For his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, titled Hood Tulip, Cologne-based artist Severin Spengler presents seven recent typological sculptures and a single-channel video projection. Working primarily in installation, sculpture, and video, Spengler’s works examine a post-industrial landscape. The seven sculptures on view resemble the candy-colored tulips that are emblematic of the “Tulip Mania” of the Dutch Golden Age, an early hallmark of speculative excess. These figurations have been upcycled from discarded automobile hoods and are fixed in bases that are reminiscent of the polystyrene blocks one might use to isolate and arrange flowers for domestic display. Spengler’s enactment is one of expansion and contraction. Drawn into the gallery space, these flowers evoke a new life-cycle of production and decay. In their distilled alloy form they permute the same transformation that happens to flowers when they are arranged and gifted; they come to embody the symbolic value of an aesthetic object. Meanwhile, the video serves as an ambient backdrop for the sculptures to take root. Using footage of empty scenes from a festival in Western Europe and shot by the artist shortly before the pandemic, the video anticipates a psychological panorama of loss just before the world was shaken by the events of the past few years. In this way, the exhibition as a whole suggests that humankind’s imprint on the natural world has itself become a symbiosis, one that has come to imprint on the collective psyche. From the decay of post-industrial waste, flip-flopped to a life-size aesthetic gesture, Spengler activates the gallery space as a container to ponder cycles of human intervention as waves of interaction and growth.