transforming into a human disco ball and studying tree bark.

“I don’t think our clients would even know what to do if we started representing traditional painters,” Kim said, explaining that Commonwealth has supported artists who consider figurative art as a flawed approach to the thorny complexities of identity politics. Instead, the gallery has nurtured a new generation of West Coast conceptualists who apply the philosophical rigor and satirical swagger of the 1960s and ’70s to contemporary issues like marginalization and decolonization.

Read more at the New York Times.