Rid yourself of absolutes. Purity is a tyranny of the abstract. Everything is in flux: in darkness there is always light but equally true is that pleasure is always accompanied by pain. No pure state exists. These are the hard-won lessons on full display in the paintings of Drie Chapek, showing now at Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle.

Making a Better Painting: Thinking Through Practice examines the “absurdity, passion, and even shame” of being a painter today. It is an ambitious survey of contemporary Northwest Painters, and exemplifies the regional shift in artists’ ambition we’ve witnessed over the last decade: each of the 18 artists make a living largely outside of this region.

This, the fifth iteration of the Seattle Art Fair, featured over 100 International galleries showing work organized around the curatorial theme “Here Explodes the Wunderkammer,” a metaphor for 21st century context collapse.

Made in L.A. 2018, the latest iteration of the Hammer Museum's biennial, is a powerful antidote to the fatalistic, apocolyptic imaginaries dominating 2018's media landscape.

André's work pries open a space for us to acknowledge the horror of existing in the face of so much suffering, while also constructing meaning from the fragments we find along the way.