George Byrne’s L.A. is Beautifully Eerie

In George Byrne’s forthcoming monograph, Post Truth (Hamilton Press), the Australian artist documents the past five years of his life in L.A. with a series of captivating if not melancholy abstract street scenes depicting the lonely corners of the sprawling metropolis. From a desolate gas station on Route 66 to French artist Vincent Lamouroux’s white spray-painted palm tree in Silver Lake to the mint–hued Grand Motel on La Cienega Blvd, Byrne applies his signature eye to L.A. by finding beauty in the mundane. Writer Ian Volner, a Surface contributor, captures the essence of the retrospective in his opening essay: “What Byrne manages to induce is an eerily familiar mental state, an encounter with the city bound to send a chill down the spine of anyone who has spent a lonely afternoon in Las Palmas, or the eastern reaches of Chinatown, or drifting up North Gower at five o’clock, under the spreading darkness of the hills.”