David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present Ash Tree, an exhibition of new paintings by Lucy Bull. The exhibition will be on view in Los Angeles, where it will occupy three of the gallery’s spaces at 5130 W. Edgewood Pl., from May 11 through June 15, 2024. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, May 11 from 6 to 8 PM. Bull will also curate and present a 24-hour marathon film screening in conjunction with the exhibition at Lumiere Cinema, beginning at 11 AM on June 1 and ending at 11 AM on June 2. In recent years, Bull has emerged as an inquisitive, open-eyed, and critically minded voice in contemporary painting. Her dedication to courting the unknown, as well as her ability to cultivate a personal and flexible vocabulary with broad metaphorical resonance, make her a notable representative of artistic legacies in which abstraction and visionary states play foundational roles. Her paintings take shape in a varied field of impressions, material experiments, and color-based meditations, their formalism balanced by the implied presence of phenomena that are difficult to capture using visual means alone. While ephemeral and even invisible phenomena have long been the subjects of abstract art, Bull registers them as avenues of possibility, encouraging immersive acts of looking in which viewers find their way by losing themselves again and again. Ash Tree features some of Bull’s largest canvases to date, including both vertical and horizontal diptychs whose expansive proportions invite comparisons to cinematic narratives or spatial journeys from one landscape into another. The proposition of landscape, which has been one of several through lines for the artist over the last few years, remains an interpretive touchstone for these new paintings. However, Bull has conceptualized the exhibition so that seeming vistas function in new and numerous ways. In one of the galleries, for instance, vertical paintings are installed so that their areas of color and gesture appear to reveal views into a forested world on the other side of the walls. This emphasizes the means by which Bull sees through her work: painting enables a kind of seeing that in turn allows those who participate in it to look through what appears before them into other spaces or states of mind. Painting, in other words, becomes not just the thing seen, but the thing that sees. - David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present L’esprit dans le temple de l’âme, an exhibition of new bust sculptures by Canadian-born, Los Angeles-based artist David Altmejd. The exhibition will be on view in Los Angeles at 5130 W. Edgewood Pl., from May 11 through June 15, 2024. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, May 11 from 6 to 8 PM. Altmejd works in a singular sculptural language, producing largely figurative objects whose scope encompasses everything from the intricate and ephemeral contours of dreams to overarching systems of life that constitute entire worlds. His chosen materials are often as diverse as his subjects, and his formal decisions are, for all the precision of their craftmanship, indicative of improvisation and exploration. A salient feature of Altmejd’s sculptures is their uncanniness: even the most alien, esoterically oriented beings are possessed of a warmth that makes them magnetic, accessible, and open to interpretation from numerous points of view. In this exhibition, Altmejd brings increased focus to this foundational aspect of his project, presenting a group of busts notable on the one hand for their concision and gravitas, and on the other, for materialized flights of imagination that he inscribes and builds in, through, and around the head, neck, and shoulders of each subject. The works can largely be divided into several groups, including those in which human (or humanoid), feline- and rabbit-like features dominate. Others find him pursuing new, intensive varieties of transformation and hybridization, as in works in which human bodies are shown mid-way through processes of fusion with, or separation from, animals like whales or swans. Even as he leans into the stillness of classical sculpture, Altmejd achieves new levels of fluidity in terms of both his subjects and the forms he employs to compose them. In so doing, he evokes the forces of change and evolution that animate living things as they are born, solidify, decompose, and merge once again with the world that gave rise to them.