Michael Kohn Gallery is proud to announce its 40th Anniversary Exhibition, opening February 19 through April 4, 2025. The group exhibition will showcase works across disciplines by prominent artists, including Keith Haring, Chiffon Thomas, Alicia Adamerovich, Matha Alf, and more. In addition, a portion of the gallery will be transformed into a theater to premiere the restoration of Bruce Conner’s THE WHITE ROSE, 1967.
 
In 1985, Michael Kohn Gallery, MKG, opened its doors on Robertson Boulevard in West Hollywood with a show titled “New York’s Finest.” Having recently moved back to his native Los Angeles after nearly five years in New York as an art critic and graduate student at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, Kohn chose a group of artists from New York for the gallery’s inaugural exhibition, including Kenny Scharf and Futura 2000.
 
Over the subsequent years, MKG organized solo and group shows for some of the most important names in modern and contemporary art:  Peter Halley, Christopher Wool, Richard Tuttle, Marsden Hartley, Mark Innerst, Mark Tansey, Joan Nelson, Andy Warhol, Richard Pettibone, "Twombly and Basquiat,” “Morandi and Ryman,” Dennis Hopper, Joe Goode, Bruce Conner, Lita Albuquerque, Wallace Berman, Mark Ryden, Alex Katz, James Rosenquist, Gonzalo Lebrija and many more. Over the last decade, MKG has continued to renew its commitment to emerging and mid-career artists with a global perspective through a dynamic exhibitions program with solo shows by Will Monk, Eddie Martinez, María Berrío, Ilana Savdie, Nir Hod, Li Hei Di, and Shiwen Wang.
 
MKG’s four-decade dedication to artists and art history is evident in its wide-ranging curatorial vision, which features artwork from 16th-century Italian Mannerist paintings and drawings to Cezanne and Picasso works on paper; American Modernists Hartley and Dove; Minimalists Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and John McLaughlin; and contemporary artists who have shaped the Los Angeles art scene over the last 40 years.
 
As the Los Angeles art scene continues to grow immensely, Michael Kohn and the eponymous gallery have remained a leading tastemaker in the city’s evolving cultural scene and the art world at large. Beyond the gallery walls, Kohn has been a dedicated advocate for the arts, contributing to the cultural enrichment of the Los Angeles arts community and the careers of the artists he represents. 
 
The 40th Anniversary Exhibition will be on view from February 19 through April 4, 2025.

Image: Still from Bruce Conner, THE WHITE ROSE, 1967,16mm, black/white, sound, 7min Courtesy of the Conner Family Trust © Conner Family Trust, San Francisco © 2025 The Jay DeFeo Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

40th Anniversary Exhibition

Kohn Gallery

A solo exhibition of rare early paintings by Julian Stanczak dating from 1964 - 1983.  This is Julian Stanczak's fifth solo exhibition with Diane Rosenstein Gallery.  

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This is Terran Last Gun's first exhibition with Diane Rosenstein Gallery.

Julian Stanczak: Early Masterworks | Terran Last Gun

Diane Rosenstein Gallery

For her second solo exhibition at the gallery, Los Angeles-based artist Shana Hoehn presents a new body of wall-based sculpture derived from fallen trees along with figurative oil paintings made of collaged canvas fragments and rubbings of tree bark.

In Sleepless, night opens itself for free fall. Contorted objects render you dizzy, porous, and ready to be absorbed. Holes echo throughout an aching landscape, while vessels or symbols for rest or grieving suggest uncertainty may be safer than the present. Large anamorphic tree hollows act as ominous basins to softly sink into or to be consumed by. Carved wooden braids gently ripple and repeat between tentacular protrusions as curious armor emerges from tree branches. The gleeful, girlish legs of cheerleaders peek out from severed branches. Disembodied wooden legs –menacingly making petrified mid-jump splits– are pressed against the periphery of the room, referent of a gargoyle or religious icon. 

The wood for the rubbings and sculptures in this new body of work was collected from local fallen trees taken during a windstorm in the spring. It’s hard to disconnect Hoehn’s work from its timely psychic pull, or the media-laden timespace studded with reflexive and expansive mythology that is Los Angeles. Los Angeles, a city ready to propagate the myth of perfection around the body, or the way one lives a life, as its psychic drama slings at you from every angle within its prescribed dream state. Hoehn’s work is distilled as quiet wreckage from within it. Wreckage as the accumulation of shards of symbolic and personal history, melded to forge logic between disorientation and the facts of a life. Details and memory are carved and transformed as an offering.    
  
Iterations of seeds, birth, and growth visually document the nonlinear metamorphosis that Hoehn explores. Movement and stillness take turns to connect various truths. A body drapes over a hollowed-out wooden vessel with carved roots, inverted and serene, while the artist’s back emerges from a braid cocoon in another work entitled “I give birth to myself.”

Hoehn grew up in a conservative forested and swampy East Texan city. Her molding of meaning and violent and macabre legacies carefully pull from nature, football culture, local lore of her hometown, literature, psychoanalysis, and lived experience. Using her own experiences to animate her work, her personal biography, and her roots in a state with strict abortion laws, become palpable. Through this lens, birth, as well as transformation, become complicated, terrifying, and joyful. By using her own fears and desires as material, Hoehn’s work gives you an invitation to delve into your own. The growth and permutations of meaning made physical in her work become analogous for the way fear and desire infest and adorn our inner lives. 

Zoe Koke


Shana Hoehn: Sleepless | Camilla Engström: Wondrous Place

Make Room

Gana Art LA is pleased to present Never Ending Naturalism, a solo exhibition by pioneering Korean artist Rim Dongsik (b. 1945). A seminal figure in Korean contemporary art, Rim emerged from the avant-garde movement of the 1970s, co-founding the experimental performance art group Yatoo, which was dedicated to site-specific engagements with nature. His time in Germany—where he intersected with the Fluxus movement and artists such as Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, and John Cage—further expanded his conceptual approach, integrating art and life.

In his latest body of work, Rim renders Korea’s shifting landscapes with poetic subtlety, capturing the ephemerality of the seasons and the quiet pulse of nature. Having transitioned from direct interventions in the environment to contemplative depictions of it, his paintings reflect a lifelong inquiry into the interplay between nature and culture.
Each canvas unfolds as a meditation on time, place, and memory—an eternal cycle of transformation.

Through his work, Rim seeks harmony between the rushing currents of modern life and the quiet pulse of nature. His landscapes, steeped in stillness and reflection, whisper a gentle contrast to the world’s unceasing pace. From delicate gestures to intricate drawings and sweeping paintings, he weaves a story where nature and human experience intertwine. With each piece, he invites the viewer to step closer, to linger, to find themselves within the rhythm of the natural world.

Rim Dongsik’s Never Ending Naturalism is a testament to his enduring vision—where art and nature converge in an infinite dialogue, weaving warm narratives of memory and place. Through his touching poetry of brushstrokes, he invites us to pause, reflect, and rediscover our place within the ever-changing landscape.

Rim Dongsik: Never Ending Naturalism

Gana Art Los Angeles

Raos invites the world into the space of painting, using his unparalleled eye for the aesthetic possibilities of the city’s neglected corners and discarded debris to elevate the quotidian to a higher realm. His crisp lines, sharp colors, and chic abstractions only seem detached; their cool exterior hides a deeply personal body of work whose razor-sharp humor playfully comments on class, struggle, and the hustle necessary to make it in a world that often feels made to keep you down.

Kristopher Raos: Can I Live

Charlie James Gallery (2nd location)

Bryan Ali Sanchez was born in San Diego, California and earned an AA from San Diego City College, a BFA from California State University of Long Beach (2019). His paintings address the effects and hardships of belonging to a working class community. He explores moments between stillness and tension. He achieves a blurred, ephemeral quality in his paintings through a range of paint application, and color combinations which emit a sensorial quality. His practice engages in a dialogue between past and present which reveal a fragmented understanding of two halves reflecting each other based on family history and childhood along the U.S-Mexico border.

Bryan Ali Sanchez

Baert Gallery

For our inaugural show in our new Melrose Hill location, we are pleased to present The Messengers, an exhibitionof new paintings by Los Angeles-based artists Francesca Gabbiani and Eddie Ruscha.

Through their collaborative exchange, Gabbiani and Ruscha channel shared visions of ecological hope and healing to reflect upon the restorative cycles of the natural world. The vibrant series of works on paper combine painting and collage with soft, fluid forms and hard edges to embrace interconnection as a transcendent mode of survival. While Ruscha’s airbrush techniques produce smooth, ethereal forms, Gabbiani’s hand-painted paper collages add depth and texture, pulling the viewer into a pulsing landscape of fusion and duality.

Across the exhibition, Gabbiani’s collages of various cacti and their blossoms vibrate within Ruscha’s vivid psychedelic abstractions. The material use of paper echoes the delicate nature of each subject, while vibrant waves of radiating color allude to the unspoken presence of a deep spiritual power. Within Swelter, the jagged stalk of a flower rises through swirling hues of red and orange. The saturation gradually fades into an ethereal mist, framing two blossoms in a halo of light. The encircling beams of energy seem to emanate from the plant itself, as though it has been caught within the process of transformation. Whether withering or blossoming, the aura of each piece alludes to the sacred role of life cycles, reflecting upon the reciprocal forces of birth and death.

By inviting the viewer into a space of intuitive knowledge and spiritual resonance, The Messengers explores the resilient adaptability of plants and the ways in which they can reinform notions of transcendence and survival. The largest piece in the show, Psyacti 6, centers a blooming agave plant. As an allegory of endurance in the face of adversity, the agave blooms just before it dies -- a final act which simultaneously imparts the symbolic beauty of life’s impermanence, while functioning as an evolutionary means of seed dispersal, bringing new life through death.

Amidst the upheaval of shifting landscapes and climate disaster, the regenerative nature of life on Earth continues, reminding us that visions of destruction bring with them an organic sequence of rebirth. Within The Messengers, Francesca Gabbiani and Eddie Ruscha impart their mutual reverence for the mystical teachings embedded within the Southern California landscape. By honoring those who have grown to adapt under harsh conditions, the exhibition summons the ancient wisdom of natural forces which call to us, offering themselves as sacred beacons of strength, healing, and harmony.


Francesca Gabbiani (b. 1965, Montreal, Canada, raised Geneva, Switzerland) creates depictions of overlooked landscapes, where nature and urbanization collide in their true anarchic state. Combining intricately layered cut paper, mixed media washes, and airbrush, Gabbiani's paper paintings pair literary influences with her own photographic documentation of environments in disastrous, damaged, and regenerative states. Reminiscent of settings in science fiction, her philosophical approach depicts humanity secondary to the omnipresent force of Mother Nature.

Selected exhibitions include Life on Earth: Art and Ecofeminism and Gossip (performance), The Brick, Los Angeles, CA and West Museum Den Haag, The Netherlands (2025); Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); Cedric Bardawil Gallery, London (2023); Mixografia, Los Angeles (2022); Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin, Texas (2021); Monica De Cardenas, Milan, Italy (2021) and Zuoz, Switzerland (2020); GAVLAK, Los Angeles (2018), and film screenings at the Malibu International Film Festival, Los Angeles (2023, awarded Best Experimental Short); Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills at San Vicente Bungalows (2022); and the Getty Center, Los Angeles (2022). Selected group exhibitions include Kunsthaus Centre d'Art Pasquart, Biel/Bienne, Switzerland (2023), the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2022); MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2022); Kunsthaus Zurich (2021); KANAL Centre Pompidou, Brussels (2020); Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (2018); MAMCO Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Geneva (2016), and the Underground Museum (2014). Her work is included in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Collection, Switzerland; and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others. Gabbiani lives and works in Los Angeles.

Eddie Ruscha is a multi-disciplinary artist living in Los Angeles, California. Art and music have always gone hand in hand for Ruscha and in both mediums he attempts to bridge elements of mysticism, beauty and humor of the subconscious. In his visual art, he skirts the usual results of the airbrush medium and attempts to shatter forms and skew perspectives flirting with a style sometimes devoid of the artist's hand, infusing warmth in color and tone.

Ruscha’s visual style is highly informed by unschooled graphic design, animation, psychedelic album, comic and poster art, Italian interiors and fashion, as well as all manner of fine art movements in the hope of blurring the lines between them.

Ruscha has released records with labels such as Beats In Space/RVNG, Good Morning Tapes, Invisible Inc. amongst others, producing different styles of electronic psychedelic music in addition to creating much of the visual art to accompany it. Recent projects include Green Mirror (Secret Circuit) and Who Are You (E Ruscha V), as well as film score compositions and ambient soundscapes for the ongoing series of Slow Show performances choreographed by Dimitri Chamblas, and presented at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Los Angeles, Lafayette Anticipation, Paris and LUMA, Arles. He recently made an album with Peter Zummo, one of Arthur Russell’s most consistent collaborators.

Ruscha has co-composed several film scores with Oscar winning sound designer, Nicolas Becker. Black Flies was presented at the Cannes film festival in 2023 and Planetes will be presented at Cannes in 2025.

Eddie Ruscha graduated from California Institute of Art in 1991. His work has been in numerous exhibitions, notably The London Institute, Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain. Ruscha is represented by Cedric Bardawil Gallery in London.

Francesca Gabbiani and Eddie Rushca: The Messengers

Wilding Cran Gallery

Dream Girl, an exhibition of new paintings and sculpture by Tschabalala Self opens at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles on Saturday, February 15th. The works address the concept of a constructed self and the construction of femininity. The paintings and sculpture will be presented as an immersive environment, conceived as a mind map outlining the artist’s process and conceptualization of the protagonists in her paintings. The installation is anchored by the paintings, each of which function as a vignette into the mind of its subject.

Tschabalala Self is one of the most celebrated figurative artists of her generation. Her distinctive paintings combine fabric collage with exuberant paint handling. They resonate as objects with a sculptural as well as an illusionistic presence. The artist describes the paintings in Dream Girl as “existing within liminal spaces which speak to psychological, emotional and spiritual aspects of personhood.”

Self is inspired by Los Angeles as a site for reinvention. The limitlessness of “the land of Hollywood” represents the city’s expansive sense of freedom, which is both romantic and dystopic. It’s all consuming yet generative. The duality of Los Angeles speaks to the various conceptual concerns within Self’s practice.

Tschabalala Self (b. 1990, Harlem, New York) lives and works in the Hudson Valley, New York. Self is an artist who builds a singular style from the syncretic use of painting, printmaking and sculpture to explore ideas surrounding the black body. She constructs depictions of predominantly women using a combination of sewn, printed and painted materials, traversing different artistic and craft traditions. The formal and conceptual aspects of Self’s work seek to expand her critical inquiry into selfhood and human flourishing.

Self’s work has been exhibited at Art + Practice, Los Angeles (2016) and in a solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum (2019). In Los Angeles, her work is in the collections of the California African American Museum, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Museum of Contemporary Art. In addition, her work has been exhibited widely in international museums and is included in numerous museum collections. Her Lady in Blue (2024) sculpture won the Fourth Plinth Commission for Trafalgar Square London and will be displayed in 2026. Tschabalala Self’s work was featured in Punch LA (2019) and Luncheon on the Grass (2022) at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles. Dream Girl is the artist’s first solo gallery exhibition in Los Angeles.

Image: Tschabalala Self, All Smiles (2024), permanent marker on tracking paper, 11 x 8 inches.

Tschabalala Self: Dream Girl

Jeffrey Deitch | Santa Monica

Jeffrey Deitch is pleased to present Winging It, a captivating exhibition of new work by Nina Chanel Abney that redefines spirituality, resilience, and modern survival. Known for her vibrant use of color and layered narratives, Abney delves into the improvisational ways in which people navigate life’s uncertainties—through religion, astrology, social media affirmations, and even the ubiquitous, yet often dismissed, aesthetic of aspirational decor. Through vibrant, large scale paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and an immersive installation that debuts Abney’s first neon work, Winging It interrogates the blurred boundaries between sacred and secular, critiquing the commodification of belief while celebrating resilience, humor, and adaptability. The exhibition examines how individuals construct meaning in a world where traditional frameworks often falter, reimagining spirituality as something flexible, unstructured, and personal—qualities that resonate with the experience of “winging it” through life, especially when the formal answers and comforts of organized faith feel distant or irrelevant.

The title, Winging It, captures the essence of navigating a chaotic world without a clear guide, nodding to the adaptability and creativity required to piece together spiritual and emotional sustenance from fragmented sources. Abney juxtaposes symbols of traditional religion—angels, halos, and altars— with modern motifs, blending the sacred with the secular. Central to the exhibition is the idea that coping mechanisms, from TikTok mantras to “Live, Love, Laugh” signs, offer both comfort and scrutiny. These mass-produced artifacts, often categorized as “cheugy,” embody the commercialization of hope. Abney transforms them into cultural touchstones that reveal the aspirational, yet deeply human, effort to find solace in a fractured world.

Abney reimagines classical religious painting, investigating the tension between faith, performance, and societal expectation. A striking acrylic on canvas triptych inspired by Tyra Banks’ iconic “we were all rooting for you!” outburst serves as the exhibition’s emotional anchor. This painting explores how systems of validation—be they religious institutions, astrology memes, or motivational culture— oscillate between encouragement and judgment, reflecting the precarious balance between support and condemnation. The exhibition’s reimagined religious icons reinvent familiar symbols to reflect a more inclusive and accessible spirituality. This vision doesn’t promise all the answers or a straightforward path; instead, it suggests that spirituality can be a fluid, evolving practice, just as life itself is.

Abney further reinterprets traditional religious scenes with a modern, secular spin in her vibrant, multi-panel works on paper. In Breaking Bread, a reimagining of The Last Supper, a classic scene becomes a lively Black family reunion. Loads of Grace depicts figures with bright yellow halos, akin to the Virgin Mary, participating in the mundane act of washing clothes in a laundromat. By grounding religious imagery in the every day, Abney celebrates the sacredness of community and shared resilience, especially for those who might not feel welcomed by traditional spaces of worship. In The Pursuit of Happiness, a large sculptural piece, a figure surrounded by candles holds an American flag in a scene reminiscent of a vigil. Each candle, however, represents an aspect of the American Dream—wealth, freedom, equality, safety—that people might still be praying for. It’s a somber reminder that for many, these “dreams” remain aspirational. With pieces like this, the exhibition asks viewers to consider where and how they find meaning, connection, and hope when traditional structures have proven exclusionary.

At the heart of Winging It is a monumental reredos-inspired installation (traditionally a decorative screen or backdrop behind an altar), anchored by a vinyl mural and an animated neon sign depicting Jesus creating a rainbow—a playful symbol of inclusivity, reclaiming spiritual imagery for all. The installation is accompanied by a series of letter board signs, a nod to the church signs commonly seen in neighborhoods across America. Unlike the hateful or exclusionary messages that some signs display, often condemning homosexuality or those who don’t conform, Abney’s letter boards offer modern, snappy mantras from pop culture and Black vernacular wisdom. These phrases appear across the boards, transforming everyday sayings into spiritual affirmations. In Abney’s hands, these boards become icons of a more modern spirituality—one that’s open, affirming, and full of wit.

Through her dynamic works, Abney invites viewers to embrace imperfection and reimagine spirituality as an adaptive, deeply personal act. Whether through religious iconography or the playful exploration of mass-market culture, Winging It celebrates the messy, improvisational process of finding meaning and strength in an unpredictable world. “Winging It” is transformed from a casual phrase into a philosophy about finding the sacred in uncertainty, and the comfort of community in the absence of clear answers. By embracing “winging it,” Abney encourages viewers to let go of the need for control, to make peace with life’s unpredictability, and to create personal meaning through resilience, connection, and joy. This exhibition invites viewers to reflect on where they find solace and hope, especially in a world where institutions that once provided refuge now feel out of touch. By recasting ordinary moments as acts of faith, Abney transforms spirituality into something wholly human and deeply personal—a universal invitation to connect, reflect, and find one’s own way of coping with life’s challenges, like a secular sermon with a wink.

Nina Chanel Abney (b. 1982, Harvey, IL) has been honored with solo exhibitions at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia (2023); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2023); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2022); the Gordon Parks Foundation, Pleasantville, New York (2022; traveled to Henry Art Gallery, Seattle); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2019–21); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); and the Contemporary Dayton, Ohio (2021). Additionally, her solo exhibition at the Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (2017), toured to the Chicago Cultural Center; Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the California African American Museum, Los Angeles; and the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York. Abney was recently commissioned to transform Lincoln Center’s new David Geffen Hall façade in New York, drawing from the cultural heritage of the neighborhood previously known as San Juan hill that comprised African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Puerto Rican families. Abney’s recent public mural at the Miami World Center was similarly inspired by Overtown, a historic Black neighborhood in Miami. Abney’s work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Bronx Museum, New York; the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; the Rubell Family Collection, Florida; the Nasher Museum of Art, North Carolina; the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; amongst others.

Nina Chanel Abney: Winging It

Jeffrey Deitch | Orange

“Replace Cartridge Soon” is an exhibition of experimental works on paper by David John Attyah. Outfitted with an old-school Xerox copier, a roll of black masking tape, and a glue stick, Attyah integrates hand-drawn elements into snippets of found, cut, and re-xeroxed photos.  The exhibition is fueled by Attyah’s longing for a former time - a period that mashed up sexual awakening and political turmoil, located somewhere in the 1990s.   

The artworks are made of scratchy drawn elements, emo-lite motifs, taped zine styling, and cut up photos.  There are appearances of disco balls, tarot cards, beating hearts, and faded TV stars - symbols which Attyah can’t logically explain.  

David John Attyah is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles.  He spends his free time and most of his money in a sparse, frigid studio thinking about drawing, queer politics, embodiment, handmade things, and his unconscious self.  After many years as a professional and conscientious artist and art educator, he is currently working on being utterly unremarkable, pursing his life dream of fading off into brutal obscurity.  

David John Attyah: Replace Cartridge Soon

Keystone Gallery

Please join us for the festive opening of El trineo, a sculpture by Enrique Martínez Celaya, in the Wende’s garden, with light refreshments and a speech by the artist.

About the artwork:

“On Christmas of 1967, my parents bought me a toy sleigh. In the Cuba of my childhood, where snow was as imaginary and foreign as Santa Claus, the sleigh represented the Land of Otherness. This land of Otherness was a place where people would go to and never come back, and where we would someday go as well. As such, the sleigh was a symbol of both our hope for a brighter future and a rejection of who we were. This duality between feeling-not-enough and hoping to be that other is a pervasive Caribbean ailment. Using my memories and biography as a point of departure, El trineo wavers between being a primary experience and being an allegory for the evolution of hopes and illusions that suggest connections between the personal, the familial, the political, and the physical.”

—Enrique Martínez Celaya

About the artist:

Enrique Martínez Celaya is an artist, author, and former physicist whose work has been exhibited and collected by major institutions worldwide. His notable projects and exhibitions include those at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia; The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.; the Museo Marino Marini in Florence, Italy; the Berliner Philharmonie in Berlin, Germany; the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, Cuba; and the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig in Germany. His work is held in over sixty public collections internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Martínez Celaya is the first Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts in the history of the University of Southern California and a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, where he was also a Roth Family Distinguished Visiting Scholar. He is the author of nine books on art, art practice, philosophy, and poetry.

From April 26–October 19, 2025, the Wende Museum will present the exhibition Enrique Martínez Celaya: The Sextant.

Enrique Martínez Celaya: El Trineo

The Wende Museum

Complaining over the phone about my general uneasiness, Christine pointed out how important it is to just be bored in one's own home. It was one of those offhand comments that shocks with its simultaneous simplicity and gravity, a sentiment that’s equally calming and exciting.

A hallmark of Christine’s work, and way of being, is a particular attention to attention. Her sensibility is purposefully sluggish yet razor sharp, with the goal of confounded and ultimately blissful ends. I’ve said before that Christine taught me how to slow down and absorb the world, and that we have the ability to perceive our own vision and that such attention is an expression of agency. We can choose how to see, and it’s okay to enjoy a certain aimlessness or slowness. Sit in a room and let the light change around us while a record spins backwards. Let our thoughts flit back and forth before we inevitably move forward into a brief moment of clarity. Through our plodding a goal may appear, and our subjectivity can become even more fully realized.

In her second solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Christine continues this exploration to more monumental and aggressive ends. Having established her process over the last decade, this shift has enabled a more absorbing and totalizing expansion of her antagonistic grappling between the conscious and the unconscious. Physicality and sight are implied in big gestures, canvases with eyes, architectural and bodily forms, distant landscapes, and with more ground to cover her constant play between shadow and light, cool and warm, foreground and background, thick and thin applications, gentleness and aggression are able to more fully overwhelm. Binaries and rationality are pummelled from all angles into an ever expanding mass. Tempered with an impoverished good humor—a stamp made from her childhood drawings, a plastic grocery bag dipped in black paint dragged across a surface, discarded string and hot dog buns used as brushes—Christine’s dialectical confidence and desperation can be fully felt.

Christine chose a relatively peaceful life in Duluth, Minnesota and works part time at a local grocery store. Her apartment on a hill overlooks the bay of Lake Superior, and she walks to and from work through a densely wooded trail. A river runs through the trail and circles around it, flattening and pooling here and there enough for bathers. There are boulders large enough to lounge on in the summer. Christine observes the seasons shift throughout the year, noting the slowly freezing water, and the dramatic change in colors as winter undresses the trees before covering it all white. We’ve spoken about how important this connection to nature has become to her again—something she didn’t realize she was missing since spending most of her adult life in cities. Christine has found her home. The act of painting forces one to confront the physicality of existence, bestowing an awareness that Christine embraces fully. This exhibition is a testament to her relentless Humanistic pursuit, as well as a reminder of our own personal relationships to the forces pushing and pulling us throughout our lives. Every decisive act arises from a thousand shaken doubts.

-Ramsey Alderson

Image: Christine Burgon, What? Who? Me?, 2024-25, Acrylic on linen, 52” H x 50” W

Christine Burgon: Spandau Césarienne

Sebastian Gladstone

Hope. Beauty. Denial. Action. Home. 

We usually think about these various things at different times, different ways—they belong to different spheres, different discussions. What if we thought of them as just different words for the same thing? 

The older and more accomplished that the Swiss-born, New-York-based artist Yves Scherer gets, the more he has been embracing, a fact beautifully borne out by his latest show of sculptures and paintings at The Journal Gallery. 

Of course, at first glance the show itself might appear to be going in two different directions. In the front room is a quiet and reflective statuary court, a gathering of serene, Giacometti-slender sculptures of meditative figures in dusty pale pink and white onyx (accented by a flower-nibbling bronze goat and a couple endearing poppets). Meanwhile, in the back room, a color riot is underway—an overgrowth of small, rough, vibrant paintings hung salon-style, a post-impressionist garden of green-earth grounds, blurry pastel washes and yellow-red poppies of color, all going pell-mell to seed.

But if one room seems pensive and the other expressive, they’re both part of Scherer’s belief in what, in today’s art world, is often seen as a dangerously radical idea: optimism.

“I wanted this show to have a joyous feeling,” says Scherer, who chose the title “Another Day in Paradise” for his new Los Angeles show not to sound cynical but to reflect a steady, daily sense of positivity. “I’m in a happy place in my life right now and I like to make people feel the same.” 

It might sound odd to hear optimism described as radical in a world where radical usually signifies critique and deconstruction, if not outright demolition. But strictly speaking, a shift that’s radical—from the Latin radix, for root—is a change that happens at the root. 

Over the years, Scherer’s approach to making art has changed quietly but at the root. “I used to be a more unhappy person, used to think about things a lot more,” he says. “I had this Italian boss once who was very into the Chinese philosophy of Daoism of not thinking much, just moving always trying to forward. The world moves by positive action rather than talking about negative things, I think.”

Both the beautiful pink onyx and the earthen greens spring from this impulse, which for Scherer has been amplified in recent years with the birth of a son and daughter (whose presence can be glimpsed in the show’s two childlike sculptures) and the desire to create a positive space that keeps their giddy laughter inside and the world’s ugly reality out. 

But the clearest expression of Scherer’s spirit can be seen in the show’s most monumental work: a ten-foot aluminum work that displays a ruined Greek-hero statue, beheaded and disabled by time and vandalism, but held upright and resilient by a massive dandelion propping up his half-calf and weary spine. 

Even maligned as a weed, the dandelion makes a wonderful metaphor for the power that nature has to bring life, change and joy to a ruin, an apt and hopeful image not just for post-inferno Los Angeles but for a world besieged by cynicism and destruction. 

Similarly, as much as optimism is maligned as the uncultivated weed of human thought, it’s hard to dispute that it has its appeal and place. Scherer’s work is a strong argument for both art and optimism having an apotropaic power—a term for rituals and charms (like the evil eye) with the power to ward off evil. It may be naïve to trust in such things to avoid bad luck, but any number of studies suggest that optimists are generally healthier and happier and are both more creative and more successful at problem-solving than those who opt out, so to speak. A different kind of flower power, perhaps, but one with a heady bouquet.

                                                                                                                -David Coleman

Yvers Scherer  Another Day in Paradise 

The Journal Gallery

Simchowitz is pleased to present Entanglement, Holly Lowen’s first solo exhibition at Hill House, Pasadena. Please join us for an open house and reception on Sunday, February 23rd from 11am-3pm.

Holly Lowen shares her latest body of work, an evocative exploration of evolutionary psychology, sport, and domestication through the dynamic interplay of figuration and abstraction.

Raised in Bethesda, Maryland, Lowen holds a BA in Art History from Duke University and a degree in Interior Architecture from The New School. Currently completing her MFA at the New York Academy of Art, Lowen works across pen, charcoal, oil, and pastel, crafting compositions that delve into the complexities of human and animal behavior.

Lowen’s work reflects a continuous evolution, beginning with experi­mentation in abstraction rooted in figuration. Her early pieces play with color, form, and composition, deconstructing the subject to explore emotional resonance beyond literal representation.

A pivotal shift is evident in her “Flamingo Series,” which investigates defense mechanisms in the natural world—spikes, scales, and other protective traits—and their psychological parallels in humans. Flamingos, emblematic of both grace and vulnerability, become metaphors for self-protection, their intertwined forms symbolizing mutual defense and the fragility inherent in connection.

Her exploration deepens with an introspective series examining the psychological landscape of tennis—a sport she views as a fascinating study in controlled aggression and social performance. The sterile uniformity of all-white attire, the isolated confines of the court, and the tension veiled beneath polite decorum evoke themes of repression and release.

Lowen dissects the mental rigor and existential underpinnings of the sport, viewing it as a microcosm of human struggle—where precision, repetition, and control are both liberating and confining—a reference to scholarship on sport and sports psychology, such as David Foster Wallace’s collection of essays written on tennis titled “String Theory”.

Her entangled figures, set within formalized social structures, challenge perceptions of societal norms and boundaries. Inspired by the dynamic battle scenes of Peter Paul Rubens and Old Master studies, Lowen reinterprets these influences through a contemporary lens, crafting a haunting critique of polite society’s suppression of passion and aggression.

Lowen’s paintings interrogate the paradox of human nature: the coexistence of civility and primal instinct. Her work reveals the contained animal within, navigating the thin line between composure and chaos.

Similarly, Albert Camus’ reflections on sports psychology resonate through her work, particularly his view of sports as a metaphor for the absurdity of human existence. Camus explored how athletic endeavors embody the tension between the repetitive pursuit of perfection and the inherent meaninglessness of that pursuit, mirroring the broader existential struggle. For Lowen, this manifests in the portrayal of tennis as both a disciplined ritual and an absurd exercise in controlled aggression, revealing the fragility of societal structures and the human desire to impose order on chaos.

Please RSVP for address and parking information at info@simchowitz.com.

Holly Lowen: Entanglement

Simchowitz Hill House

Capturing people and places commonly overlooked by society, Vivian Maier uncovered a profound beauty below the surface of ideological constructs.

As renowned photographer Joel Meyerowitz put it, Maier was “a quick study of human nature, of the unfolding moment, the flash of a gesture, or the mood of a facial expression – brief events that turned the quotidian life of the street into a revelation for her.”

Despite being virtually unknown to the public during her lifetime, Maier’s allure endures as scholars and admirers continue to research and piece together details of her life despite much of it remaining a mystery.

Celebrated by The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, American Photo, Town and Country, and countless other publications, the life's work of street photographer Vivian Maier has captivated the world and spawned comparisons to photography's masters including Diane Arbus, Helen Levitt, Lisette Model, Walker Evans, and Weegee among others.

“Maier’s photographs, and all that has and may happen to them, remind us of all that can and cannot be anticipated or controlled. They are evidence of countless ways photography gave her - and gives each of us - a sense of self, agency, and a legacy. Vivian Maier’s photographs fascinate not only because we see her world through her eyes, but also because they give us such a vivid sense of what it is that artists, and the rest of us, need, see, and live for.
- Marvin Heiferman from the 285 hard bound monograph “A Photographer Found” by Harper Collins

Vivian Maier: Unscripted

KP Projects

“It is the image in the mind that binds us to our lost treasures, but it is the loss that shapes the image, gathers the flowers, weaves the garland.”
—Colette, My Apprenticeships, 1936
 
Babst Gallery is pleased to announce its exhibition The loss that shapes the image featuring works by Vanessa Conte, Gabriel Slavitt, and Jesse Howard.

On view are selections from Vanessa Conte’s series entitled No Hard Ground (2020-2022) that feature a female protagonist whose endurance and flexibility pushes the limits of her own body, as well as the very cells of the comic book format.  As Alex Jovanovich writes, “these pugilistic women refuse to surrender. They are not, per Conte, dummies of ‘fawning femininity’ sprung from the male imagination, but muscular, hardheaded beings—who know how to give as good as they can take—trapped in a capricious, misogynistic world not too dissimilar from the one we occupy in real life.”

Gabriel Slavitt uses his drawings as a net to trawl the subconscious. In the drawing Calling the Earth To Witness, a hand claws the back of a figure, leaving a mark that is more an ink-black void than a wound. Clusters of repeating imagery—empty pockets, tattered clown shoes, and fly trails—may be pure emotion made visible, but their criss-crossing paths signal the artist’s fervent search for meaning.

Jesse Howard covered his 20-acre property in Fulton, Missouri with hundreds of his hand-lettered signs until the 1970s. Howard reused anything he could find, such as wood and paper, to make his work. WHAT IS A HOME WITH=OUT=LOVE? represents one of Howard’s most minimal signs—the text overwhelming the surfaces on which they were written. Despite constant vandalism and a large fire, Howard continued to make signs until his death in 1983.

Vanessa Conte (b. 1977, Yonkers, NY) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Her work has been exhibited at venues including kunstbunker forum für zeitgenössische Kunst, Nürnberg, (2023); Ginvera Gambino, Cologne (2019); Hester, New York (2016); Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (2016); Gavin Brown’s Enterprise (2013); Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2013); Venus Over Manhattan, New York (2013); Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles (2012); Galerie Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt (2006); Art Center, Pasadena (2004); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2003); and Exit Art (2003), among others. Her most recent comic Thrill To Live was published in 2023 by Random Man Editions.

Gabriel Slavitt  (b. 1988, Park Ridge, IL) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. In 2023, he had a solo exhibition of his paintings and sculptures at Babst Gallery. He has also exhibited at Hisssss; Sade; Suite Gallery, at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia; Vielmetter Los Angeles, Los Angeles; Central Park Gallery, Los Angeles; Elsa Lee Bruno Gallery, Los Angeles; and INGRAMS, Los Angeles, among others. In 2022, he released the comic book Master of Return. He graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 2010.

Jesse Howard (1885–1983, b. Shamrock, Missouri) was first featured in Art in America. His work was included in exhibitions at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota (1974) and at the Philadelphia College of Art (1981). His first comprehensive museum survey Thy Kingdom Come, was exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in 2015. His work is included in the collections of a number of museums, including the American Folk Art Museum, New York; the American Visionary Arts Museum, Baltimore; the Kansas City Art Institute; and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, among others.

The loss that shapes the image 

Babst Gallery 

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by artist Lisa Yuskavage, on view at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. This will be the artist’s ninth solo exhibition with the gallery and her first in Los Angeles in thirty years.

One of the most original and influential artists of the past three decades, Yuskavage creates works that affirm the singularity of the medium of painting while challenging conventional understandings of genres and viewership. Her rich cast of characters and their varied attributes are layered within compositions built of both representational and abstract elements in which color and light are the primary vehicles of meaning.

Lisa Yuskavage

David Zwirner | 612 N Western

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present Proof of Concept, Jon Rafman’s latest exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery, which features a groundbreaking installation that reimagines television for the AI age. Building on the artist’s long-standing exploration of digital culture and virtual worlds, Rafman has created a living, mutable stream of music videos, animations and experimental content – a hypnotic mirror of our digital era. Blending the collective viewing experience of MTV’s golden age with new technologies, Proof of Concept investigates our evolving relationship with artificial intelligence, nostalgia and media consumption.

Jon Rafman: Proof of Concept

Sprüth Magers

Noelia Towers: Account Of Preceding Events | Bruna Massadas: Sun Flower

De Boer Gallery

A Whole Night . Xiao He. March 8 - April 12, 2025. Solo exhibition.

4478 W Adams Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90016.
_ _

We are grateful and honored to share this time with Xiao.

There’s something so rare and so precious about a chance encounter. That’s how I met Xiao: she came into our previous gallery-space located on La Cienega Boulevard (along that strip of galleries there). A conversation was sparked and we connected. But it was an affinity produced through the works, by being in the space—something materially and momentarily shared between us, with nothing staked except for the enjoyment of being somewhere with someone else; looking, longing, and remembering. (I’ve always loved that about being around art—there’s a kind of connection made that seems like it might never happen anywhere else, a conversation that could never happen without the art and without the serendipity of a chance encounter.)

Since meeting Xiao that day we have included her work in past group shows There’s no telling time and Other Days (as well as in a couple of Art Fair presentations in San Francisco and the Hamptons). Her work is always changing .

The name of the exhibition, A Whole Night, is borrowed from one of the film’s that inspired this new body of work: Toute une nuit (1982) by Chantal Akerman. Others—other people, other places, other times—always populate Xiao’s practice. The chance of seeing something, of running-into someone or something—of catching a glimpse like a “slipping glimpser”—seems to be one of the repeating movements of Xiao’s painting practice: looking, recording, running: a nearly endless series of processing and transforming the scenes that populate her world. Catching-hold of an image only to let it go in the same instant. Everything she sees, touches, becomes something else by roiling the seams between herself and someone or somewhere else—between what she sees and how she sees it. 

(I’ve never met someone who works so hard, so lovingly.)

A fearless tenderness, a serene intimacy with all extremes of feeling and experience is seen in each stroke oscillating between a frenetic action or gesture, and a precise vision or precious distance of a gaze. There’s a sense of someone being in the dark but seeking, and often finding, the light. A place where the “night is also a sun,” and where the sun is also a night. All the light of a whole night. The stars that call the night black and blue. This, I think, is the place opened-up of this new body of work: the preciousness of the gaze, and the distant intimacy it unfolds between someone and seeing. Some of the paintings are looking at scenes from films, some are reading books, some are remembering memories (distilled into images). All wound around a longing gaze that can’t be undone. A longing to see; to see home; to see family; to see somewhere else: and to be seen. To see what the light eclipses—A Whole Night, traveling the distance of a gaze.

Her work is changing everything around me, changing how I see.

__________________________________________________ 


Xiao He (b. 1998, Chengdu, China) Xiao He is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in San Francisco. Xiao holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has completed an online drawing development year at the Royal Drawing School London. Her recent exhibitions include 2024 Reisig and Taylor Contemporary in Los Angeles, 2023 4C Gallery in Los Angeles, 2022 Art Capital in Paris, France, Upstream Gallery in New York, USA, Huacui Contemporary Art Center in Shanghai, China, and Zhou B Art Center in Chicago, USA. Her artist interviews have been featured in Al-Tiba9 Art Magazine, ShoutoutLA and VoyageLA, along with residencies awarded at the Cubberley Artist Studio Program in 2024 and the Kala Art Institute in 2023. Her mixed-media artists' book, "A Collection of Random Thoughts," is part of the permanent collection of the Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection in Chicago.

Xiao He. Le Consentement . 2024. Oil on canvas. 18 × 24 inches.

Xiao He: A Whole Night

Reisig and Taylor Contemporary

Alexandra Grant lives and works between Los Angeles and Berlin. Grant examines language and written texts through painting, drawing, sculpture, video, and other media. Her work has been exhibited at the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), the Pasadena Museum of California Art, among others, and in a solo exhibition at the Orange County Museum of Art, Telepathy Is One Step Further Than Empathy, curated by Cassandra Coblentz. Awards include the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Alexandra is the creator of the grantLOVE project, which has raised funds for arts-based non-profits, including Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA); Project Angel Food; Art of Elysium; 18th Street Arts Center, and LAXART. In 2017, Grant cofounded X Artists’ Books, a publishing house for artist-centered books.

Alexandra Grant’s paintings invite us into a ceremonial space where art becomes a vessel for intention, reflection, and transformation. Rooted in the power of language and symbolism, her works act as ritual sites—imbued with energy, meaning, and a call to presence. In this exhibition, ceremony is explored not as a distant or esoteric act, but as an everyday practice, where the canvas serves as sacred ground for contemplation and renewal. Through layered text, vibrant color, and meditative composition, Grant’s work encourages the viewer to engage in a dialogue with the self, using art as a mirror for inner inquiry. By treating the creative process as an offering, her paintings transform into portals for healing—spaces where intention becomes form, and where reflection deepens into practice.

____

When a cavalcade of delight permeates your soul, it can either overwhelm or invigorate—what path will you choose? When shakti and awareness merge, the beauty of abstraction propels our essence into realms of awe and wonder. Embrace curiosity for such gestures and movement of brush and color.  Viewing becomes ritual—a practice that nurtures soul maturation. Are you ready to truly know your inner self? Color and personal inner movement is one of life’s exquisite beauties. Cavalcade is an invitation to move and express: by incorporating performance art, activations and intention, this exhibition will stretch the viewer's experience into that of a ceremony.

Featuring Alexandra Grant, Thomas Downing, Bernard Piffaretti, Jean Nagai, Jeppe Hein, Emma Soucek, Larry Bell, Marc Horowitz, and Iva Gueorguieva, Cavalcade brings together artists who push the boundaries of abstraction, materiality, and movement. Bell’s explorations of light and space, Downing’s rhythmic color fields, and Gueorguieva’s gestural dynamism create a rich interplay of form and energy. Horowitz infuses humor and unpredictability, while Pipheretti, Soucek, and Beeber each contribute distinct perspectives on structure, fluidity, and motion.

More than an exhibition, Cavalcade is a ceremonial experience—activating the senses through immersive art, performance, and interaction. Will you simply observe, or step into the flow?

Image: Antigone 3000 (6), 2018 detail by Alexandra Grant

Alexandra Grant: Ceremony | Group Exhibition: Cavalcade

John Wolf

Open Wed-Sunday 3-8pm thru 4/15/25
& by appointment: 310 213-9551 

Held at Ambience Doré, celebrating 25 years in business, Open Arms is a retrospective show featuring two artists whose symbiotic lives have been dedicated to art and creative exploration.

Foremost, this powerful exhibition showcases the life and fascinating career of Native American Latino SoCal playwright, producer, and artist Josef Rodriguez White Cloud, who goes by “Doc,” and contemporary visual artist Mar Doré, known as M3.

Doc's "When Quasars Suck and Black Holes Blow,” “Songs of the Singing Glyphs” and “Wormholes Rock in Dead Tattoos” depict alternative realities of ethnic life: lucha libre figures, mythic cultural symbols, a mother earth figure, and skulls moving through the multiple wormholes of alternate parallel worlds.

During the show, guests will take a step back in history to see grassroots theater and hear songs with lyrics and scripts still pertinent to today’s time. You’ll find a fascinating story of how Doc emerged from the farming community in Fowler, California. In high school, he won the National Forensics’ Original Oratory Championship in 1962, which led to more opportunities.

Six years later, Doc produced one of the first minority-written plays, “El Manco,” in American Theater at the Los Angeles Inner City Cultural Center in 1968. From there, Doc worked with Luiz Valdez in the early ‘70s in San Juan Bautista with his Native America version of “La Virgen de Tepeyac.” In the San Francisco Bay Area, Doc performed and created theater, including work at the Hatley Martin Gallery.

Doc carried on the tradition of the theater through his 1992 production of “The Get Lost Again Columbus Opera,” premiering for the National Indigenous People’s Days Protest in Berkeley. Written in history as the first Native American Opera, you can discover the full history in person, including his new Sci-Fi Opera script, at the Open Arms Exhibit.

Doc and Mar traveled to Indigenous communities. Doc was instrumental in connecting Engineers Without Borders to the Indigenous community of Nueva Catalina De Ixtahuacan, Guatemala. The community was relocated after mudslides from Hurricane Mitch.

The combined art of the two is charged with an unspoken energy. Doc’s theatrical performances, scripts, drawings, paintings, and photos are juxtaposed with M3’s abstract contemporary sculptural wall art in metal, rock, and mixed media—from large pieces to small handheld wearable art.

M3, an MFA graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, is premiering her original Metal Giest series of 3D paintings and contemporary explorations. This art has been intentionally kept off the internet and out of public exposure. For M3, it represents a lifetime of development and discovery.

Recently, Doc has experienced some medical issues that inspired M3 to celebrate his life through the Open Arms exhibit.

View more here: https://mardoregallery.com/open-arms.html


Open Arms Art Show: Historical/Contemporary

Mar Doré Gallery

Again & Again

Overduin & Co.

Artist’s Talk: March 30, 2025  3-5 p.m.

Windswept, opening March 21st in Los Angeles, is an immersive group exhibition featuring over 15 painted works from throughout international artist Susan Ossman’s career in conjunction with sculptural, photographic, collage, video, and installation works by artists including Dani Dodge, Angelica Sotiriou, Beth Elliott, Linda Sue Price, Snezana Saraswati Petrovic, Diane Cockerill, Bruce Cockerill, Scott Meskill, Eileen Oda, Jason Jenn, Nancy Kay Turner, and Nancy Voegeli-Curan.

The exhibition explores each artist’s own unique vision of wind, from lush oil and acrylic to potent abstract neon art and otherworldly mixed media. While you can’t see the wind, you can envision what it creates: sand and soil, propagated flowers and seeds, the sails of ships, ocean currents, kites soaring aloft, magical balloons, tossing tumbleweeds, birds drifting on warm ocean currents, the ominous wreckage of storms both natural and societal, or the ungovernable spread of fire and ash.

Wind has always played an enormous role in both the world’s ecology and in the lives of humans.

Wind is a mood and a feeling, a part of our culture, our literature, and our desire for change. In the novella Red Wind, noir writer Raymond Chandler describes the wind in Los Angeles as “…one of those hot dry Santa Ana’s that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.”  Kahlil Gibran writes in The Prophet, “The breath of life is in the sunlight and the hand of life is in the wind.” South African philosopher Mokokoma Mokhonoana says, “To most human beings, wind is an irritation. To most trees, wind is a song.” And of course, we all know that when we question our situation in life, as Bob Dylan sings, “The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind.”

 The works in this exhibition are all about the pull of wind, encompassing images that traverse the seasons. Conceived as a group exhibition, while not conventionally collaborative, the artwork swirls together in a wide range of mediums, examining how this natural phenomenon and its symbolism affects all aspects of life on this planet.

 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin says, “Matter is spirit moving slowly.” But in the matter of wind, it is spirit moving rapidly, coursing through the world, the mind, the heart, and art.

 - Genie Davis, curator

Artist Information:

Susan Ossman

Both an artist and anthropologist, Susan Ossman’s images emerge from her ethnographic and artistic research in Southern California, Europe, Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula, where she currently teaches at New York University Abu Dhabi. Ossman’s painted works are vibrant and visionary. She creates often-themed exhibitions and installations that involve movement and light that emerges from her powerful use of lines, and a hypnotically undulating sense of motion rich with color and soft texture.

Dani Dodge

Dodge uses unexpected sculptural materials to alter spaces that change and challenge expectations, her work playing with surrealist ideas using innovative forms. She shapes often-audience-interactive installations and painted work that merge the rational and the dream state.

Scott Meskill

As a sculptor and painter, Meskill explores the concepts of limitations, obstacles, and hope using abstracted figures. Inspired by artists such as Alberto Giacommetti and Francis Bacon, he often focuses on figurative gestures expressing heavy emotional circumstances.

Nancy Kay Turner

Turner’s work ranges from evocative sepia toned collages to mixed media based in memorabilia. With a graceful focus on unusual materials, she often subjects them to outdoor elements and time, shaping unexpected correlations as well as her own artistic innovation.

Jason Jenn

Jenn shapes galvanizing site-specific immersive experiences that entertain, educate, illuminate, and inspire. His work is often designed for exhibition on stage, screen, page, galleries, and special environments, and focuses on reexamining both familiar archetypes and universally appealing topics.

​Beth Elliott

Elliott is a multi-media sculptor, installation and performance artist utilizing experimentation and humor as she employs found, repurposed, and natural materials in a focus on environmental issues. Inspiring viewers to interact with her work and expand creative possibilities is always her goal.

Diane Cockerill

As a photographic artist, Cockerill creates meticulous images of nature and street photography with a compelling eye for composition, color, and finding the magic in any subject. She juxtaposes visuals poetry with thematic elements from gritty cityscapes to sea and desert vistas.

Bruce Cockerill

Photographic artist Bruce Cockerill is drawn to images of nature and light that delight and surprise. His lyric work is subtly subversive and always elegant in approach.

Angelica Sotiriou

Sotiriou shapes a personal journey of uncovering and revealing transcendent pathways and spirit. Her multi-layered contemplative abstract works always find and follow the light. As she says, she witnesses voyeuristic conversations exchanged between her mind, heart, and hand.

Linda Sue Price

Price creates mixed media neon sculpture using abstract shapes bent free form without a pattern, making each shape unique. Her interest is in how people make sense of the world, in which change is the only constant, and how our response to it alters our lives.

Snezana Saraswati Petrovic

Petrovic’s exciting multimedia work features an emphasis on plastic, bioplastic, found objects, 3D printing, video, and augmented reality. The stunning and intimate worlds she creates of radiant flora and fauna all begin with her observations of nature and research of symbolic meanings.

Eileen Oda

Oda’s vibrant work is infused with her lifelong love of nature, shaping art that expresses and shares her passionate and spiritual view of the world. From colored pencil to large-scale oil paintings and 3D-canvas exsculpaintings, she crafts a sweeping yet intimate world both impressionistic and realistic, as an expression of the soul. 

David Isakson

Welds, joins materials, makes humorous deconstructions out of everyday objects, and has created video footage that reveals his inventive, self-taught work.

Nancy Voegli-Curran

Curran creates abstract sculptures, drawings, and paintings derived from chance events and forces found in the natural world. A vortex, a tangle of unruly vines, water carving its own path through rocks - all provide a framework with which to explore process and materiality.

Genie Davis

As exhibition curator, Davis brings an exciting collection of museum-exhibited artists to this exhibition, one that will provide a radiant art experience for both collectors and viewers. She curated last year’s Thresholds at Gallery of Hermosa, 2023’s Leaving Eden at Keystone Art Space, and is also an arts writer and publisher at https://www.diversionsla.com/, a creative writer and journalist, who as a curator, believes that the voice of the artist is the most important element in any exhibition.

Windswept Curated by Genie Davis

Wonzimer


Gallery Hours Sundays 1-6 & by appt
info@lastprojects.org

Last Projects is pleased to present “Seen from Behind,” paintings by Patrick Donovan, his second solo show with the gallery.    These paintings mine the thoughts and emotions we experience in everyday life evoked by observing people seen from behind.   They urge us to reflect on the looker in all of us.
The artist explains:
“A few years ago, a former gallery owner visiting my studio commented “seen from behind” about one of my then-paintings.	I later remembered it and thought it might be interesting to do a series of paintings of persons seen from behind. 	These paintings are about the everyday experience of looking at people unobserved, the quick, automatic application of whatever characterization of the person is invoked, as well whether we are attracted, indifferent, or want to see or know more, or not.  But, looking unobserved at people also suggests a vulnerability of the person seen, and aggression by the looker in a figurative sense.   It calls to mind the French expression for a glancing look, “coup d’oeil,” literally a hit of the eye.   This thought led me to look again at some earlier paintings of bullet holes and of a man with a gun, which suddenly resonated with current events and seemed to have a relationship with the ‘seen from behind’ paintings in the sense of the aggression of looking at someone unobserved.     Also, to me, the word ‘behind’ suggests what is behind us – our past.	The ‘seen from behind’ figures could be the past leaving us behind, leaving us to our future.” 
Patrick Donovan has previously shown work in Los Angeles at Blackstone Gallery, Lava Projects, the Queer Biennial 2018, SoLA Contemporary, the Los Angeles LGBT Center, and Last Projects; in Sacramento at the Crocker Art Museum; and in San Francisco at Paolo Meija Projects.  His work was included in New American Painting, Pacific Coast Edition (2013).  He has a BA (1971) in philosophy from Brandeis University and an MFA (2012) in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute.


Patrick Donovan: Seen From Behind 

LAST Projects Gallery

parrasch heijnen is pleased to present Back At Cha – A Celebration of Alonzo Davis, a group exhibition commemorating the life and accomplishments of Alonzo Davis (1942-2025) and his impact on the multitude of artists who worked with him in Los Angeles.

Our dear friend, legendary artist, and gallerist Alonzo Davis passed away on the morning of January 27, 2025. He was 82 years old. Born in Tuskegee, AL in 1942, Davis’ six-decade-long career has explored a wide range of media and methods, from mural to print, painting, sculpture, performance, and installation.

This expansive tribute includes not only Alonzo Davis, but artists in his orbit and with whom he had collaborative relationships. The joyful and enthusiastic outpouring of responses to the show encapsulate Davis’ ethos of community and have resulted in the inclusion of works by nearly 50 artists, including Judy Baca, Romare Bearden, Dale Brockman Davis, David Hammons, Mildred Howard, Suzanne Jackson, Doyle Lane, Samella Lewis, Kerry James Marshall, Senga Nengudi, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, Teresa Tolliver, Linda Vallejo, Carrie Mae Weems, La Monte Westmoreland, and Charles White.

A spiritual core resides at the heart of Davis’ oeuvre. Social justice was a central part of his creative language and expression. Using self-referential iconography, Davis often employed arrows in his works, reflecting a philosophical interest in direction, be it political, societal, personal, or cosmic. His works are a reclamation of identity, using Blackness, Egyptian imagery, African imagery, and Indigenous motifs, projecting a winding narrative of identity and meaning, and suggesting it was, and continues to be, a subversive act to believe in oneself.

As co-founder of the seminal Brockman Gallery in Los Angeles, the first major Black-owned contemporary art gallery in the United States (1967 - 1990), Davis, along with his brother Dale Brockman Davis, sought to champion Black artists in a time when white, male art was prevalent. The Davis brothers focused their efforts on promoting overlooked and underrepresented Black and minority artists by offering a platform for critical and commercial exposure and a nurturing environment to encourage talent and provide visibility within all communities. The Davises allowed artists to focus on experimentation, and Brockman grew to include studio and living spaces, as well as a nonprofit branch.

During the summer of 1966 the Davis brothers traversed the continental United States in their green Volkswagen Beetle. The two visited artist studios in historically Black communities throughout the country, meeting Romare Bearden, John Biggers, and Jacob Lawrence, among others in an effort to rewrite the overwhelmingly western and white art history education they had received at university. Civil rights protests were forming across the nation, and the Davis brothers took an active role, participating in the James Meredith March - the “March Against Fear” - a 21-day solitary march down U.S. Highway 51 from the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, TN, to the Mississippi State Capitol in Jackson.

The journey had an indelible impact on Davis, exposing him to myriad visual traditions practiced by Black and Indigenous communities. His realization, as quoted on the Hammer Museum website, that “there was room for me, that there was an opportunity for a person of color to be an artist and to make a statement,” fueled both his mission and his passion.

An advocate for public art, Davis consulted Robert Fitzpatrick, director of the Olympics Arts Festival, to commission a series of public murals to celebrate the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. This endeavor resulted in works by ten artists, including Judy Baca, Frank Romero, Kent Twitchell, and Richard Wyatt Jr.. Davis’ own contribution was the iconic Eye on ‘84, located on the 110 South Freeway at 3rd Street, which incorporated the Olympic Rings into compositions of hearts, eyes, and arrows.

Alonzo Davis participated in multiple exhibitions at parrasch heijnen, including his 2022-2023 solo show The Blanket Series, Davis’ first show in Los Angeles since 1984, as well as Alonzo Davis: Select Works, 1973-1979, Frieze Masters, London, UK (2023). Together with Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York, parrasch heijnen co-presented retrospectives Brockman Days: 1967-1990 at Art Basel Miami Beach (2023), and Brockman Days (Part II): A Tribute to Brockman Gallery, Los Angeles 1967-1990, at Felix Art Fair, Los Angeles (2024).

Solo exhibitions of Brockman Gallery artists presented by parrasch heijnen include: La Monte Westmoreland: A Survey, 1974 - 2024 (2025); Teresa Tolliver: Sitting on the Edge of Reality (2024) Linda Vallejo: Select Works 1969 - 2024 (2024); and Mildred Howard: A Survey: 1978 - 2020 (2020).

Alonzo Davis received a B.A. from Pepperdine University, Los Angeles, CA (1964), and a B.F.A. (1971) and M.F.A. (1973) from Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, CA. Select solo exhibitions include Just Above Midtown Gallery, New York (1975); Modern Nordisk Konst, Göteborg, Sweden (1979); Watts Tower Arts Center, Los Angeles, CA (1981); and parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles (2022-2023).

Davis was featured in the landmark exhibition Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2011-2012); Traveled to: MoMA PS1, New York, NY (2012-2013), and Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA (2013); Eleven from California, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (1972); Synthesis, JAM (Just Above Midtown), New York, NY (1974); Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1994); and L.A. Object and David Hammons Body Prints, Tilton Gallery, New York, NY (2006) and Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles, CA (2007).

Davis’ work resides in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO.

Back At Cha - A Celebration of Alonzo Davis will be on view at parrasch heijnen, 1326 S. Boyle Avenue, Los Angeles, from March 22 - April 19, 2025. An opening reception will be held Saturday, March 22, from 5 - 8p. Gallery staff are available to guide you through our exhibitions virtually via Zoom upon request. For more information, please contact the gallery at +1 (323) 943-9373 or info@parraschheijnen.com.

Exhibition includes work by:

Judy Baca
Romare Bearden
Phoebe Beasley
Gloria Bohanon
King Brock
Nathaniel Bustion
Elizabeth Catlett
Bernie Casey
Hyunsook Cho
Dan Concholar
Michael Cummings
Alonzo Davis
Dale Brockman Davis
Charles Dickson
Emory Douglas
Melvino Garretti
Mark Greenfield
David Hammons
Maren Hassinger
Varnette Honeywood
Mildred Howard
Suzanne Jackson
Doyle Lane
Samella Lewis
Kerry James Marshall
Yvonne Cole Meo
Senga Nengudi
Oliver Nowlin
John Outterbridge
William Pajuad
Judson Powell
Noah Purifoy
John Riddle
Frank Romero
Betye Saar
Joseph Sims
Kenzi Shiokava
Donald Ray Stinson
John Stinson
Teresa Tolliver
Kent Twitchell
Linda Vallejo
Ruth Waddy
Timothy Washington
Carrie Mae Weems
La Monte Westmoreland
Charles White
Richard Wyatt Jr.
Stanley C. Wilson
 
Image: Alonzo Davis, New York, 1973. Photographer: Dwight Carter. Image courtesy Dwight Carter Studios.

Back At Cha: A Celebration of Alonzo Davis

parrasch heijnen

Xela Institute of Art is delighted to announce Repatriate, the first solo museum exhibition by Los Angeles based artist, Elijah Ford.

Ford's exhibition provides a fantastical discourse approach to a serious humanitarian issue regarding the displacement of hundreds of natives in the Chagos Island. The U.S and U.K secretly planned the mass deportation of the native Chagos, known as Ilois, in order to build a
U.S military base on the island. The Ilois are descended from enslaved peoples originating from Africa and Madagascar. Ford's lineage includes distant Malagasy ancestry, connecting them to the heritage of Madagascar.

Ford's Repatriate features several paintings and a sculpture piece that depicts the connection between dogs and humans with an extraterrestrial approach. Ford creates an alternate reality where the aliens have witnessed the injustices of the displacement of groups and the removal of their histories for the sake to benefit the world's superpowers. As an attempt to empathize with the losses, the aliens give their alien dogs to the displaced groups. Although the alien dogs cannot acclaim full reparations of what was lost, they provide a fantastical hope of a rhizomatic development of empathy amongst one another. It explores the connection between human and alien dogs- although different- an effort to understand one another as an act of care. Ford’s fantastical world serves as a sci-fi alteration of reparations for the loss of traditions, homes, families, sense of security and the displacement of natives. Ford yearns to provide hope for his ancestors and those affected by displacement forced upon by power-centric countries.

About the Artist
Ford is a California-born artist who embraces the juxtaposition of fantasy and reality through a range of characters, creatures, figurations, and compositions in his paintings. He utilizes historical art tropes with contemporary imagery to bring his imaginations to life.

About Xela Institute of Art
Xela Institute of Art is a nonprofit art exhibition space located in Wrigley Village, Long Beach, dedicated to showcasing the vibrant talents of both emerging and established artists. Xela Institute of Art viewings are by appointment only, if you’d like to schedule one- email info@xela.art

Address of Xela Institute of Art:
2176 Pacific Avenue, Long Beach, CA 90806

Elijah Ford: Repatriate

Xela Institute of Art

Lucky Cat Gallery presents ‘Press Play’, a group show featuring the diverse voices of ten Los Angeles-based artists. Together, these works present a dreamlike landscape that invites the viewer to revel in these outward expressions of whimsical play and also ask deeper questions about the origins of the images before them.

Featured Artists: Dan Iel, Walter Limo, Amanda Estrada, Leonard Croskey, Annie Rob, Dany Paragouteva, Anna Katrina McBride, Timothy Smith, Adrian Huth, KOLA DPW

Press Play: A Group Show

Lucky Cat Labs

The work in this show is 'modernist with a reduced aesthetic. It incorporates vested interest in contemporary concerns for painting, sculpture and Installation.  It  balances the attributes of art, design, craft and architecture.  It is Modernism with a human touch.  

Fineman, Razili and Greenberg have exhibited together numerous times in larger group exhibitions and the three together in a collaborative installation in 2021 at Divisible Projects in Dayton, Ohio.

“abstract art is not the creation of another reality but the true vision of reality.” Piet Mondrian

The art practiced by Yoella Razili, Alan Greenberg, and Stuart Fineman is based on a Modernist and Reduced aesthetic that incorporates vested interests in contemporary concerns for painting, sculpture and Installation. Their work together is thought-provoking and is a visual delight in the way their conceptions play off of each other. The works are constructed and conceived with disparate elements that come together in compositions that just feel visually and conceptually right. Intuitive decision-making, based on years of experience with balancing the attributes of art, design, craft and architecture, translates across their oeuvre. It is Modernism with a human touch. 

Each of their works is non-objective. While they may be considered abstract, considering the quote by Mondrian, they have their own reality and a concreteness that is self-referential. When experienced together the viewer can see similar dynamics and problem solving. And while the languages are similar, based on shared historical philosophies and references, there is a uniqueness of vision that makes each of the works their own. 

Shared themes among the three artists are the attention to contrasts and edges, degrees of opacity, what is inside and outside, in front of and behind and degrees of lightness, expressiveness and control. Look for parts and sections in their shared use of both fabricated and found materials, the handmade qualities and the attention to color and visual juxtapositions.

In this exhibition Yoella Razili continues her exploration of geometric forms with organic inspired round edges and a reduced palette that together create a feeling of softness and calm. They are meant to be contemplated and explored. The contrast of the incorporated found and aged wood that merges its raw and time-worn presence with the crispness of applied white elements results in a sublime yet concrete object. Recessed elements and the turning of round structures, produce shadow and darkness where form and light reveal sculptural depth. In Rise and Stillness 2023  the vertical column has both preciousness and strength. It stands tall despite being composed of so many parts. It remains stable despite the forces that want to disassemble the unity.

Alan Greenberg’s work likewise explores the interactions of line, shape and form in space. 

In some of his new works he arranges planar forms of plaster, wood, translucent plastic and other objects on shelves in stacked compositions that highlights dynamic yet balanced contrasts of color, light and shadow. In Pink Eclipsed with Wood Panel 2025 we see that his smaller “shelf” pieces increased in scale. The larger planes are on the floor, leaning against the white wall. In this sculpture, weight has become an important factor in the concept. In the wall installation, Greenberg incorporates a line/cord and a hook with literally dangling planes. Penumbra is less formal and almost whimsical, free of some of the constraints of weight and gravity. Together, the sculptural pieces address degrees of translucency and opaqueness, color and value, weight and balance, surface and composition.

In Stuart Fineman’s most recent work, he too has been exploring formats, processes, materials and surfaces. Conceptually his work explores how something can be perceived and understood in more than in one way. The works, like Razili’s, seem harmonious, stable and dependable upon first observation. There Is a beauty to them. Once contemplated however, attributes, that is what makes the painting, becomes incongruous to each other. What appeared comfortable becomes something more challenging. 

The painted panels are on flat plexiglass, principally monochrome, with organic and expressive inspired drawings within a shallow atmospheric space. Some panels are mounted alone but others combine with the wall, which contributes other values, colors and materials seen next to or apart of the panels. There are aspects of the painting unknown and of betrayal 2025 and outwardly and inwardly 2025 painted directly on the wall that may not have been perceived from a distance. In one of the tall vertical compositions, definite and indefinite 2025, the top panel juxtaposes with a cut to size but otherwise untouched flat black sheet of rubber. The other vertical painting, concord or discord 2025, is combined with a second imbedded image, this on paper. The painted panels themselves are secondary to the “big picture”, that is, what occurs when they are seen together. Color choices and their contrasts, vestiges of past marks and directions, along with the changing edges of softness to hardness, further adds to the dissonance and mystery.

There is a temporary aspect to Stuart Fineman’s paintings, similar to Alan Greenberg’s installations, and Yoella Razili’s vertically stacked column Rise and Stillness, they only fully exist when installed.

Stuart Fineman, Yoella Razili, Alan Greenberg

The LMF Gallery & Darkroom

Friday Gallery is honored to present our Winter 25 season with Iraqi artist Halim Al-Karim, ON HOPE: Inanna's Revolution. Join us for an opening reception with the artist on Friday February 14th, from 6 to 9pm.

Al-Karim’s work explores the fierce power of mythic beauty across time and culture — a force of sensual and spiritual nourishment that gives birth to hope. This is not gentle softness, but the electric vibrancy of untamed beauty that tears at our flesh, pierces our gaze, and stands in defiance of injustice with proud hands on hips.

Through beauty, we feast on hope.

Halim Al-Karim’s large-scale photography honors the Sumerian mythology of Inanna, who suffered in the depths of darkness, only to return to the fullness of her power with a glint of garnet in her eyes. Al-Karim is an alchemist  blending vintage techniques with experimental practices — turning mirrors into collodion wet plates, printing with raw minerals, and building with a custom camera over nine feet tall. His final images become both tangible and opaque, confrontational yet soft, intimately close and veiled far away.

Escaping political persecution during the Iraq war, Al Karim found refuge in the desert, where the kindness of an elderly Bedouin woman sustained him, hid him, and fed him. Her face became an enduring symbol of hope. Like a memory softened by time, it lingers on the edges of clarity, blurred and just out of reach. This moment came to define his creative practice. The thirst of a man trying to remember water, forever laying down at the altar of beauty.

Selected as Iraq’s representation at the Venice Biennale, Halim Al-Karim’s relationship to his homeland has come full circle. At its core, his work is about the hope that no matter what one has endured, the feeling, the smell, and the taste of beauty can still be held. Without hope, we only just exist.

Each Friday season is anchored in a rotating theme, with the art, fashion, and objects curated under a shared spirit. For “ON HOPE,” we pair Al-Karim’s work with brands that explode with the energy of otherworldly beauty and abundance - from the animistic sculptures pulsing with life from Lebanese designer Tamara Barrage, to a line of hand-embroidered apparel from artisan Lahore brand Color Coded Crime, to the fiery spirit of parandi designers Ziddi reimagining heritage craft.

For Inanna, to hell and back,
Friday Gallery

RSVP: https://partiful.com/e/iAZqbuEoJ8ZWJHwMkp2k


_________

Halim Al Karim is a contemporary Iraqi artist known for his strategically blurred and altered photographs. Born in 1963 in Najaf, Iraq, he went on to study at the Baghdad Academy of Fine Arts and later the Gerrit Reitveld Academie in Amsterdam. His work was featured in the Iraqi Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale – the first Iraqi Pavilion in 36 years. His work is in the collections of major museums including the Arab Museum of Contemporary Art in Doha, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Saatchi Collection in London, Darat Al Funun in Amman, L’Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Artron Art Museum in China and Yinchaun MoCA in China. He lives and works between Denver, CO and Dubai, UAE.

About FRIDAY

Friday exists to encourage the discovery of rising creative voices from the Global South, curating art, objects, and editions from across the Middle East, South Asia, and beyond. The space blends an art gallery with a design concept store to create a seasonal platform celebrating brown artists, designers, and artisans. Each Friday season is anchored in a rotating theme, with the art, fashion, and object curation bound together in a shared spirit. From Pakistani minimalism, to the surrealist visions of feminist Arabic photographers, to queer gothic brujas in Mexico, Friday peels back old divides to celebrate the cultural voices of tomorrow. Connect at thefridaygallery.com and @thefriday.gallery on instagram.

Halim Al-Karim: On Hope, Inanna's Revolution 

Friday Gallery

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present SATOR ROTAS, its first exhibition of new work by Maia Cruz Palileo. The exhibition will occupy two spaces at the gallery’s Los Angeles location, and will include paintings, ceramic sculptures, and works on paper, shedding light on the multi-faceted nature of the artist’s project and their poetic engagement with the Filipino diaspora. SATOR ROTAS is on view at 5130 W. Edgewood Pl. from March 13 through April 26, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, March 13 from 6 to 8 PM.

Palileo looks at their own Filipino heritage to better understand the routes by which their family arrived in the United States, but also as a way of entering into deeper communication with their own psychological and imaginative responses to the contemporary world. In each phase of Palileo’s work, they give shape to otherwise invisible forces that animate landscapes, drive historical change, and enrich—and complicate—human lives.

SATOR ROTAS features work Palileo has made since their visit to the Philippines at the beginning of 2024, when they were able to have firsthand experiences of environments that, as someone born in the US, they had predominantly encountered through archival documentation and secondhand family accounts. A whole new set of sense impressions has therefore transformed the raw material available to them on both conscious and unconscious levels, lending increased physicality to a practice already notable for its attunement to the sculptural qualities of paint.

Such impressions are not limited, however, to the visual or even the tactile. They also include more intuitive perceptions that arose when Palileo was able to connect myths, legends, and folklore shared by their family with the natural landscapes of the Philippines, resulting in an expanded, multi-dimensional sense of place. Several paintings are informed by time spent around Mount Banahaw, a slumbering volcano long considered a holy pilgrimage site in the Philippines. Palileo renders images of dense forest scenes, root systems, and branching forms of trees, providing opportunities for intricate layering and the creation of suggestive, mystery-laden openings where the unruliness of life bursts forth, seemingly of its own accord.

The exhibition’s palindromic title draws attention to ideas of reflection and mirroring that appear throughout the works on view. In the horizontally oriented work, Like a Shadow That Cannot Walk (2025), Palileo bisects the painting so that when viewed in one direction, orange and pink swaths appear as water atop which a boat is floating. When viewed in the other direction, however, the orange and pink become a sunset sky, with its boat and figures reflected in the dark waters beneath. Similarly, the painting Revir (2024), whose title is the word “river” spelled backwards, draws connections to sinister ideas of the “upside down world” as it relates to colonialism, prompting the viewer to interrogate what it is they’re seeing and to not be easily fooled by a first impression.

In Springtime Again (2024), a monumental diptych, Palileo establishes an optical rhythm in which vertical striations create an effect akin to double vision. Like vintage stereo cards, Palileo creates two nearly identical spliced landscapes that, when presented side-by-side, allude to a third, imagined landscape. This work also exemplifies the ways in which collage, as a process and typology, influences Palileo’s approach to image-making. Here, a repeated pattern of dark, tree-like vertical impressions approximates the negative space that results when cutting out strips of paper. Springtime Again, like several other works on view, pulls imagery directly from postcards—objects that have historically represented, or misrepresented, faraway places from a colonially skewed perspective. Postcards and stereo cards have an inherent relationship to both image and experience, which makes them an ideal reference for Palileo, whose work considers the motivations behind historic documentation and image-making, just as much as they consider the physical embodiments of one’s senses.

Understanding the invisible, like travel or other sensorial events, plays a large part in Palileo’s project, prompting questions around what experiences are invisible and what can be rendered visible. As a whole, the works in this exhibition offer a parallel understanding from both lived accounts—touching trees, walking down a street you’ve mostly seen in photos—and flattened images in an archive. It’s through this parallel approach that Palileo creates paintings that appear mirrored, spliced, or otherwise bifurcated to approximate the experience of understanding a place and people through indirect methods, thereby gaining a closer understanding of their own family history and of themself.

Maia Cruz Palileo (b. 1979, Chicago) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Cummer Museum, Jacksonville, Florida (2023); Kimball Art Center, Park City, Utah (2022); Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2021); and American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington, D.C. (2019), among others. Recent group exhibitions include Spirit House, Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University (2024); Seven Rooms and a Garden, Moderna Museet, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm (2023); Spirit in the Land, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (2023); The Outwin: American Portrait Today, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. (2022); A Point Stretched: Views on Time, San José Museum of Art, California (2022); and Our Blue Planet: Global Visions of Water, Seattle Art Museum (2022), among many others. Their work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Cummer Museum, Jacksonville, Florida; San José Museum of Art, California; TANG Art Foundation, Hong Kong; Fredriksen Collection, National Museum, Oslo, Norway; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky; and Chapman University, Orange, California. Palileo lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

____

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce Amazônico, the first solo exhibition of Chico da Silva’s work in Los Angeles, on view at 5130 W. Edgewood Pl. from March 13 through April 26, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, March 13 from 6 to 8 PM.

“I feel the animals, the jungles, the fantastic worlds, entering the phase of other worlds.”
—Chico da Silva, 1972

Over a prolific career spanning four decades, Chico da Silva devoted himself to depicting the celestial, otherworldly realms within his imagination. His work, which spans a rich and varied body of paintings, drawings, and performance, encapsulates a profound engagement with the intersection of personal mythology, cultural history, and collective creativity. Amazônico brings together exemplary paintings from the 1980s—an often-overlooked phase of Chico’s career—alongside works from the 1960s, offering a comprehensive look at his practice and insight into the evolution of his distinctive artistic vision.

Born in Alto Tejo, Brazil, Chico’s early years in the Amazon deeply influenced the development of his cosmology of fantastical creatures and environments. As a teenager, he moved to Pirambu with his mother. It was only a few years later that Swiss art critic Jean-Pierre Chabloz saw him drawing on some neighborhood buildings and quickly became a key supporter, launching Chico’s international career. By the early-to-mid 1960s, Chico had honed his unique style, working primarily on paper and depicting creatures—both real and imagined—in suspended states of conflict. The 1964 and 1966 works featured in this exhibition both feature stippled lines and dots that define his bichos (creatures). In the 1966 example, fish surrounding a tree share the same intricate patterns, dissolving the boundary between flora and fauna in Chico’s invented world.

Chico continued to garner significant attention, culminating with an invitation to participate in the 1966 Venice Biennale, where he received an honorable mention. A work from this pivotal year is included in Amazônico. The only painting in the original artist frame, this work offers critical insight into Chico’s process: the painting’s frame bears marks from the artist, who constantly wiped his brush onto the frame’s border to ensure precision in every stroke. His refined technique later became the foundation for the Pirambu School. Originally conceived as an arts workshop for children and local artisans to learn directly from Chico, the school quickly evolved into a collective. Members of the Pirambu School began to create their own works, expanding Chico’s visual language and contributing to a shared, imaginative universe. 

Throughout his time teaching at Pirambu, Chico continuously reinterpreted and evolved his compositions. Two works from disparate parts of his practice, 1966 and 1981, exemplify this sustained reinterpretation. Both of these works feature a large, central fish surrounded by smaller ones swimming around its open mouth. In the earlier of the two paintings, an eel swims into the fish’s mouth, while in the later version, Chico replaces it with a slim fin extending from the fish’s head, subtly shifting the composition and drawing in the smaller fish. Moreover, Chico’s use of color and pattern shifts from a moody, dark tone in the 1966 work to a vibrant, eclectic style in the 1981 piece. Fifteen years apart, these works highlight Chico’s endless ability to reinvent his fantastical world and the characters that inhabit it.

Chico’s Venice Biennale recognition brought both fame and scrutiny to the Pirambu School. European audiences struggled to make sense of the school’s collective approach. Meanwhile, Chico’s worsening alcoholism led to extended inpatient treatment. While hospitalized, Chico continued to paint and by the late 1970s, he had returned to the studio. An untitled painting from 1980, created in the last few years of Chico’s life, presents a notable departure from his earlier style by omitting the patterned gradient backgrounds that had defined much of his previous work. Here, a vibrant grid serves as the backdrop for two dueling dragons. Each square is composed of creatures and scenes amassed throughout his decades-long body of work. The snakes, trees, birds, and fish familiar from his 1960s pieces are reimagined in smaller forms, subtly obscured by the dramatic presence of the two dragons. Through this grid, Chico synthesizes the rich cosmology he had developed over many years. 

Chico’s deployment of Amazonian flora, fauna, and mythical iconography has had a lasting impact on international audiences. By presenting regional narratives on an international stage, Chico continues to play a key role in shaping the conversation around Latin American art, challenging conventional views and highlighting the relevance of art practices from outside traditional art centers in global movements.

Chico da Silva (b. circa 1910, d. 1985) has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including the major, traveling retrospective Chico da Silva e o ateliê do Pirambu, presented at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2023) and the Pinacoteca do Ceará (2023). Other solo exhibitions include Chico da Silva: Sacred Connection, Global Vision, Museu de Arte Sacra, São Paulo (2022); Chico da Silva – O Renascer 100 Anos, Espaço Cultural Correios, Fortaleza, Brazil (2010); Retrospectiva Chico da Silva: do delírio ao dilúvio, Espaço Cultural do Palácio da Abolição, Fortaleza, Brazil (1989). Group exhibitions include Uma história da arte brasileira, Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro (2024–2025); Patrimônios, Memórias, Artes e Ofícios, Museu da Cultura Cearense, Fortaleza, Brazil (2024); The Sacred in the Amazon, Centro Cultural Inclusartiz, Rio de Janeiro (2023); Fantaisies brésiliennes, Musée International d’Art naïf Anatole Jakovsky, Nice, France (2016); Brasileiro, Brasileiros, Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo (2005); and 33rd Venice Biennale, Italy (1966). His work is in the permanent collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate, London; Pinacoteca de São Paulo; El Museo del Barrio, New York; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro; and Fundacão Edson Queiroz, Fortaleza, Brazil.

Maia Cruz Palileo: SATOR ROTAS | Chico da Silva: Amazônico

David Kordansky Gallery

MODEST common is proud to present a show of new work by artist and architect Thomas Prinz. Prinz’s work emerges from a working process that cycles between media, combining painterly effect with a sculptural approach to light & shadow. Beginning with sketches and paint on paper, he scans work digitally - modifying the composition before printing, tearing, repainting, rescanning, collaging, and altering. Navigating the space between digital manipulation and tactile interventions with a painter's sensibility, he meticulously stages the layered, ephemeral compositions that make up the final work.

From the artist: “The ray of light hits the wall, the tape casts a shadow. It’s a revelation. An abstraction is revealed. Bernini used light to sculpt marble. The Last Supper is about certainty and doubt, the table unifies this abstraction. Light is a revelation.” 

Thomas Prinz is an architect and fine artist based in Omaha, Nebraska.  He received a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a Master of Architecture from Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles. In 1990, Prinz established Arc-Studio to explore the disciplines of art and architecture. He has been an adjunct professor and visiting critic at UNL School of Architecture. He has had exhibitions of his art and architecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Creighton University, Projects in Des Moines, Circa Gallery in Minneapolis and Gallery 72. His works are collages, monotype and digital prints on paper.

Thomas Prinz: BERNINI + LAST SUPPER; PAPER TAPE LIGHT CERTAINTY DOUBT

MODEST common

Rhett Baruch Gallery is pleased to announce Colt Seager’s (b. 1993, Illinois) inaugural solo exhibition, following his debut as the first painter featured in our gallery in 2022. This show marks a key milestone in his career, offering a deeper exploration of his evolving practice and inviting our audience to engage with his distinct vision.

Seager’s paintings transcend color as a mere visual element, using it as a language—a conversation between nature and the viewer. Inspired by the unexpected placements of colors in the natural world, he creates compositions where each hue tells a story, drawing from the vibrant colors of the Midwest landscape, including wildflowers, grasses, rivers, and forests. His approach is intuitive and personal, focusing on translating nature's beauty into something deeply felt rather than merely seen.

His work is also influenced by the Celtic tradition of the "thin place," where nature and the divine seem effortlessly connected. His paintings serve as windows into these spaces, inviting viewers to pause and reflect. Each piece is a living conversation, with colors and forms evolving gradually through the process, inviting contemplation and connection. Seager aims to evoke a sense of spirituality and awe, creating a space for viewers to question their place in the world.

The opening reception is this Saturday, March 22, from 5-8 PM at Rhett Baruch Gallery, located at 6057 Melrose Ave, 90038. The artist will be present. Refreshments will be provided, and rideshare is encouraged.


Colt Seager: Thin Places 

Rhett Baruch Gallery 

Stroll Garden is pleased to present Plumage, a solo exhibition featuring a new body of work by Eun-Ha Paek. Inspired by the social, cultural, spiritual and aesthetic preoccupations surrounding hair, Plumage features over twenty works including polystyrene foam sculptures, polymer clay “paintings,” and 3D printed ceramics.

Partially animated by the artist’s aﬃnity for poodles and their sculptural haircuts, this new series tests the delicate and complex interactions between vanity, control, kitsch, and cuteness, particularly when it comes to self-fashioning and reinventing oneself through hair.

From the story of Samson and Delilah to the contemporary trope of getting a new haircut after a major life change, one’s hair is often equated to one’s identity. During the artist’s childhood, Paek was taught the Confucian idea of filial piety, that one should avoid cutting one's hair as it is an extension of your parents and would be akin to damaging their flesh and bones. The weight of this symbolism led the artist to wear her hair short for a long time.

In traditional Korean paintings, the artist was struck by the subjects’ elaborate hairstyles that looked like they “were wearing little poodles on their heads.” The wigs, called “gache,” were intricate constructions only worn by wealthy women in the Joseon period (1392-1897), weighing between six to nine pounds. Paek recalls reading about a woman who broke her neck after standing up too suddenly due to the weight of her gache.

Drawing from these visceral images and visual associations, Plumage features vibrant clay works fashioned through diﬀerent techniques that investigate the dissolution of the status quo, the duality of feeling, and the weighty pressure of influences–from the societal to the ancestral.

In the artist’s own words: “Hair bears the weight of symbolizing beauty, status, wealth or on the other side, strife. My hair went partially gray in college after a traumatic event—it seemed to happen just like in the movie Nightmare on Elm St, where the main character wakes up to find her hair had gone gray. The world was so normal, even though it could be terrible. This dissonance made me wonder if I just imagined the terrible. The gray proved to me that it wasn’t all in my head because something in the outside world had also changed. It was a strange comfort. This show is about uncomfortable happinesses and strange comforts, unbearable weights and letting go.”

EUN-HA PAEK was born in Seoul, Korea. She received a BFA in Film/Animation/Video from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her animated films have screened in the Guggenheim Museum, Sundance Film Festival, and venues internationally. Grants and awards include the Center for Craft Teaching Artist Cohort Grant, Windgate Scholarship and Rudy Autio Grant from the Archie Bray Foundation, and a Travel and Study Grant from The Jerome Foundation. Her work has received mentions in The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue Living and G4 Tech TV. Residencies include EKWC, Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Center for Contemporary Ceramics, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and Archie Bray Foundation. She teaches at Parsons School of Design and Greenwich House Pottery.


Eun-Ha Paek: Plumage

Stroll Garden

Bruce Eichelberger: Born and raised in San Diego by his adopted parents, Bruce Eichelberger was an avid skater and surfer.  Struggling with drugs and the law caused him to go in and out of prison, then seeing and experiencing the many facets of inequalities and antagonisms within our society.

As a child he always had a love for art of all sorts. He was always drawn to many mediums; tattooing, drawing, painting, sculpting , silver-smithing, taxidermy, pyro-graphy, woodcarving etc. For many years is wasn’t enough to keep him out of trouble, but the roads he would have to walk down made him create his own style.

Christopher Bales: Christopher Bales is often mistaken for creating “steampunk” artwork, but his work is much more timeless than a funky era of fashion birthed out of Renaissance Faires and that one animated movie Atlantis. Christopher Bales makes alter-like displays of antiqued wood-works, brass-works, and paintings in which the stories played out are ones of the intersection of science and religion. These are themes are that are intersectional with industrialization but continue to supersede within pop-culture. Bales questions authority through juxtapositions of morality and scientific pursuits and juxtapositions of religious institutions and imperialism. 

Krystopher Sapp: Inspired by his worst nightmares, Krystopher Sapp crafts narrative sculptures out of found objects that shows his fascination with man-made atrocities. His themes range from post-apocalypse, genocide, prison-industrial complexes and their surrealist disillusions. Sapp has been known to use real-antiqued weapons, real teeth, and real animals in his work. Breathing in new life to objects that once were used for greed, hate and vanity into objects stripped of their once sinister past. These artworks are now exhibited to showcase an honest light and truth of a dark and fucked-up world.

Bruce Eichelberger: Jack of All Trades Master of None | Krystopher Sapp & Christopher Bales: Brothers in Assemblage

La Luz De Jesus Gallery

Join us for the Opening Night of a dynamic contemporary art exhibition showcasing the works of eight extraordinary Armenian artists with a diverse range of styles and mediums.

FEATURING : Zareh, Vahe Berberian, Tro Khayalian, Serj Tankian, Rouzanna Berberian, Roger Kupelian, Nika Arminé and Arpi Krikorian.  

 On view April 5th through 30th.

Common Thread

Baldwin Avenue Gallery

7811 Gallery presents To Los Angeles with Love, a new solo exhibition of works from the late artist Dorothy Rice. The exhibition is on view March 6 - May 1, 2025, with an opening reception on Thursday, March 6, 6:00 - 8:00 pm. 

Rice was a multi-talented painter, sculptor, model and actor, who had an illustrious career as a top fashion model in the 1940s and 50s, before becoming an exhibiting artist and exploring, throughout the rest of her life and through several different mediums, the breadth and vibrancy of the human experience.  

To Los Angeles with Love reflects Rice’s decades-long explorations of community, beauty and place. The exhibition stands as a timely celebration of California, specifically Los Angeles, which she called home for over 50 years. It features oil paintings, silkscreens and watercolors depicting California from the 1970s through the 90s, including iconic landmarks, tranquil natural landscapes, and scenes evocative of a bygone yet recognizable Los Angeles ethos. Though she was born and raised in New York, Rice’s later life as a renowned model married to a Hollywood producer embodied a Los Angeles fantasy which is palpable in her dreamlike paintings. Rice brought what Ray Bradbury—author, native Angeleno, and collector of Rice’s work—described as “fresh eyes and her own palette” to everything from city life to coastal landscapes. 

The exhibition also features selections that reflect the international scope of Rice’s work. New York, Israel, Japan, and Mexico all make an appearance, revealing not only Rice’s cosmopolitan life but her profound interest in depicting shared human experiences across cultures and time. 

“This exhibition encapsulates Dorothy’s entire personality. The New Yorker who went on to become a celebrated model and actor, the Californian who lived in the Hollywood limelight, the world traveler who created art to connect with the people around her—all of it comes together to reveal an extraordinary woman who captured the world as only she could.” - Deborah Blum, Gallery Director and Curator 

Rice created art her entire life, being recognized first by the Art Students League in New York, who invited her to join at the age of 14. During that time, she was “discovered” at the legendary nightclub El Morocco in Manhattan by Vogue photographer John Rawlings, which quickly led to her notable modeling career, rising to widespread acclaim as the face of the culture-defining “New Look” collection from Christian Dior and working with top fashion photographers for years afterward.  

She returned to art-making in her 40s, a remarkable shift especially as a woman during the time period. When she transitioned from full-time modeling to painting, she said she was happy to turn the focus away from herself to the world around her. Her paintings allow us to see the world through the eyes of someone who was once a muse, demonstrating an intimate and natural sense of beauty that starkly contrasts with the beauty standards of the fashion industry.

Jonathan Kirsch of The Los Angeles Times wrote that Rice “captured a softer and more romantic aspect of our city than we are accustomed to seeing. There’s an exuberance, almost an innocence to her conception of the cityscape – she has an eye for color and movement and a taste for the quaint.” Army Archerd of Daily Variety wrote: “Beverly Hills never looked lovelier than in Dorothy Rice’s latest [work].” 

About Dorothy Rice

Dorothy Rice (1924 - 2023) was a multi-talented painter, sculptor, model and actor.

Rice produced a prolific body of artwork throughout her life, including oil paintings, watercolors, pastels, silk screens and sculptures. Her artistic prowess was first recognized by the Art Students League in New York, who invited her to join at the age of 14. In 1975, Rice held her first solo exhibition Serenata Mexicana at the renowned Southwest Museum. Many of her contemporary critics and publications noted her impressive versatility, including Architectural Digest which dedicated a large spread to her watercolor paintings of New York City. 

Rice’s work was also favored internationally: she was the first American woman commissioned to create a mural in Guadalajara, Mexico, she was commissioned by the King of Morocco for a series of paintings and was hosted by the Mayor of Jerusalem while completing her Israel collection. Rice’s work has been exhibited in galleries, embassies and museums worldwide, and is held in several public and private collections, including by notable figures like Barbara Walters, Gore Vidal and Ray Bradbury. 

Rice’s artistic perspective was informed by her illustrious modeling and acting career, in which she worked with iconic creatives and traveled to regions that inspired her paintings. Rice first rose to widespread acclaim modeling for Christian Dior as the face of the culture-defining “New Look” collection. She went on to work with the top high art fashion photographers and designers of the era, appeared in over 100 plays, and starred in several prominent television shows, including the Emmy Award-winning Fear on Trial, produced by her husband, the late Stanley Chase. 

“I am searching for whatever is positive and reinforcing for the human spirit. I value the individual and appreciate the beauty human beings are able to give to each other.” - Dorothy Rice

Website: https://www.dorothyriceart.com 
Instagram: @dorothyricearchive

About 7811 Gallery

7811 Gallery is proud to feature artists based in Southern California. We put an emphasis on bringing to light emerging artists and artists with ties to Hollywood stories. We believe in fostering creativity, community and connection with ourselves, others and the earth. We enjoy hosting community events and allowing art-lovers, collectors and artists to benefit from one another.


Dorothy Rice: To Los Angeles With Love

7811 Gallery

Don’t Look Projects is pleased to present By the Company They Keep, a solo exhibition by Chenhung Chen (Taiwan, 1961), whose intricate practice weaves together industrial and organic materials to channel a metaphysics of the contemporary moment.

Chenhng Chen: By the Company They Keep

DON’T LOOK Projects

Lowell Ryan Projects is proud to present Rock Paper Scissors, a solo exhibition by Cornwall, UK-based artist Arthur Lanyon, comprised of a series of works on paper. Lanyon utilizes a variety of materials, including oil stick, oil primer, acrylic, and charcoal powder, to create gestural, tactile works at approximately 22h x 30w inches in scale. These works continue Lanyon’s exploration of the delicate balance between creation and destruction, control and surrender. This exhibition marks Lanyon’s first exhibition with the gallery and in Los Angeles.

An economical palette of predominately primary colors interplay with blacks, whites, and greys on thick 1000gsm handmade papers. Lanyon explains: “ultimately I want these works to have the look of collage without ever being cut or pasted. I use paintbrushes sparingly but prefer a lot of disposable gloves for finger painting. So, these paperworks are a combination of drawing and painting - drawing with paint.” A continual process of building up layers, sanding back, and revising is made possible due to the material depth of the paper. Initially, the paper’s hard, rough texture allows the paint to sit on the surface, however, after sanding, it is fluffy and absorbent. Formal shapes, patterns, and symbols emerge in the works informed by art historical narratives as well as personal and playful reference points. Ultimately, the process of exploration trumps a particular ideology or perspective. 

“Blind faith has me believing that what I’m looking for eventually finds me. This notion helps me tidy away toys and put drawers of stuff to bed. A trick I play with painting is to lose sight. Sometimes I take off my glasses. Or I use orange-tinted ones to curb the motions of a frenzied line spinning off the edge of an orbit sander. Using the power tool is itself dealing with chaos. Sanding back thick paper ends like a pillow fight – feathers everywhere. To come together, the whole picture first has to fail.” – Arthur Lanyon

Arthur Lanyon is a British artist born in Leicester, England in 1985. He lives and works from a studio near Penzance, Cornwall. Known for his emotive and physically engaging approach to painting, his works blend figurative imagery with abstract expression, often exploring the emotional depths of the human experience. Lanyon’s process reflects his interest in altered states of consciousness and the raw simplicity of childlike drawing. He holds a degree in Fine Art from Cardiff University and was featured in Saatchi’s New Sensations exhibition in 2008. His work has since been exhibited at galleries and art fairs such as the Saatchi Gallery in London, UK; Anima Mundi Gallery, St. Ives, UK; CGK Galleri & Kunstsalon, Copenhagen, Denmark; the Untitled Art Fair, Miami, FL; and Zona Maco, Mexico City, Mexico. Lanyon and his work have been featured in publications such as The Guardian and émergent magazine.

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Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present Darkness or the Dawn, a solo exhibition by British-born, Los Angeles-based artist William Bradley. In this second exhibition with the gallery, Bradley explores the emotional and psychological transitions between opposing forces through large-scale abstract paintings, reflecting on his own history and memory in relation to nature's continuous ebb and flow.

The title, Darkness or the Dawn, alludes to a pivotal moment of transformation, confronting the tension between unrest and the possibility of renewal. Bradley’s work resonates with the timeless reflections of William Blake and the Romantic poets, who often grappled with the complexities of light and shadow. Blake famously stated in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “The most sublime act is to set another before you,” suggesting that the whole experience of light can only occur after we have encountered darkness. Embracing this philosophy, Bradley asks: Can we truly appreciate the dawn without first navigating the depths of night? Through the unfolding of color and form, Bradley seeks a pathway through struggle toward a renewed understanding of self and the world.

Bradley’s paintings are characterized by cut-out, canvas-covered geometric shapes protruding off the canvas's surface. Painted gesturally in a rich, brooding color palette, each piece's narrative unfolds through the act of creation. Vivid reds, burnt oranges, and radiant ochres crackle across the canvas, evoking the first light of dawn breaking through a long night. At the same time, deep midnight blues, dark greens, and crimson tones vibrate against them, creating a dynamic tension between light and darkness. He allows the formal structure to evolve before transitioning to instinctual, free-flowing gestures. As the shapes rise from the surface, they embody both void and presence and a delicate balance of embrace and resistance.

William Bradley, born in York, UK in 1984, and now based in Los Angeles, creates large-scale abstract paintings and intimate collages. His work melds painterly and sculptural elements, exploring a space between two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms. He earned an MA in Fine Art in Painting from Wimbledon College of Art, UAL, in 2008 and a BA in Art and Design from York St John University in 2007. He has exhibited at galleries and institutions, including Makasiini Contemporary, Turku, Finland; Lowell Ryan Projects, Los Angeles, CA; Galerie Richard, Paris, France and New York, NY; Galerie Kornfeld, Berlin, Germany; EB & Flow Gallery, London, UK; 1969 Gallery in New York, NY; Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; and the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art, Rancho Cucamonga, CA. His works are included in the collections of Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH; Nelimarkka Museum, Alajärvi, Finland; University of the Arts London, UK; and along with several important private collections, including that of David and Indrė Roberts, Susan and Michael Hort, Serge and Ian Krawiecki Gazes, and Carole Serve and Oliver Frankel.

Arthur Lanyon: Rock Paper Scissors | William Bradley: Darkness or the Dawn

Lowell Ryan Projects 

Sean Kelly is delighted to announce Trust Me, Be Careful, I Like Your Shoes, Zipora Fried’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Bringing together four bodies of work; large works on paper, new intimately scaled drawings, ceramic sculptures, and a monumental hanging drawing, this exhibition highlights Fried’s mastery of mark-making and her continued exploration of the transformative, manipulative potential of form, color, and gesture. Simultaneously an overview of her oeuvre and a step into a new, dynamic phase of her career, the exhibition captures a shift in Fried’s practice toward heightened energy and a more liberated, expressive engagement with her materials. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, March 15, from 5-7pm. The artist will be present.

Spanning drawing, installation, and sculpture Zipora Fried’s practice explores the tension between surface presence and subconscious depth. Layers of line, color, and material accumulate, dissolving interpretation in favor of a more visceral experience. Fried’s large drawings reflect a deliberate precision, characterized by structured compositions where each element is carefully arranged to create movement across the surface. The flawless execution of these works lends them an air of ennui, emphasizing their refined sophistication. Through strategic placement of angles and voids, Fried directs the viewer’s gaze, establishing a sense of balance. The drawings exude a deep, silent presence, revealing an internalized restraint that is both elegant and profound.

In contrast, Fried’s new smaller drawings shift towards unpredictability, embracing imperfection and spontaneity. Here, the stroke is unrestrained—raw, fluid, and instinctive. These works reject the rigidity found in her larger compositions, opting instead for a more expressive and immediate exploration of color contrasts and gestural freedom. The sculptural work, Miron, 2025 takes its inspiration from traditional Japanese Kokeshi dolls—simplified, top-heavy human figures that embody both playfulness and instability. With an exaggerated head and vague body, Fried’s sculpture suggests a quiet imbalance. 

Fried’s hanging work, All I Thought and Forgot #3 (deep cobalt green), 2016, pushes the traditional boundaries of drawing into an architectural and sculptural realm. This work extends her deep, immersive engagement with color—devoting six months to a single hue, stripping the medium of drawing down to its essential elements. The persistent, labor-intensive application of mark-making over time results in a monumental work that, despite its scale, remains deeply vulnerable. 

With Trust Me, Be Careful, I Like Your Shoes, Fried unveils a new direction in her artistic journey—one that embraces vitality, risk, and a departure from control. At this point in her career, she has mastered the stroke and employs it in a playful manner. These works are evidence of an artist fully in command of her medium and unafraid to surrender to the process, allowing intuition to guide her hand.

Zipora Fried studied at the Academy of Applied Arts, Vienna. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO; Künstlerhaus Museum, Vienna, Austria, and Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, Norway amongst others. Her work is included in the Austrian Government’s Permanent Collection of Contemporary Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA and Magasin 3, Stockholm, Sweden. She currently lives and works in New York.

Zipora Fried: Trust Me, Be Careful, I Like Your Shoes

Sean Kelly Los Angeles

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to present Siren Hospitality, a solo exhibition by Hungarian painter József Csató, on view from March 22 to May 3, 2025. This exhibition marks Csató's first solo show in Los Angeles, featuring a selection of paintings alongside a site-specific installation composed of painted walls and hand-painted canvas cut-out shapes.

József Csató's paintings depict gatherings of dreamlike figures enriched by a unique aesthetic geometry. These unconventional forms dynamically emerge from his colorful canvases, creating a psychedelic symbolism in which amorphous shapes commingle to establish a compelling visual language. The striking compositions are complemented by soft, muted, monotone backgrounds that reveal modernist, fresco-like qualities through surreal layering.

Csató’s distinctive style distinguishes him from conventional narrative painting, seamlessly blending the familiar with the exotic into a cohesive framework that embodies both still life and landscape. His totemic hybrid beings evoke ancient cultures and subtly reference Dadaism, particularly reminiscent of the forms created by Jean Arp.

Filled with contradictions, Csató's artwork captures both joy and sorrow. Each painting begins with a wash of black, gradually building layers of paint to create mythical picture planes. The final surfaces come alive with intricate patterns of cross-hatching and marbling, enhanced by gestural oil stick markings and subtle airbrushed details. 

In Siren Hospitality, the recurring eyeball is a consistent theme throughout the exhibited paintings, evoking a range of feelings from humor to suspicion. For Csató, the act of seeing becomes an endeavor laden with truth, prophecy, and knowledge. The eyes also gaze back at the viewer, delivering an almost watchful warning.

About the artist

József Csató (b. 1980, Hungary) lives and works in Budapest. He graduated from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2006 under the guidance of artist Dóra Maurer. A three-time recipient of the Gyula Derkovits Art Scholarship, József also won the prestigious Esterházy Art Award in 2013, recognizing young artists in Hungary. József has held solo exhibitions at PLUS-ONE Gallery in Antwerp, Semiose Gallery in Paris, Double Q Gallery in Hong Kong, and Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna. His works are part of numerous private and institutional collections, including the Ludwig Museum, the Hungarian National Gallery, and the Hungarian National Bank.

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Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to present Unlearning, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Tonia Calderon, on view from March 22 to May 3, 2025.

Tonia Calderon employs a bold and innovative approach to painting, utilizing materials such as acrylics, floral pigments, fuel, glass, ink, sand, and resin. Her additive technique balances restraint with impulsiveness, producing finely detailed abstractions that highlight the powerful interplay between time and nature.

Unlearning includes nine large-scale works on panel as well as a suite of five smaller panel pieces. Calderon's paintings display atmospheric surfaces and otherworldly textures, reflecting her methodical curiosity and establishing a synergy between the microscopic and macroscopic.

Calderon begins each painting as a poem, drawing inspiration from fragments of language and memories. She deconstructs these elements into abstract forms. The unexpected combinations of natural and synthetic materials create intricate, expressive surfaces that embody both harmony and tension, challenging conventional definitions of painting. This process embodies the theme of unlearning, as it involves relinquishing rigid ideas to uncover the fluidity and honesty inherent in transformation.

Floral pigments are created by boiling flowers to produce dyes, which are then chemically modified. Resin is added to interact with the colors, serving as both a preservative and an interrupter. Sand and glass provide additional texture and disruption. Deeply connected to their materiality, Calderon's works exude a gestural resonance, reflected in the interplay between the physical properties of the materials and the expressive forms she creates.

Throughout her creative process, Calderon contemplates both physical and symbolic meanings, addressing themes such as chaos and order, as well as time and memory. By emphasizing the limitations of language through visual abstraction, she examines the tension between organic and synthetic elements, celebrating impermanence and the fleeting beauty of life. Her works embody the notion that everything is in a state of change, evolution, and decomposition.

About the artist

Tonia Calderon (b. 1987, San Jose, California) is a visual artist based in Los Angeles. Over the past decade, she has exhibited her work through various platforms and at institutions such as SF MoMA and MOCA Cleveland. Her efforts embody an ambitious vision that challenges traditional boundaries and explores new opportunities for presenting contemporary art.

József Csató: Siren Hospitality | Tonia Calderon: Unlearning

Vielmetter Los Angeles

The exhibition Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal is inspired by the life and legacy of jazz musician, devotional leader, and mother Alice Coltrane (b. 1937, Detroit). The title takes its name from her book Monument Eternal (1977), which reflected her newfound spiritual beliefs; the loss of her husband, the saxophonist John Coltrane; and the path to healing and self-discovery. The exhibition presents works by contemporary American artists paired with ephemera from Coltrane’s personal archive. Featuring a range of mediums including video, installation, performance, and sculpture together with Coltrane’s archival handwritten sheet music, unreleased audio recordings, and rarely seen video footage, Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal explores themes including spiritual transcendence, sonic innovation, and architectural intimacy to honor Coltrane’s cultural output and practice.

This exhibition is part of a larger initiative called “The Year of Alice," and in partnership with the John & Alice Coltrane Home.

Header image: Portrait of Alice Coltrane, 1970. Photo: Chuck Stewart. © Chuck Stewart Photography, LLC/Fireball Entertainment Group

Alice Coltrane: Monument Eternal 

Hammer Museum

Aimee Mandala’s solo, “Blue Is Where the Heart Is” debuts at ShockBoxx Gallery in Hermosa Beach on Saturday, March 22nd at 6 P.M. Mandala, a Los Angeles based charcoal and graphite artist is often found toggling between smudging charcoal across a page with wildly blackened hands, to reigning in the loose with highly precise graphite renderings from a past life of those that came before her. 

In this exhibition, Mandala sets the stage with a body of work that explores the darker themes of life, impending death, and the isolation and uncertainty in between. Intimate, personal and soulful, "Blue is Where the Heart Is" offers viewers an immersive look through the worn window panes of Mandala’s narrative to find that the lone protagonist, floating amongst the scenes of quiet turmoil, is, in fact, not alone at all. Navigating a  landscape of self truths, hard losses, and broken promises, this work’s exploration reveals an ever-present grace and sense of softness amongst strength that reassures the audience hope not only remains, but prevails. And like the stillness after a burn or the sun after the rain– Mandala brings you home to the warmth of a mother’s hug, the safety of a father’s steady guide and the beauty found in even the most treacherous of roads in the journey.

Situated in the Cypress Arts District of Hermosa Beach, California, ShockBoxx Gallery serves as a pivotal center in the South Bay for artists, curators, collectors, and art aficionados to unite and promote the arts. Established in March 2017 by Mike Collins and Laura Schuler, ShockBoxx is celebrated for its group and solo exhibitions, which showcase a variety of emerging and established artists and offer a continuous flow of fresh artistic influence.

Aimee Mandala: Blue Is Where the Heart Is

Shockboxx Gallery

la BEAST proudly presents “Paintings”, a solo exhibition of timeless artworks crafted by artist Michael Norton. Prominently focused on the traditional medium of egg tempera, Norton renders atmospheric, geometric, gateways, professing the existence of a vast expanse. Shifting between the familiar and the ethereal, Norton’s delicate panels possess a quiet intensity; being both inviting and strangely intimidating. As if painted a millennia ago, his surfaces feel historic, defiant of modernity, asserting an exquisite vision of antiquity that no longer exists.

‘Paintings’ opens with a reception on Saturday, March 29th, from 6-9 pm at la BEAST gallery in Cypress Park. The show will conclude on May 10th.


Michael Norton: Paintings

la BEAST Gallery

Brenna Youngblood | R.A..D…I..O.
March 29 – May 10, 2025
Opening Reception Saturday, March 29th, 6-8pm

Roberts Projects is pleased to present R.A..D…I..O., an exhibition by Brenna Youngblood and the artist’s second solo presentation with the gallery. Featuring nine new paintings alongside a freestanding sculpture and earlier works in assemblage and photography, R.A..D…I..O. demonstrates the breadth of Youngblood’s investigations into the complexities of American material culture. By incorporating mass-produced kitsch and objects of everyday use into her compositions, Youngblood reveals how specific registers of visual communication can be disrupted and broken down before being reconstituted into something altogether new. 

With her unique process of assemblage and painterly abstraction, Youngblood’s work remains in dialogue with California’s rich history of assemblage and abstract expressionist artists including George Herms, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy and Betye Saar. Where Youngblood’s work departs from her predecessors’ is in the consistent use of and emphasis on objects, images and languages of contemporary life: materials found at home and on the street, images seen while shopping or scrolling through social media, words or phrases extracted from commercial or utilitarian contexts and remade via collage. The attention to the ready-made in these works—along with Youngblood’s longstanding use of photography and found images—are critically important elements that combine contemporary references, abstract forms and novel beauty.

In R.A..D…I..O., Youngblood continues to use typically discarded or overlooked images as anchor points within her mixed-media paintings, which now feature stenciled flower designs that provide a form of sculptural relief. Objects as varied as coat hangers, gloves and Nilla Wafer boxes are removed from their original contexts and made to function as units of form and color. Once deconstructed, these fragmented objects assume new meaning and significance within the visual fields that Youngblood creates. The deliberately constrained palette which characterized the artist’s previous works has been dramatically expanded to include yellows, blues, reds and blacks in a progression of tonalities that evoke the artificial and hand-made in equal measure.

While her compositions and techniques of abstraction have grown more complex, Youngblood’s connection to the photographic image remains an important visual and conceptual reference. This is reinforced by the use of photographic imagery in the nine new works—including images created by Youngblood herself or ones she sources from the flow of digital imagery found online. Though we might try to recapture the original meaning of images in Youngblood’s paintings, the artist’s altering or fracturing of their forms makes such an attempt altogether impossible. Instead, she reveals the malleability not only of the materials and images around us, but ultimately of language and meaning as well.


About the Artist

Brenna Youngblood (b. 1979 Riverside, CA; based in Los Angeles, CA) is known for creating multi-faceted works that exist at the intersection between abstract painting, assemblage and photography and which explore the layered meanings of American material culture. Though often classified strictly as an assemblage artist within the lineage of fellow Californian artists like George Herms, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy and Betye Saar, Youngblood’s practice ultimately defies easy categorization. 

Originally trained as a photographer, Youngblood combines a sensitivity to the world of ready-made images with an interest in the fragments of discarded objects that surround us. The multi-layered and densely textured paintings she creates, which she refers to as “landscapes,” acknowledge the tradition of assemblage without being confined by it. Instead, Youngblood uses these everyday materials to, as she has said, “make something new out of something old,” while also creating highly charged and multi-layered critiques of contemporary consumer culture. Her work also regularly deals with political subjects and social issues as she explores Black American identity and representation while referencing historical moments in Black history.

Youngblood’s work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Solo exhibitions include R.A..D...I..O., Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (2025); the LIGHT and the DARK, Roberts Projects, Culver City, CA (2021); Lavender Rainbow, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA (2020); Abstracted Realities, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle (2015); Projects Series 50: Brenna Youngblood, Pomona College Museum of Art, Pomona, CA (2015); Brenna Youngblood: Loss Prevention, the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2014) and Hammer Projects: Brenna Youngblood, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, (2006). Group exhibitions include Colliding Vision: Contemporary California Collage, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA (2023); Art of California: Greater than the Sum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2021); Dust My Broom: Southern Vernacular from the Permanent Collection, California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2019); Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO (2017); A Shape That Stands Up, Art + Practice, Los Angeles, CA (2016); AFRICA FORECAST: Fashioning Contemporary Life, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA (2016); Murmurs: Recent Contemporary Acquisitions, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2013); Fore, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2012) and Made in L.A. 2012, Organized by the Hammer Museum in collaboration with LAXART, Los Angeles (2012). In 2015, she was the recipient of the Seattle Art Museum’s Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize.

Youngblood’s works are held in private and public collections, including the Fundación/Colección Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Seattle Art Museum; the Art, Design and Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara, CA; The Blake Byrne Collection, Los Angeles, CA; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Creative Artists Agency, Los Angeles, CA; The Eileen Harris Norton Collection, Santa Monica, CA; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA; JP Morgan Chase Art Collection and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.

For additional information, please visit robertsprojectsla.com or contact David Daniels, Sales Director at david@robertsprojectsla.com or 323-549-0223.

For press inquiries, please contact the team at ALMA.


Brenna Youngblood: R.A..D...I..O.

Roberts Projects

Alex Kerr: Starting Gate
April 4 – May 10, 2025
Opening Reception: April 4, 2025 6–9pm
 
NOON Projects is honored to present "Starting Gate" by Alex Kerr, opening April 4, 2025. This is Kerr’s first exhibition with NOON Projects in Los Angeles, following a solo presentation together at NADA Miami in 2023. "Starting Gate" showcases a new body of work that brings together ceramic lamp sculptures, bronze works, paintings, and a sound piece, extending Kerr’s exploration of desire, control, and deflection—the mechanisms by which we reveal, restrain, and obscure ourselves.

Kerr’s practice is rooted in dramaturgic symbolism and the shifting nature of identity, pulling from theatrical motifs, stagecraft, and surrealist humor. His work navigates the real and imagined space between authenticity and artifice, where performance becomes both a form of expression and a site of tension. "Starting Gate" builds upon this foundation, presenting a richly textured world where familiar objects are transformed and recontextualized. Through new material investigations, including cast bronze plates and large-scale ceramic lamps, Kerr deepens his inquiry into the paradox of self-mythology—where the compulsion to be seen collides with the instinct to withdraw.

Desire, control, and deflection underscore the exhibition’s central themes. The manic hunger of cartoonish longing—the awooga eyes, the slack-jawed wolf—is met with an equal and opposite force of restraint. In a new series of paintings built on mitered panels that appear to leap into space, Kerr renders an abstracted, backstage reality populated by the harlequin, the dressing room mirror, and warped theatrical planes—places of transformation where identity is both crafted and dissolved. His two monumental ceramic lamps—each standing nearly six feet tall—embody this theatrical tension. One lamp, a four-faced clock tower labeled with different salads (Caesar, Cobb, Niçoise, and Waldorf), plays on the idea of being “dressed up” for performance, a humorous nod to the expectations of presentation. The other, featuring an overturned limousine perched on raindrops, evokes the aftermath of a spectacle—desire met with its inevitable collapse.

Kerr’s bronze plates—displayed on infinitely rotating bases—extend this meditation on control and deflection. The spinning plates, an age-old metaphor for precarious balance, suggest both an act of mastery and the prescient threat of failure. Throughout "Starting Gate," Kerr repurposes objects and symbols from his ongoing codex—the harlequin, the snowman, the trophy, playing cards, and surrealist clocks—constructing a universe where time loops endlessly, control is illusory, and the line between audience and performer blurs. The exhibition’s sound piece, an invisible cuckoo clock that announces the time every quarter hour, introduces an unseen presence into the space, underscoring the tension between revelation and retreat.

Ultimately, "Starting Gate" meditates on the push and pull of desire and control, the absurdity of performance, and the necessity of deflection. Kerr’s meticulous craft, honed through his background in traditional pottery techniques, becomes a vehicle for illusion—a magic act that toggles between revelation and disguise. In this latest body of work, Kerr pushes his inquiry into the mechanics of spectacle and self-invention, inviting viewers to question where the act begins and whether it ever truly ends.

For more information email info@noon-projects.com or call 971-341-6648

Alex Kerr: Starting Gate

NOON Projects

"Yes, you're changing. But the best parts of you are still here."
– Amina Cain, Indelicacy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020)

Coordinating paintings by Calla Donofrio with sculptures by Kento Saisho, the exhibition attends to conversions, registered here as manifold shifts in state.
‍
Calla Donofrio (b. 1990, Torrance, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles. The artist received her BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2013. Solo exhibitions: “Conversion,” Cheremoya, Los Angeles (2025); “Fear,” California Institute of the Arts (2013). Selected group exhibitions: “Out of Body,” Not Real Art (online) (2025); “Drawings & Prints,” Salmagundi Club, New York (2022); “Figurative Show,” Salmagundi Club, New York (2022); “Women Artists Show,” Dacia Gallery, New York (2022); “Comfort & Gratitude: Excellence in Traditional Fine Art,” California Arts Club, Los Angeles (2021); “Line Art Attack,” Hive Gallery, Los Angeles (2019); “Tiny Visions,” Hive Gallery, Los Angeles (2019); “Text Me Up,” Tate Modern, London (2012); “Bringers of the Light,” Gallery 1313, Toronto (2012); “Love Art,” Tinystage Gallery, Los Angeles (2012); “Not An Exhibition: The UK’s First Witch House Art Showcase,” Lumiere Gallery, London (2012); “Social Being,” Hudson Gallery, San Pedro, CA (2011); “Rough Around the Edges,” Windsor Art Center, Hartford, CT (2011); “Illuseum,” Pastee Co. Gallery, San Pedro, CA (2011).

Kento Saisho (b. 1993 in Salinas, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles. The artist earned his BFA in Furniture Design from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, in 2016, where he was a Windgate-Lamar Fellowship recipient from the Center for Craft in Asheville, NC. Solo & two-person exhibitions: “Conversion,” Cheremoya, Los Angeles (2025); “Things,” Open Mind Art Space, Los Angeles (2022); “Mansion Apartment Shack House,” Gallery North, Penland, NC (2020). Selected group exhibitions: “limina, lumina,” Reisig and Taylor Contemporary, Los Angeles (2024); “Best in Show,” Pamplemousse Gallery, Richmond, VA (2024); “Smokey Trails,” Rhett Bharuch Gallery, Los Angeles; “Skin, Holes, and Hovels,” Reisig and Taylor Contemporary, Los Angeles (2023); “Fjord Anniversary Show,” Fjord Gallery, Philadelphia (2023); “WITNESS | holding time,” Penland Gallery, Penland, NC (2023); “Queer + Metals,” Hereford College, Hereford, UK (2022); “A Tender Presence” (traveling) Gallery 2052, Chicago, Alma’s, Richmond, VA, and Penland Gallery, Penland, NC (2022); Small Acts: The Craft of Subversion, San Diego, CA; “NOMAD Art Show,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2021); “Dutch Invertuals: True Matter,” Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven, NL (2021); “What We Inhabit If Not Our Bodies,” Finlandia University, Hancock, MI (2021); and “Softer than Thought,” Penland School of Craft, Penland, NC (2019). Saisho completed the Core Fellowship at the Penland School of Craft from 2018-2020. He was a recipient of the inaugural Emerging Artist Cohort from the American Craft Council in 2021 and the Career Advancement Grant from the Center for Craft in 2022.

Calla Donofrio and Kento Saisho: Conversion

Cheremoya

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present The Never-Ending Journey, on view from March 29 –– May 17, 2025. This exhibition will present a selection of works by Dinh Q. Lê, including his monumental installation Một Cõi Đi Về alongside a collection of photographic weavings from the Reamker series, which constitute the artist's final pieces. 

Dinh Q. Lê: The Never Ending Journey

Shoshana Wayne Gallery

4pm: Public conversation with Sandra Jackson-Dumont and Umar Rashid, moderated by JJ Strawn

5–7pm: Opening reception

BLUM is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings and drawings by the late artist Robert Colescott, curated by Los Angeles–based artist Umar Rashid. Rashid frames this presentation of work—ranging five decades—as an entry point into The Anansean World of Robert Colescott, a parallel universe that violates principles of social and natural order, blithely disrupting what once was and then reestablishing it on a new basis. In the time of the ancient deities, the trickster was the only one who could successfully navigate the complex and morally fraught universe of power-hungry, vengeful, wickedly jealous, and ambivalent gods, as well as their equally maligned human counterparts. One can only imagine the path of Thoth, Hermes, Coyote, Dionysus, Loki, Prometheus, and the original spider-man, Ananse. Although there are far more “tricksters” woven into our collective human consciousness throughout time, I have kept the list relatively short so that I may get to the point. Despite being tasked with delivering various decrees on this and that, the messengers of the gods of old almost always had a penchant for mischief, high drama, and outright rebellion. And despite these “faults,” they managed to survive the wrath of their omnipotent masters and formed a complex relationship with their painfully mortal audience. Their legacy as “middle management” and mere couriers left an indelible mark on their human charges. With the death of the old pantheon,
humanity’s hubristic and equally chaotic reign, produced its own gods, monsters, and tricksters, bringing to mind the old saying, “As above, so below.”

And thus, we enter the world of Robert Colescott, grand trickster of the ages. The appellation is incredibly apt in terms of his artistic practice, yet he was not born thus but forged through the crucible of being an African American fine artist in a time of limited opportunity for those like him and the ideas he sought to bring forth in a postindustrial world, burdened by draconian racial awareness, social lobotomization, and post-imperial, imperial war machinations. This is mid-twentieth-century America, replete with all the trappings of Mount Olympus at its zenith.  — Umar Rashid

Robert Colescott (b. 1925, Oakland, CA; d. 2009, Tucson, AZ) was a proud instigator who, over a nearly six-decade painting career, fearlessly tackled subjects of social and racial inequality, class structure, sex, and the human condition through his uniquely rhythmic and often manic style of figuration. His distinctive works, while not easily placed within any one specific school of painting, share elements of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, "Bad" Painting, Renaissance Painting, Neo-Expressionism, and Surrealism. A retrospective curated by Lowery Stokes Sims and Matthew Weseley, opened at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH, in 2019, and later traveled to the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Sarasota Art Museum, Sarasota, FL; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL; and New Museum, New York, NY. The exhibition was accompanied by a comprehensive monograph on the artist’s life and work, published by Rizzoli Electa.

Colescott’s work is represented in public collections internationally, in such notable institutions as the Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH; Art Bridges Foundation, Bentonville, AR; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; BY ART MATTERS, Hangzhou, China; California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Crocker Museum of Art, Sacramento, CA; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Delaware Museum of Art, Wilmington, DE; Denver Museum of Art, Denver, CO; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; de Young Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles, CA; Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC
Davis, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.;
Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, OR; Pinault Collection, Paris, France; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Tucson Museum of Art,
Tucson, AZ; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; among many more.

Umar Rashid (b. 1976, Chicago, IL) creates paintings, drawings, and sculptures that chronicle the grand historical fiction of the Frenglish Empire (1648–1880) a conceptual world he has been developing for over seventeen years. Each work represents a frozen moment from this parallel history, often recalling fraught real-world narratives—both canonized and marginalized—with familiar signifiers and
iconographies. Rashid’s work channels the visual lexicons of hip hop, ancient and modern pop culture, gang and prison life, and revolutionary movements throughout time. Rashid’s work is represented in the public collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY; Jorge
Pérez Collection, Miami, FL; Mount Holyoke Art Museum, South Hadley, MA; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, Clinton, NY; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; and the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa, among others.

About BLUM

BLUM represents more than sixty artists and estates from twenty countries worldwide, nurturing a diverse roster of artists at all stages of their practices with a range of global perspectives. Originally opened as Blum & Poe in Santa Monica in 1994, the gallery has been a pioneer in its early commitment to Los Angeles as an international arts capital. The gallery has been acclaimed for its groundbreaking work in championing international artists of postwar and contemporary movements, such as CoBrA, Dansaekhwa, Mono-ha, and Superflat, and for organizing museum-caliber solo presentations and historical survey exhibitions across its spaces in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and New York. Often partnering with celebrated curators and scholars such as Cecilia Alemani, Alison M. Gingeras, Sofia Gotti, Joan Kee, and Mika Yoshitake, the gallery has produced large-scale exhibitions focusing on the Japanese Mono-ha school (2012); the Korean Dansaekhwa monochrome painters (2014); the European postwar movement CoBrA (2015); Japanese art of the 1980s and 1990s (2019); a rereading of Brazilian Modernism (2019); a revisionist take on the 1959 MoMA exhibition, New Images of Man (2020); and a survey of portraiture through a democratic and humanist lens (2023); among others.

BLUM’s wide-reaching program includes exhibitions, lectures, performance series, screenings, video series, and an annual art book fair at its base in Los Angeles. BLUM Books, the gallery’s publishing division, democratically circulates its program through original scholarship and accessible media ranging from academic monographs, audio series, magazines, to artists’ books. Across the three global locations, BLUM prioritizes environmental and community stewardship in all operations. In 2015, it was certified as an Arts:Earth Partnership (AEP) green art gallery in Los Angeles and consequently became one of the first green certified galleries in the United States. The gallery is also a member of the Gallery Climate Coalition, which works to facilitate a more sustainable commercial art world and reduce the industry’s collective carbon footprint. BLUM is committed to fostering inclusive and equitable communities both in its physical and online spaces and believes that everybody should have equal access to creating and engaging with contemporary art.

____

BLUM is pleased to present an exhibition of sculptures by Japanese artist Kazuo Kadonaga.

Kadonaga was born in 1946 in Ishikawa, Japan, to a family of forestry professionals. Deviating from intergenerational tradition, the artist chose a more creative path—initially pursuing painting before returning to his father’s sawmill for the inspiration behind a lifelong, sculptor-based practice. Aligning himself with the influence of Arte Povera, Mono-ha, and Gutai, Kadonaga’s works emphasize the material from which they are brought forth. Through meticulous interventions, the artist emphasizes the natural state of his subjects.

Press Inquiries

Nicoletta Beyer
Communications and Editorial Director, New York
nicoletta@blum-gallery.com

Christie Hayden
Communications and Social Media Editor, Los Angeles
christie@blum-gallery.com

"The Anansean World of Robert Colescott" Curated by Umar Rashid | Kazuo Kadonaga

BLUM

Wonzimer Gallery is delighted to present "Everything is Radiant," a solo exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Gary Brewer.

Life is an incomprehensible mystery. The forces that have shaped the infinite variations of living things are vast, and our understanding of what we see as reality is a mercurial slipstream of shape-shifting phenomena. Brewer's paintings and sculptures express his deep love of life and a desire to engage in articulating a spectrum of forms that reveal a glimmer of the metaphysical order in life's rich pageant.

Inherent in each of the life forms in Brewer's paintings or in the abstract biomorphic shapes of his ceramic sculptures, there is a quality that conveys the tenacity and complexity of this animate universe. Orchids, corals, gold formations, and lichens are a part of the lexicon of images that he uses in his paintings. In each of these subjects, we see something that instantly engages our mind, bodies, and imagination. The animated character of these shapes has intrigued Brewer for years. They express in their elemental designs, a life force that begets the complex unfolding of our world, adapting and metamorphosing to flourish in an ever-changing environment.

Brewer's ceramic sculptures are polymorphic; they suggest sea life, the body, and erotic orifices. The rich overlay of glazes excites the mind and suggests lichens, mosses, encrustations from the sea, dried salt flats, and myriad other phenomena. The sculptures are created without a design in mind. They unfold in an intuitive process; the sensual experience of feeling and shaping form through his hands guides him; Brewer creates his sculptures more through touch than sight.

Brewer feels as though the colorful and dynamic glazes in this body of works are a form of 3-dimensional painting. These ceramic sculptures are a recent and fascinating new development in his life as an artist; they are a reflection of the subject matter in his paintings transformed into a new physical expression.

Gary Brewer: Everything is Radiant

Lisson Gallery is pleased to announce its first exhibition with Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019), one of the boldest and most influential artists of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, whose foundation has been represented by the gallery since October of last year. This inaugural show also marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Known for her groundbreaking and multidisciplinary practice, which spanned six decades, Schneemann challenged societal and artistic conventions by using her own body and diverse media to address issues of sexual expression, gender, politics, and war. 

The exhibition focuses on Schneemann’s practice two decades into her career, centering on a unique multimedia installation engendered by a dream she had while visiting Los Angeles in the summer of 1985. In the dream, Schneemann envisioned round, rock-like shapes reminiscent of Monet’s Water Lillies, floating in the distance. The resulting work, Video Rocks (1987), shown at Lisson for the first time in its entirety, consists of 180 discs, each roughly the size and shape of a cow dung pat, spread across the floor in a shallow mound. At the head of this mound, five video monitors have been arranged in a row. Each screen plays staggered filmed scenes that allude to the preceding sculptural landscape — footage of people and animals crossing the rocks. Building on the self-reflexive explorations of embodiment and personal narrative she had established in her early 8mm and 16mm film works such as Fuses (1965), Plumb Line (1968–71) and Kitch’s Last Meal (1973–76), Video Rocks marks a pivotal moment in Schneemann’s practice. This immersive, multifaceted work was last exhibited in the United States nearly thirty years ago during her solo show Carolee Schneemann: Up to and Including Her Limits at the New Museum in New York. 

Alongside this installation, the exhibition includes a series of drawings that Schneemann simultaneously created to document the imagery and possible configurations of Video Rocks—expressive sketches in paint, crayon, and marker that capture the artist’s sources and methods. A selection of these works, including a 31 ½-foot-wide painting of pink and yellow floral forms that hangs horizontally on the adjacent wall—a reference to the water lilies in Schneemann’s dream—is also on display. Framing the entire assemblage in the gallery are five acrylic light rods suspended from the ceiling, illuminating the rocks below and adding another layer of lyricism to this ‘dream/vision’ space, as the artist described it. 

The exhibition also features works from Schneemann’s Lebanon Series (1981–1999), including Souvenir of...Tyre...Sidon...Damour (for Bruce McP.) (1982), a tactile collaged painting that blends and abstracts personal and political imagery to address the violence of the Lebanese Civil War and its aftermath. The Dust Paintings (1983–86), also part of the Lebanon Series, are abstract compositions that incorporate circuit boards, silkscreened images, nails, glass particles, ash, and other materials. These works reflect Schneemann’s long-standing engagement with political atrocities, such as her protest film Viet-Flakes (1965), connecting to her early experiments with painting and collage in the 1950s and 1960s. The Dust Paintings reinforce her deep material exploration, with rag paper surfaces layered with paint, string, vegetable dye, and glass.

If Video Rocks was Schneemann’s early attempt to merge her video works with sculpture, the Dust Paintings represent another instance of her desire to fuse and disrupt artistic mediums. Just as her early investigations aimed to break free from static, traditional forms, these later works reflect her continued efforts to create a dynamic and unfolding artistic practice.


Carolee Schneemann

Lisson Gallery

An exhibition of recent paintings by five artists: John Brooks, Canyon Castator, Kenwyn Crichlow, Pam Posey, and Vanessa Prager.

Opening Thursday, April 17, 2025.

Five Painters

For nearly six decades, pioneering conceptual artist Charles Gaines has used systems to create series of works that mine the complex relationship between perception and meaning. This February, following a major 2023 – 24 museum survey and an acclaimed public commission, Gaines returns to his hometown of Los Angeles to present a new sequence of his signature Plexiglas works at Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood—the most elaborate treatment yet of his ongoing Numbers and Trees series, first conceived by the artist in 1987. Consisting of nine large-scale triptychs and a suite of new watercolor diptychs, all works are based on photographs of baobab trees the artist shot during a trip to Tanzania in 2023.

Charles Gaines

Hauser & Wirth | WEHO

Gallery Luisotti is delighted to announce Minding Time, artist CJ Heyliger’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition is timed at ten years since his first at Gallery Luisotti and serves as an opportunity to observe how the artist has used photography to interpret the concept of time over the last decade. It is a survey of several series including Hell Mirage, 13 Vs, and most recently Horizon Studies, a set of small-scale works made using analog and digital methods.

Rather than depicting fixed moments, Heyliger’s photographs illustrate a more speculative view of time. Through a multitude of gestures–blurs, inversions, and even the physical manipulation of prints–the works in the show question the photograph as a means to describe time and space.

The earliest work in the exhibition is Goler Canyon (from Nothing Stands Still), which presents the viewer with vibrating geometries of a desert canyon and mountain ridge that are the result of multiple visits to the same site over time. During these trips the artist would try to reorient himself and see how closely he could make the same photograph on the same piece of film. The resulting image not only points to a layering of time which is present in the physical geologies of the sites but also undercuts the idea of a photograph representing a singular moment.

Works from 13 Vs present time through solarized photographs that have crossed a tipping point of exposure to the sun. Much like a quick sunburn on a bright summer day, the energy of the sun overwhelms the chemistry of the film and the familiar areas of light and dark as seen by the human eye are inverted. There is a haunting reversal in these black and white images which are simultaneously positive and negative. The soft reflections of sunlight, the ocean waves, and the readymade romance of the Pacific are subverted and presented as something to inspect with closer attention.

The first work in the exhibition, Westerly Wind, a suspension of a cloud of desert dust sifting through the artist’s hand, almost as if in a cinema still, is more “straightforward” work but still illusionistic and serves as a starting point for the explorations of time to follow. The latest works track time as sunlight fades from various locations. Finally, Heyliger introduces two singular transformations of the work by physically tearing prints and placing the halves side by side—their state permanently altered. The tear evades reproduction and is an action that cannot be performed the same way twice. Altering the print this way is an acknowledgement of the limitations of being human, and a way for the artist to attempt marking a fixed moment in time.

For more information please email us at info@galleryluisotti.com

CJ Heyliger: Minding Time

Gallery Luisotti

Join us in the courtyard to kick off Frieze LA 2025 to celebrate the openings of ‘David Hammons. Concerto in Black and Blue’ and ‘George Rouy. The Bleed, Part II’ at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles. Enjoy cash bars and food for sale by the gallery’s onsite restaurant Manuela, and music by DJ Jihaari and Grandfather.

Hammons’ acclaimed installation work ‘Concerto in Black and Blue’ will be presented for the first time since its debut over twenty years ago and will be accompanied by the LA exclusive launch of the exhibition catalogue ‘David Hammons,’ which revisits the artist’s 2019 show at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles. A singular book created entirely under the artist’s direction, this publication illustrates the most expansive exhibition of this legendary artist’s work to date.

Galleries will be open for viewing from 6 – 9 pm.

This event is free; however, reservations are recommended.

About ‘David Hammons. Concerto in Black and Blue’ 
Presented for the first time since its debut over twenty years ago, artist David Hammons’ acclaimed installation work ‘Concerto in Black and Blue’ will be reprised at Hauser & Wirth's Downtown Los Angeles Arts District complex.

About ‘George Rouy. The Bleed, Part II’
British artist George Rouy’s first US solo exhibition with the gallery, following upon the artist’s recent London presentation. This ‘second chapter’ will feature all new works extending his exploration of human mass, multiplicity and movement. Characterized by a distinctive dynamism, Rouy’s works capture essential experiences of contemporary life – desire and vexation, the urge to connect frustrated by alienation – to address emotional extremities in a globalized, technologically-driven age.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the US premiere of ‘BODYSUIT,’ a collaborative performance by Rouy and internationally acclaimed choreographer Sharon Eyal. ‘BODYSUIT’ is commissioned by Hannah Barry Gallery and co-produced with Hauser & Wirth. Details and ticket information are forthcoming.

About ‘David Hammons’  
This post-exhibition catalogue revisits David Hammons’ 2019 show at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles. A singular book created entirely under the artist’s direction, this publication illustrates the most expansive exhibition of this legendary artist’s work to date.

David Hammons: Concerto in Black and Blue | George Rouy: The Bleed, Part II

Hauser & Wirth DTLA

BEYOND THE STREETS proudly presents PINK CLOUD, the triumphant LA debut of graffiti icon GREY (Jonas Melvin). A trailblazer of San Francisco’s golden graffiti era, GREY revolutionized the art form with his bold, punchy style, influencing generations. After rising to fame in the late '90s, GREY disappeared into a world of addiction and turmoil, resurfacing years later with a renewed purpose.

Now sober, GREY reflects on his journey through vibrant installations, paintings, and sculptures that blend his struggles with a message of hope. The show also features works by Alexis Ross, Alicia McCarthy, Angel Castro, Barry McGee, Cheryl Dunn, Dan Murphy, Dave Schubert, Elberto Muller, GKAE, Mark Cross, MERCH, Stephen Powers, Timothy Curtis, Todd James, and more.

A portion of proceeds supports Feed The Streets LA, aiding communities in need.

Details: beyondthestreets.com


GREY (Jonas Melvin) & Friends: PINK CLOUD

Beyond The Streets

Colectivo Cherani is a political and artistic initiative organized by an intergenerational group of artists: Betel Cucué, Giovanni Fabián Guerrero, Francisco Huaroco Rosas, Ariel Pañeda, and Alain Silva Guardian. Its name refers to the place where the collective was founded: Cherán, a town located in the state of Michoacán, Mexico. As part of a 2011 political uprising by the Purépecha community of Cherán, Colectivo Cherani has pioneered a cultural movement that seeks to recover and invigorate the plurality of cultural expressions of the Purépecha people. The collective’s output is characterized by the use of various artistic techniques, including painting, murals, graffiti, photography, installation, and hand-embellished objects, reflecting the customs and traditions of the community. Colectivo Cherani foregrounds the importance of communal justice, self-government, resistance, and the role of art and ancestral Indigenous traditions in transforming society.

Hammer Projects: Colectivo Cherani is organized by Pablo José Ramírez, curator, with Jessi DiTillio, curatorial assistant.

Hammer Projects: Colectivo Cherani

In recent decades, technological advances have supercharged surveillance. Online, personal data are automatically collected and analyzed on a mass scale. Algorithms watch, listen, track, and identify people, complementing and sometimes replacing human eyes and ears. Powerful combinations of surveillance software and hardware, such as surveillance cameras outfitted with real-time facial recognition, are conquering public spaces. These technologies are often misleadingly presented as though they were pure innovation and have no history.

The exhibition Counter/Surveillance traces the historical roots of such surveillance devices and methods, and the Cold War dynamics that shaped and spread them. It explores the precursors of current biometric surveillance in Cold War manuals for police, border guards and spies; in forensic portraiture; and in the little-known early history of computer facial recognition, revealing links between forensics, science, art, and popular culture. It also traces similarities between Cold War surveillance devices and methods used in East and West, from miniature cameras and listening devices to forensic composite kits. These not only point to a shared technical history, but are also indicative of exchange, inspiration, and imitation across the Iron Curtain. Technical exchanges with allies in the Global South ensured further international dissemination.

Then as now, the skills and tools of secret services were sometimes mirrored by the creativity of their targets. Throughout history, dissidents, activists, and artists have found ways to “watch the watchers” in order to evade, criticize, and expose them – sometimes using the very same surveillance methods and tools deployed against them, from covert photography to profiling and encryption. Others repurposed surveillance tools to make art or created artworks that correct and reclaim the distorted narratives that emerge from personal surveillance files. By showing the rich history of such acts of countersurveillance, the exhibition calls attention to the many ways in which people have reclaimed agency, it celebrates human ingenuity vis-à-vis state control, and it shows how art can be an inspirational signpost in the process. 

The exhibition includes artwork from Sadie Barnette, Paolo Cirio, Asya Dodina & Slava Polishchuk, Graham Fink, Ken Gonzales-Day, Damara Inglês, Yazan Khalili, Verena Kyselka, Gerhard Lang, Francisco Masó, Decebal Scriba, Liat Segal, Nedko Solakov, Xu Bing, Yang Jian, and Mail Art from the Mail Art Archive of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and Robert Rehfeldt, Berlin. 

Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency was curated by Wende Chief Curator Joes Segal and science historian Marieke Drost.

The exhibition is made possible with support from Getty through its PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative. The Wende Museum is participating in the PST ART Climate Impact Program.

Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency

Augmented Reality Exhibition
AR OPEN
Sun, 02/25/2024 -Wed, 12/31/2025
Venice Public Art Walls

Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Diddle My Skittle (LA), 2024, AR Installation, Venice Beach
feat. Diddle My Skittle (LA) by German artist Anne Duk Hee Jordan

AR Open invites you to immerse yourself in the world of augmented reality artworks blending into the scenic views of Venice Beach – all with your own cell phone. AR OPEN features artworks by Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Jeewi Lee, Pixelated Realities, Dennis Rudolph, Benedikt Terwiel, Jonas Wendelin, and others.

At the heart of the exhibition stands the piece DIDDLE MY SKITTLE (LA), commissioned by the Goethe-Institut LA. This AR sculpture delves into themes of gender, power, and alternative world orders, transporting the world-famous Hollywood sign to Venice Beach. It serves as the backdrop for this unique, interactive, site-specific art experience. Jordan's work confronts traditional male dominance, featuring a flying manta ray-like creature that symbolizes female empowerment and resistance against patriarchal structures. Initially inspired by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the piece has evolved to address broader issues of gender inequity and the male gaze in cities such as Moscow, Berlin, Hollywood, and beyond.

PLEASE NOTE: 
The site-specific installation is only accesible on location at the Venice Public Art Walls
This is a web-based project viewed via AR-enabled smartphone or tablet (2017 or newer) using mobile data.
Attendees must bring their own smartphone or tablet.
No apps are needed to access the installation.
Upon arrival at the Venice Public Art Walls, open www.ar-open.com on your compatible smartphone or tablet
The map and the works and further instructions on how to view all installations can only be found on the mobile version of the project: www.ar-open.com

All artworks are part of Augmented Studies, an AR program exploring the potential of augmented reality for contemporary art. Based in Berlin and operating internationally, Augmented Studies has produced numerous public art projects and has been running the exhibition series AR OPEN in Al-Zawraa Park in Baghdad since 2021 and in Berlin's Tiergarten since 2022. 

AR OPEN Augmented Reality Exhibition

AR Open @ Venice Public Art Walls

The Western Mystique reimagines the West beyond its mythic past. The frontier was never just cowboys and conquest; it was a place shaped by the resilience of women whose stories remain largely untold. From Indigenous leaders like Lozen, the Apache warrior and healer, to Biddy Mason, the formerly enslaved woman who built a legacy of landownership and community care in California; from 'Stagecoach Mary,' the first African American woman to work as a U.S. postal carrier in the West, to artists like Agnes Pelton, who sought spiritual transcendence through abstraction, and yes, even 'Calamity Jane'—women have long transformed the West into a space of reinvention, survival, and quiet revolution.
 
Just as The Feminine Mystique* challenged limiting narratives of womanhood, this exhibition sheds light on the unseen women of the West:  the healers, caretakers of the land, makers, and visionaries who defied expectations and left an indelible mark on history. It brings together a new generation of artists whose work isn’t about the West as a place, but as a feeling, an invitation to explore the unseen, to heal, and to awaken something deeper within us. Through abstraction, texture, and form, these artists honor the spirit of those who came before, pushing beyond boundaries to awaken something transcendent—an echo of the past, a vision for the future.
 
*Feminine Mystique book by Betty Friedman

Western Mystique

Dorado 806 

'Pit Party' reimagines suburban Americana as a hyperreal spectacle, where larger-than-life rituals of pride, masculinity, and performance are re-enacted, satirized, and transformed through the outsider gaze of four young artists. By stepping into this exaggerated world, they adopt its myths, mimic its grandiose displays, and reinterpret its cultural codes as both critique and catharsis. Blurring the line between participation and parody, their work exposes the contradictions of a culture fixated on visibility and pride.

Sophie Chao, Megan Hsu, Sarah Kim, Brandon Ngai: Pit Party

alt projects

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to present Hugo Crosthwaite: Ex-voto, the artist’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will run March 1 - April 5, 2025 with an opening reception on Saturday, March 1 from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. An artist talk will be announced in March.

Hugo Crosthwaite: Ex-voto, brings together a new series of large-scale paintings and multi-panel mural on canvas—a prolific endeavor that continues his commitment to visualizing the many myths, narratives, and dynamics of his native Tijuana, Mexico. The exhibition's title pays homage to Mexican ex-votos, a folk art genre originating from a synthesis of European and Mesoamerican traditions. "Ex-voto," from the Latin ex voto suscepto (meaning "from the vow"), denotes a painting or object expressing gratitude through depictions of answered prayers and miracles. Ex-votos typically portray petitioners dramatically situated within scenes of their dilemmas, where divine beings intervene unexpectedly from the spiritual realm. 

These earnest, dream-like, and surreal compositions have inspired Crosthwaite's latest body of work. He paints the true stories, miracles, and vows of Tijuana residents, portraying them as icons of resilience and perseverance. Long known for his trademark black-and-white palette, these new paintings mark an important shift as color becomes a primary element in conveying a new spectrum of experiences within a narrative populated by heroines and modern-day saints forging their way through collapsing systems, both literally and figuratively. Crosthwaite resists simplistic interpretations and dismantles frameworks of hierarchy, class, and politics, altering power dynamics to evoke the complexities and in-between-ness of the border city.

The paintings offer a captivating contrast in composition. They juxtapose the fluid shapes of the human form with the sharp, angular lines of architecture. This serves as both a tribute to the city's unique urban landscape, characterized by its stacked and tiered hillside homes, and a skillful exploration of cubism's ability to represent multiple viewpoints simultaneously. He also indulges in wordplay, broadening his social critique to encompass the mechanisms of capitalism by interrupting the scene's intrusive advertisements at points that reveal dual meanings and puns. This is complemented by a variety of ominous visual symbols, such as Coca-Cola bottles, roosters, spirits, and skulls. The vernacular is transformed into allegory as Crosthwaite utilizes symbols of memento mori and vanitas, serving as a timeless yet urgent reminder of humanity’s common ground.

For 25 years, Hugo Crosthwaite has cultivated a radical storytelling practice, bringing hard truths, journeys, dreams, and struggles of everyday people, crossing and living along one of the world’s most traversed international borders. Attracting travelers from all populated continents, the San Ysidro Port of Entry and the metropolis of Tijuana offers ample narratives, from the myths and stereotypes circulated by foreigners, to the hopes of those looking for opportunities in the North, to Americans who visit for affordable goods, medical tourism, cultural diversions, as well as the exploitive underbelly of the market for contraband and sex tourism—what the artist calls “cannibal tourism.” Crosthwaite’s documentary approach has included recordings of oral histories, live-sketch graphite portrait drawings, murals and animations to capture stories that often go untold in a region shaped by constant flux. 

Hugo Crosthwaite (b. 1971, Tijuana, BC, MX) lives and works between Rosarito, BC, MX, and San Diego, CA, US. He holds a BA in Applied Arts from San Diego State University. Crosthwaite was awarded First Prize in the 2019 Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition for his stop-motion animated video A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez, and subsequently the portrait commission for Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, another stop-motion animation portrait that debuted at the NPG in 2021. Other awards include the 2021 San Diego Art Prize and the Grand Prize at the 2014 XI FEMSA Monterrey Biennial, MX. Crosthwaite’s works are included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Morgan Library and Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; San Diego Museum of Art, CA; National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA; Boca Raton Museum of Art, FL; University of Arkansas Art Gallery, Little Rock, AK; FEMSA Collection, Mexico City; CECUT/Centro Cultural Tijuana, Mexico; and private collections in the U.S. and around the world.


HUGO CROSTHWAITE: Ex-voto

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

Subliminal Projects is pleased to present Visual Language: Vistas, a group exhibition featuring artists who expand and redefine the landscape genre with a focused tribute to California. This exhibition marks the third iteration of Visual Language, an ongoing curatorial collaboration with Coates and Scarry, examining art as a communication medium within specific artistic genres.⁠
⁠
In the wake of the fires impacting Los Angeles, Visual Language: Vistas centers itself as a love letter to California, embodying our shared journey of healing, rebuilding, and reimagining. In support of our community a portion of the proceeds from this exhibition will be donated to the LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund, providing emergency relief for artists and arts workers.⁠
⁠
Join us for the opening reception on Saturday, Feb 22nd, 7-10 PM. RSVP to rsvp@subliminalprojects.com to attend.⁠

*Featured Image: Matt McCormick, Dark Was The Night, Hot Was The Ground, 2024

VISUAL LANGUAGE: VISTAS

Subliminal Projects

I Am a Bloodstone
Too shiny
And too precious
To be buried beneath your feet
Dredged up under sediment
I’m no one’s hidden treasure

I fly—and I change
Begin anew again and again
I resist with joy!
I resist with courage!
You won’t make rubble outta’ me

– Derriann Pharr	 		
		 
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce Derriann Pharr: I Am a Bloodstone, the Birmingham-based artist’s Los Angeles debut exhibition, on view March 1 – April 5, 2025, with an opening reception on Saturday, March 1, from 4–7 p.m.

Derriann Pharr’s mixed media work conjures abstract drawing, painting, and poetic expression in a quest to free the human figure from societal norms and conventional notions of aesthetics and beauty. Drawing from her own experiences as a Black biracial woman grappling with self-esteem while facing societal expectations, Pharr's commitment to liberating her figures stands as a response to her observation of “a lack of intrinsic and physical consideration of marginalized bodies in the American South.”

At the core of Pharr’s artistic practice are themes of transformation, personal growth, and self-acceptance. Each work serves as a deliberate effort to deconstruct and reconstruct deeply rooted beliefs regarding identity, while also incorporating forms that have been historically overlooked in figure drawing, which often idealizes the human body. Rendered with pastel and acrylic on heavyweight black paper, vivid shades of magenta, glowing yellows, dreamy azures and radiant jewel tones infuse her works with an undeniable energy. The figures exist in a state of ambiguity, twisting and turning among lush arrangements of plants, ultimately evolving into spiritual representations of their authentic selves.

Pharr’s figures transcend the constraints of naturalistic representation by shapeshifting in a dynamic interplay of gestural marks, their contours fluid and otherworldly, defying the realities and confines of societal norms and expectations. Pharr’s affinity for vibrant colors evokes the peculiarities of childhood and gendered color preferences, wherein young girls often embrace and express a passion for bright hues before succumbing to insecurities and adopting more subdued palettes.

In I Am a Bloodstone, Pharr envisions landscapes untainted by the injustices of our imperfect humanity. These vibrant scenes emerge as a response to the prevailing sociopolitical environment, serving as a call to embrace personal authenticity as a form of resistance. Distorted depictions of eyes, limbs, genitalia, and therianthropic figures intertwine with vegetation, symbolizing a harmonious relationship between human essence and the natural world. The figures glisten and find solace beneath protective botanical canopies that connect our existence with theirs. The interplay of soft and hard along with the fusion of grittiness and smoothness, reflects the intricate tapestry of emotions and experiences that define the human spirit.

Derriann Pharr (b.1998, Winfield, AL) holds a BFA from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Recent solo exhibitions include Scott Miller Projects, Birmingham, AL (2024), and Bells Gallery, Dothan, AL (2024). Pharr currently lives and works in Birmingham, AL.


DERRIANN PHARR: I Am a Bloodstone

Central Server Works is pleased to present "Flesh World", a two-person exhibition featuring new works by Sofia Heftersmith and Monica Berger. Drawn together by a shared interest in pre-digital erotica, particularly vintage pornography from the 1970s and '80s, the artists reimagine the female form both as an artifact and a construct. With a critical eye on the aesthetics of desire, representation, and the commodification of the body, Flesh World interrogates the tensions inherent in the way we view and consume these images.

This exhibition marks Central Server Works' second presentation with Monica Berger, following her solo show "Cafe Bizarre" in 2023, and the first exhibition with Sofia Heftersmith, who has been part of the gallery's group exhibitions "Dandelion Wine", (2023) and "Men in the Off Hours",(2025). The exhibition is born from the artists' ongoing dialogue as painters, a creative partnership that began in 2022 and has fostered a mutual exchange of ideas and references.

Both artists' practices are grounded in an extensive archive of found imagery, primarily culled from the lurid pages of vintage adult magazines, with their garish colors, tactile pulp-paper textures, and an often surreal collision of text and image. These magazines serve as both inspiration and critique, with Berger using latex house paint and acrylics to manipulate and distort the figure, abstracting the original source material into vivid compositions. Heftersmith, incorporating collage techniques, explores the slippages between perception, context, and meaning, creating works that question how we read the female form within these charged visual codes.

In "Flesh World", the artists’ respective practices converge in a series of paintings made specifically for the show and a collaborative collection of their works on paper that reframe the idealized female body. Through both large-scale canvases and a smaller, magazine-inspired collaboration, Berger and Heftersmith foreground the overlooked, grotesque aspects of the body—exaggerated proportions, folds of skin, traces of movement—exposing the fragility and imperfection behind the glossy ideal. Their collaboration takes the form of a bootleg magazine, complete with covers and sealed in plastic, displayed on a magazine rack. In March, CSW Press will publish the magazine at the closing of the exhibition, ahead of its wide release at the 2025 Printed Matter Art Book Fair.

While both artists maintain mastery over their distinctive painterly techniques, their works exude a raw, unfiltered sensibility that transcends the confines of traditional representation. Echoing the spirit of punk in their engagement with the violence and eroticism of the body, the figures in these works exist in an unresolved space, suspended between control and abandon. This tension—similar to the early photography and poetry of Patti Smith—presents an art that cannot be neatly categorized, blending beauty with grotesquerie and desire with violence.

Further, the exhibition alludes to a more mythic dimension, evoking surreal imagery reminiscent of artists like Leonora Carrington. Here, women become hybrid forms, both human and otherworldly, caught in states of flux and transformation. Their figures resist definition, hovering between the realms of the real and the imagined, the self and the object.

"Flesh World" explores the contradictions embedded in these representations of the female body—not as a reclamation, but as an ongoing negotiation between desire, consumption, and objectification. It is an exhibition that does not indulge or condemn, but rather positions the viewer in the midst of the friction between the image and its viewer, where the complexities of desire are laid bare.

Image: Sofia Heftersmith, "Post No Bills", 2025. Acrylic on canvas. 40 x 30 in. 

Monica Berger and Sofia Heftersmith: Flesh World

Central Server Works DTLA

Artists: Keith Boadwee, Polly Borland, Robert Andy Coombs, Joe Davidson, Tom Dunn, Trulee Hall, Randi Matushevitz, Dakota Noot, Dylan Ricards, Zak Smith, Steven Wolkoff

Curated by: Jenny Hager, Ty Pownall, Steven Wolkoff

Los Angeles, CA – March 22, 2025 – As political forces tighten their grip on cultural institutions, Degenerate Art in the Age of DOGE stands as both a rebellion and a celebration of fearless self-expression. Opening at Durden and Ray on March 22, 2025, this exhibition confronts state-controlled narratives, censorship, and the suppression of creative autonomy.
Drawing from the Trump administration’s intervention in the Kennedy Center and the NEA and evoking the legacy of the Nazi Party’s 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition—used to vilify and silence artists—this show reclaims the term as a symbol of resistance. Featuring a diverse group of contemporary artists, Degenerate Art in the Age of DOGE challenges power structures, disrupts social taboos, and amplifies voices that refuse to conform.
Polly Borland, Joe Davidson, Tom Dunn, and Randi Matushevitz manipulate familiar gestures and shapes, distorting the human form in ways that simultaneously seduce and unsettle. Through photography, Keith Boadwee, Robert Andy Coombs, and Dakota Noot expose the private as public, questioning the norms that dictate how bodies should be seen and used. Likewise, Trulee Hall’s playful yet provocative videos and squeaky mechanisms, with their surreal imagery, blur the line between desire and taboo. Zak Smith’s ink paintings pull us into intimate, behind-the-scenes moments from porn sets and bedrooms, while Dylan Ricard’s vision of a post-Anthropocene world plays out in a close-up video of his mouth and skin, displayed on a Shibari-bound screen. Steven Wolkoff bridges past and present, drawing on historical references like Holocaust book burnings and Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ to confront the ongoing threats to artistic and intellectual freedom.
Spanning painting, sculpture, digital media, and performance, the exhibition delves into themes of gender fluidity, bodily autonomy, and sexual taboos. Degenerate Art in the Age of DOGE is not just a challenge to repression—it is a reclamation of creative freedom in a world that too often demands silence.
Content Warning:
This exhibition contains nudity, depictions of sex acts, and explorations of social taboos. Some works may be provocative or challenging. Viewer discretion is advised.




Degenerate Art in the Age of DOGE

Durden and Ray

In [siccer], Will Rawls considers the ways in which Black bodies are relentlessly documented, distorted, and circulated in the media. This dance performance, presented together with the artist’s exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA), experiments with stop-motion, a filmmaking technique in which still photographs are strung together to produce a moving image. Throughout [siccer]’s live performance, Holland Andrews, keyon gaskin, jess pretty, Katrina Reid, and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste are suspended in an uncanny reenactment of an iconic American film. When the camera’s shutter closes momentarily between photographs, Rawls and collaborators play within the intervals, taking advantage of a gap in surveillance. The project’s title is driven by the usage of “[sic],” a Latin adverb which indicates incorrect spelling within a quotation, often employed to contrast Black vernacular with standard English. 

Will Rawls: [siccer]

REDCAT

Palos Verdes Art Center / Beverly G. Alpay Center for Arts Education is pleased to announce 9 x 9: Contemporary Quilts and Containers, a showcase of artworks by 18 distinguished artists from California’s established fiber art community. Presenting innovative interpretations of traditional craft forms, these dynamic quilted, woven, plaited, and twined works investigate the purposes and potential of cross-cultural narratives and techniques through diverse media, expanding our understanding of visual culture. Material-based, conceptually engaged, and skillfully executed, these artists transform conventional quilting and container-making practices into sophisticated contemporary expressions.

The exhibition is curated by Jo Lauria and Carrie Burckle, and features: Fafnir Adamites, Charlotte Bird, Lavialle Campbell, Joe Cunningham, Barbara Danzi, Lea Feinstein, Luke Haynes, Polly Jacobs-Giacchinna, Susan Jamart, Merrill Morrison, Kathy Nida, Caitlin Parker, Corine Pearce, Kay Sekimachi, Carol Shaw-Sutton, Karyl Sisson, Elise Vazelakis, and Nicki Voss.

About Quilts
The elevation of American quilts to fine art began at the 1876 Centennial International Exposition in Philadelphia, where intricately patterned and vibrantly colored quilts demonstrated how functional objects could transcend their humble origins through artistic vision. The 1970s American Fiber Movement further revolutionized the medium by moving quilts from bed to wall, as artists embraced diverse techniques, materials, and imagery to convey deeper meaning.

The nine quilters featured here bring fresh perspectives to this legacy. Some create abstract compositions rivaling the visual impact of paintings, while others address pressing social, technological, and ecological challenges—inviting dialogue and inspiring hope.

About Containers
In contemporary fiber art, containers evolve beyond their fundamental purpose of holding and storing to become vessels for artistic expression. Artists combine traditional techniques—twining, coiling, knotting, and looping—with materials ranging from natural reed and grasses to commercial ribbons, found objects, plastics, and paper. Their works span from abstract sculptures to reimagined traditional forms, in scales from miniature to monumental.

Whether working with quilts or containers, these eighteen artists honor craft traditions while pushing material boundaries. Their innovations embed contemporary narratives and meanings that resonate with our time.





9 x 9: Contemporary Quilts & Containers

Palos Verdes Art Center

Track 16 is excited to present “Potential Goods,” a selection of Joseph Beuys’s prints and multiples, offering a renewed perspective on his radical approach to art, activism, distribution, and meaning-making.

Joseph Beuys: Potential Goods

Track 16

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles is proud to present a survey of the fascinating and poignant work of the late Pete Hampton (1940 - 2018), an artist deeply connected to his childhood landscape and driven by a sense of loss and hope for the natural world. His work, focused on saving the Puente Hills and La Habra Heights from encroaching development,
serves as both an artistic and environmental mission. Through his paintings, slide shows,
and homemade music, Pete Hampton crafted a vivid narrative about the changing landscape
of Southern California, where his beloved wilderness was steadily replaced by urban sprawl.
His art is not just about what was lost, but also about the yearning for a better, more
harmonious future.
The Lost Era, organized by his childhood friend and local artist, John W. MacLean, offers a rare
opportunity to see a collection of 50 paintings from Pete's personal archive. These works
range from serene depictions of the night skies over Whittier to more unsettling, nightmarish
imagery. The underlying themes of loss, yearning, and hope are present throughout his body
of work. The show is a tribute to Pete Hampton's unique artistic vision and his tireless
dedication to preserving the natural world he loved. It is a celebration of his legacy and a
chance to appreciate the work of an artist whose contributions were far ahead of their time, yet
remain deeply relevant today.

Opening:
Saturday, Mar 22, 2025
7-10 pm
On View:
Mar 22 - Apr 13, 2025
Sat and Sun 1-5 pm
and by appointment
TSA • LA
1206 Maple Ave, 5th Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90015
tigerstrikesasteroid.com
 Insta: @tsa_la
Hosted by
John W. MacLean
Organized by
Carl Baratta
carlbaratta@gmail.com