This month, we recommend shows by several artists who provide singular, visionary, and radical ways of viewing the world — and imagining new ones. Madam X’s enigmatic diagrams on view at the Philosophical Research Society draw on myriad spiritual traditions to wrestle with the weight of existence, while Ramekon O’Arwisters’s tangled and knotted constructions reflect the complexities of his lived experience as a queer Black man in America. Carole Caroompas reworks a beloved 19th-century novel as an exuberantly subversive series of paintings.
A show of seminal work from Robert Irwin captures the moment he turned away from object-making in favor of the perceptual and experiential. Finally, a Robert Colescott show curated by Umar Rashid sets up a dialogue between the two artists who, in their own ways, reconfigure dense webs of historical and cultural sources in service of alternate versions of reality.Madam X: The Spiral UniverseThe Philosophical Research Society, 3910 Los Feliz Boulevard, Los Feliz, Los AngelesThrough April 19Madam X, “Eternal Culture” (c.
1980), acrylic, graphite, and ink on paper (photo by Carlotta Guerra, courtesy Philosophical Research Society)For 50 years, the mysterious artist known as Madam X has been exploring and constructing her own spiritual and philosophical universe, made manifest through enigmatic paintings and sculptures. These often take the form of detailed diagrams or charts that draw on a web of esoteric or spiritual sources, incl.
