https://artandcakela.com/2018/10/20/andre-yi-at-open-mind-art-space/

Andre Yi “Obliterate”
Open Mind Art Space
Through October 26, 2018

by Jody Zellen

Before turning to sculpture, Andre Yi created delicate paintings and drawings. His early works were detailed renderings of natural and architectural elements centered in large expanses of soft color, often juxtaposed with swirling ribbon shaped white lines that suggested flowing rivers. In later paintings such as Untitled (Ginko Tree), 2008 the green tree leaves are depicted as hard edged rectangles. Imagining a progression, it is possible to see the trajectory from Yi’s paintings which were becoming more abstracted while remaining two-dimensional, to his current constructions. It is as if the trees and the background disappeared leaving just the geometric shapes.

In The Drawing Show, the drawings by these local artists remind us that this medium can be equally valued as painting as a primary mode of expression. Drawings by Nancy Baker Cahill, Jodi Bonassi, Abel Alejandre, Nancy Baker Cahill, Susan Feldman, Joanne Julian, Echiko Ohira, Milo Reice, Kent Twitchell, J. Michael Walker, and Andre Yi cover the walls and stairwells of the unique exhibition space. Amazing portraiture by local muralist Kent Twitchell capture one’s careful attention. Andre Yi enhances his drawings of dead birds with pencil shavings, poured paint, and collage components. In a separate small gallery space are drawings by Joanne Julian. Julian’s work is derived from Asian traditions with her nature-based images and Zen Circles.. One’s eyes never tire with these exhibitions that offer such a variety of unique approaches to their respective mediums. I plan to revisit both of these exhibitions when I can enjoy them in solitude and recommend you do the same, as both of these are well worth a careful viewing experience.

We Bay Area chauvinists occasionally feel the need to compare the Best Place on Earth to NYC or LA, nice places to visit, certainly, but somehow (sniff) unsuitable. There's finicky regional essentialism in our art world, too, painting LA as the Other: our shallow, giddy dark side, the antipodean land of the 101 and the 5. In reality, however, regional style in this digital age global art market is pretty much extinct; the art map for better or worse has no center(s). In The Nature of LA, Angelenos Samantha Fields, Portia Hein, Stas Orlovski, and Andre Yi examine our human condition, within and apart from nature, in universal, metaphorical terms, from their diffuse, suburban, austral megalopolis.

...Yi draws the abandoned mining infrastructure of the American West — mines, sheds, etc. — in a style combining detailed Western realism with Eastern orthogonal perspective, infinite space (though here painted in muted neutrals), and swirling scroll-like forms suggestive of water, wind, dragons, and time's vicissitudes; eternity pervades temporality.

Given its fabulous and multifarious terrains and climates, California has inspired more than its share of landscape-oriented art. Back a century, British-born William Lees Judson cranked out a virtual pictorial record of our meadows, mountains and deserts in a sensitive, agreeable quasi-impressionist manner. Not especially flashy or virtuosic, Judson, founder of USC’s School of Fine Arts, had a knack for letting space and nature speak for themselves through his brush. His landscapes, on view at the Torrance Art Museum, are not simply seen, but sensed...

André Yi – Zwei Wochen malt AndréYi an kleineren Bildern, bis zueinem Monat an größeren. Entsprechendakkurat wirken die Gemälde,bis ins winzigste Detail.Meditative Ansichten, die Ruheausstrahlen und die Gedanken desBetrachters nicht zuschütten mitFarbe, Form und Inhalt, erwartenden Besucher.

Down the block at the new Carl Berg Gallery (6018 Wilshire Blvd.), Berg is showing work from Los Angeles artist Andre Yi, an MFA graduate from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. The exhibition, entitled "Floating City," features eight works, all acrylic, ink and colored pencil on paper, depicting the sort of lower middle-class homes and food stands found in the diverse melting pot neighborhoods located between Beverly Hills and Downtown L.A.