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 

Simard Bilodeau Contemporary is pleased to present El Baño, a solo exhibition of new works by Cuban artist Gabriela Reyna on view from 29 March to 26 April 2025. In a continuation of her ‘Bathroom’ series, Reyna conceives the titular space as a locale of shared emotional and physical intimacy.
It is here, in the privacy of the domestic realm, that the quiet scenes of routinary life between the artist and her partner are framed. With a tenderness rarely afforded to the contemporary toilette, Reyna identifies the bathroom as one of the most vulnerable spaces in the home, where nudity—in both the corporeal and figurative sense—takes centre stage. It is the nucleus from which narratives of power emerge, a space where intimacy and authenticity unfold without pretense.
There’s undoubtedly a sense of freedom in Reyna’s scenes; a raw, unconstructed beauty discovered in the absence of a discerning audience. Yet, in witnessing these moments, from behind the shower curtain, the base of the toilet or in a steam-softened mirror reflection captured in a phone camera, the viewer becomes a passive onlooker, granted access to a world that exists beyond performance. Reyna’s work exposes the relationship between her subjects as one built on trust. Presence itself becomes the dialogue—an exchange of glances and gestures free from judgment yet deeply attuned to one another. 
For many women, the bathroom is also a site of transformation. In this liminal space, layers are both applied and removed and identity fluctuates between what is hidden and what is revealed. Reyna appropriates the very methods used to construct an idealised, polished femininity by painting with makeup and using makeup wipes as a patchworked canvas. Not dissimilar from applying cosmetics to skin, her process involves layering, blending close-toned shades within the same colour family, and building textural depth to create light and shadow. In her hands, the material characteristics of cosmetics themselves become a metaphor: highly compact yet fragile, intensely pigmented yet easily erased. The wipes too, absorbing and embedding colour, serve as a reminder that what society deems ‘feminine’ is often temporary—disposable, yet deeply ingrained. 
The bathroom reinforces this in-between state, acting as both a private retreat and a threshold to the public world. It is a space where identity is not only reflected but also deactivated and reconstructed, where we remove our respective masks to find ourselves, often, quite literally, naked. Grounded in this reality, the paintings comprising El Baño illuminate the unspoken intimacies that shape our closest relationships, revealing the vulnerability of those we let past the threshold.
Gabriela Reyna (b.1991) lives and works in Havana, Cuba. She holds a degree in Visual Arts from the University of the Arts of Cuba (ISA), graduating in 2016. That same year, she began working as a curator at the Raúl Oliva Gallery of the Center for Scenic Design Studies in Havana. In 2022, she joined the faculty of the San Alejandro National Academy of
Fine Arts as a sculpture professor. 

Reyna has presented many solo shows in her native Cuba, and participated in group shows throughout the US, Europe, and South America. She is also part of the Jorge M. Pérez collection. She has completed two artistic residencies: the Molten Capital Residency in Santiago, Chile in 2017, and the RARO residency in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2018. Her work was also exhibited during the Mediterranean Art Biennale as a part of the exhibition Videonale #1: Image of Happiness, a show dedicated entirely to female artists in video art. Most recently she exhibited at Zona Maco 2024 in a group show and a solo exhibition at Zona Maco 2025.

Gabriela Reyna: EL BAÑO

Simard Bilodeau Contemporary

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

ALBERT REYES // TEENAGE COYOTE LOVERS IS A MAXIMALIST CELEBRATION OF LOCAL LEGEND HOMIE HERO 

So what the show means to me as a person and as an artist, it has been a great experience working with SADE gallery couldn’t ask for anything more really letting me just go at it and do what I feel so to me the show represents freedom, freedom of expression I enjoy painting, drawing print making and building an installation that creates a vibe and an environment onto itself the show celebrates Halloween and my Halloween haunted houses that I have made throughout the years in my backyard. It's also a wide range total tour of my art and art styles – adding in some new airbrush pieces (recently gone back to air brushing). It is a celebration of Halloween and the Southern California Way of doing it. My work also comments on the society and the culture in which we are living in. I take things in all around me. I when it comes out it comes out looking like this family friends, an artist that I appreciate politics, culture, sex, oh shit almost forgot religion – if you can’t find it in this show, it probably doesn’t exist. I’m a huge nerd of movies. I feel they are the highest form of art because they encompass all the arts. I am a horror fan and all these things are reflected in my work my work is to engage the viewer and get them to commit to seeing what narrative or what stories they bring to my heart, which is the art of Southern California America, as I know it.   — ALBERT REYES

OPENING EVENT ON SATURDAY APRIL 5TH FROM 7-11PM 

THE WORKS WILL BE ON VIEW EVERY SATURDAY AND SUNDAY 1-6PM / AND AT ALL OTHER TIMES AVAILABLE BY PRIVATE VIEWING APPOINTMENTS UNTIL SUNDAY APRIL 26TH 

THERE WILL BE MULTIPLE EVENT DURING THE RUN OF SHOW 

CONTACT SADE-LA@SADE-LA.COM FOR PRIVATE VIEWING APPOINTMENTS AND INQUIRIES 

@SADELOSANGELES @THEALBERTREYES

ALBERT REYES: TEENAGE COYOTE LOVERS

SADE

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

In Casa Monstruos first-generation Central-American artist and designer, Jasser Membreno, draws inspiration from the 80’s cult films he relied on as a child, merging autonomic creative processes with monsters, surrealism, and elements of Latin American and European mythology. The gruesome and whimsical monsters of Membreno’s drawings and paintings step into and out of worlds that ask them to assimilate, find authenticity, and give and receive compassion. 

After attaining a B.A. in Film and Video Animation from CalArts, Membreno developed projects for Disney and entertainment industry companies which evolved into his establishment of Casa Monstrous, a multimedia art and storytelling series. His work has been exhibited at La Luz de Jesus Gallery and LAMAG and he’s led programs for LA Commons and Arts for Healing and Justice Network. Membreno is the child of Central American immigrants and was born, raised and is currently based in South Los Angeles.

Jasser Membreno:  Casa Monstruos

Keystone 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

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

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

North Loop West presents Interpenetrate: an exhibition of work by Los Angeles-based artist Andrew Holmquist. This is the gallery’s inaugural show in LA after operating in Williamstown, Mass., from 2022 to 2024.

The presentation features new ceramic sculptures alongside paintings and works on paper including the artist’s towering LA Intersection, shown for the first time. In Holmquist’s hands, a major intersection in LA’s Atwater Village is abstracted into a swirling mass of movement and simultaneity: stoplights, cacti, streetlamps, and the whirring of cars and bright light are united on the stage of a concrete curb. Rendered through trace monotype, densely pigmented wax pastels and oil paint, LA Intersection underlines the artist’s ever-evolving use of abstraction to conjure multisensory experiences of the city. 

Holmquist paints and draws Los Angeles from direct observation: the portraits of palm trees on view were painted entirely outside in Elysian Park. Riffing on art historical traditions like en plein air painting, the artist takes advantage of LA’s almost-always sunny skies and envelopes his subjects in the intense light characteristic of the city. Individual trees are no longer standalone symbols of LA, but rather idiosyncratic figures inseparable from the active environments in which they were painted in. In a new body of work, Holmquist takes up the figure of the male bather, a subject deeply entrenched in Western art history. Painted in his signature sweeping, sensuous brushstrokes, the lines between the figures and bodies of water are fluid—the bathers slip in and out of recognizability, caught between real and imagined.

Running throughout the artist’s inextricably linked sculptural, painting, and drawing practices is a distinct feeling of fluidity and movement. Boundaries are unfixed and porous in Holmquist’s world: across mediums, between figure and ground, the simultaneous recognition of both the material reality of paint and what is depicted, and most recently, in his interest in light for its ability to fill and move through forms. As Holmquist simultaneously works across two- and three-dimensions, he presents the potential for abstraction to blur lines between viewer and work, inviting viewers to find themselves mirrored within.

Andrew Holmquist: Interpenetrate

North Loop West

In a world increasingly defined by dichotomies—light and dark, joy and sorrow, nature and humanity— Unspoken Emergence invites viewers into a transitional space where these distinctions gradually blur. Unspoken Emergence is a collaboration with Mash Gallery and the Pacific Design Center, and promises to be a unique exploration of artistic expression, seamlessly blending paintings, sculptures, and various media into a cohesive narrative. This exhibition doesn’t shy away from the intricacies of the human experience. Instead, it embraces the entire range of emotions—grief, awe, fragility, ecstasy—and demonstrates how these states mirror the cyclical patterns of the natural world. The desire to create becomes an act of translation, where inner thoughts are manifested through artistic expression. Paintings, sculptures, and installations converge here, each medium expressing its own unique voice within a larger, unspoken language. Their union is not coincidental but intentional—a symphony of color, emotion, and abstraction that transcends conventional categories. The tactile quality of sculpture, the ephemeral presence of installation, the symbolic weight of objects, and the layered depth of painting come together to embody the emotional landscape of emergence itself. Each piece hums with its own frequency while contributing to a larger collective resonance. Each corner of the gallery is designed to surprise, showcasing treasures that reflect the inner workings of the artists’ minds. Attendees can expect to embark on a journey through the diverse possibilities of art, leaving with a renewed appreciation for the myriad stories waiting to be discovered within each work.

Unspoken Emergence

Mash Gallery at PDC

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

Scratches on the Film features works by seven artists exploring the manufacture of meaning through transformation, psychological masks, performance, and artifice, the exhibition brings into conversation artists with deep investment in superficiality. A shared attentiveness to surfaces, veneers, and the appearance of appearances, reveals ideas about abjection, repression, impulse, and potential violences. This intergenerational and international group of artists embrace seduction and narrative construction to consider a multitude of art historical issues including originality, appropriation, the muse, control, and aesthetics.

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For the past several years Robert Russell has painted still lifes of teacups and Allach Porcelain figurines. His latest series depicts Judaica—kiddish cups, havdalah sets, challah platters—now housed in public or private collections, but originally from what is now the Muslim world, where Jewish communities flourished for centuries, across North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Removed from their original domestic and ritual contexts, immortalized and remembered in Russell’s oil paintings, the exhibition raises questions about cultural ownership, memory, and preservation.

Scratches on the Film | Robert Russell: Stateless Objects

Anat Ebgi | Mid-Wilshire

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

"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.
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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

TAG Gallery is gearing up for its upcoming exhibition on April 23 - May 16: innovative and narrative works by artists: Lee Cooper, Agop Gemdjian, Negin Haghighi-Mismas, Ellen King, and Bella Stoakes. Their shows reflect stories of place and fleeting moments of time captured through photography and archival printing; inspirations of sun, sand and sea through mixed media and oil painting; expressionist views of the modern world; and the intimate reflection on personal history, and place.

April will also mark Sunhee Joo's curatorial debut - Our Earth: What Artists Can Do, celebrating the 55th anniversary of Earth Day. 

Image: Isabella Stoakes "She Pressed Into The Grass"

Lee Cooper, Agop Gemdjian, Negin Haghighi-Mismas, Ellen King. & Bella Stoakes.

The Artists' Gallery (TAG)

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.

"The Anansean World of Robert Colescott" Curated by Umar Rashid 

BLUM

BLUM is pleased to present a survey exhibition of Kazuo Kadonaga, an artist who worked extensively in Los Angeles during the early 1980s and has exhibited throughout the US, Europe, and Mexico. Kadonaga’s practice draws from a holistic approach to natural forms, where he unveils the essence of material properties. Deviating from sculpture as a repository of projected ideas, the artist exposes the phenomenological transformation of materials. The exhibition includes seventeen works from 1976 to 2019, spanning bamboo, oak, cedar, cypress, handmade paper, and glass. 

Kazuo Kadonaga was born in 1946 and is based in Ishikawa Prefecture, where generations of the Kadonaga family have owned a cedar forest and lumber mill. A self-taught artist, Kadonaga first moved to Tokyo in 1966 to learn architectural drawing and later study architectural techniques such as welding at small factories. Immersing himself in the contemporary art scene, he frequented many galleries and attended major exhibitions of the time, such as the 10th Tokyo Biennale: Between Man and Matter and the Osaka Expo (both 1970). He studied under avant-garde painter Hironao Toyoshima, who would bridge him to Tsubaki Kindai Gallery, where Kadonaga held his first solo exhibition in 1971. Kadonaga’s earliest works combined wood with stainless steel (Wood No. 1) as well as with transparent acrylic (Wood No. 2) in which he would cut curves into squared lumber and produce a duplicate shape in a different material and place the forms side by side. These were shown at Tsubaki Kindai Gallery (1971) and Muramatsu Gallery (1973–77, and 1981) respectively, where Mono-ha artists, Kishio Suga, Nobuo Sekine, and Lee Ufan were actively exhibiting. During this time, his work was also included in several museum annuals, such as the 10th Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan (1971) and the 7th, 8th, and 10th Japan Art Festival (1972, 1973, and 1975), which toured to Mexico, Slovenia, Germany, New Zealand, and Australia. 

In 1974, Kadonaga was invited to participate in a hundred-day symposium on stone in Sweden. During his visit he had the opportunity to see Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone’s carved and stripped tree trunks at the Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm, and was greatly inspired by his ability to use the medium of the tree itself. This experience provided an impetus for him to begin focusing on the singular materiality of wood, studying its unique organic properties. He often sliced or split cross sections of the logs, drying sections separately, and reassembling them into a solid form. The artist’s process would begin in his family’s cedar forest, cutting the base of a tree just above the root flare, while the wood is still wet. He then sent the logs to a sawmill to have them professionally cut into paper-thin layers of wood with a veneer mill—usually used for building houses and furniture—gluing each skin back to its original form, letting the thin wood buckle and flare out while drying. At the Kanagawa Prefectural Gallery exhibition From Method to Method in 1975, he unraveled a cedar log, leaving its paper-thin pieces of bark directly on the floor as if shedding skin like a snake. The two large cedar logs currently on view at BLUM were first exhibited at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in 1985 and display live cuts against the grain of the wood. The rectangular holes along the surface are the result of natural splitting. The jagged lines across the tree rings are prominent in Wood No. 11 DB (1999), a large, gnarled cedar trunk. Kadonaga created these splits by first cutting the face of the trunk using a chainsaw just a few inches and then striking the wood with a mallet to allow for the jagged splits to naturally occur. 

Kadonaga was hired by Yoshishige Saito (1904–2001), a pioneer of modern Japanese constructivism, to assist with his solo exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, in 1978. Saito, who taught at Tama Art University from 1964 to 1973, was a key mentor to Nobuo Sekine and Kishio Suga. Sharing Saito’s conviction that illusion and individual expression were obsolete, Mono-ha artists often combined natural and industrial materials to articulate the relational structures through which these forms revealed themselves. While Kadonaga’s early works are in direct dialogue with Mono-ha as well as Minimalist repetition in both process and display to deviate from the objecthood of sculpture, the artist’s interests lay in exposing the intrinsic qualities and natural transformation of materials, and activating the threshold between formation and deformation that was specific to the materiality of wood. This was in stark contrast to Mono-ha’s focus on the in-between structure among subject, materials, and site. 

In 1976, Kadonaga began investigating the metamorphic process in which oak and bamboo were separately transformed by charring half of each piece into a pyramid of ashes in a specialized furnace at intense heat (approximately 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit). Burning oak into charcoal is a ritual often used in Japanese tea ceremonies in preparation to heat tea, in which the oak burns evenly and its cross section dries in a starburst pattern that radiates out from the center (sakura zumi, or cherry blossom charcoal). First exhibited at Muramatsu Gallery in 1976, each oak piece in Wood No. 1A shows the unburned to charcoal gradation, displayed in a row of over a dozen pieces. Praised by artist Lee Ufan, Wood No. 1A was shown in tandem with Bamboo No. 7A, charred bamboo poles propped against the wall. In the current exhibition at BLUM, the two 1976 works are brought together, and installed under skylights. The bamboo work, in particular, creates an arresting pattern of shadows from the rays of natural sunlight. 

In Conversation between Bamboo and Wood (1985) at Garden Gallery, Kyoto, Kadonaga activated sound by installing bamboo and wooden logs around a visitor who sat in the middle of the installation, experiencing the materials cracking in real time in response to shifts in temperature. 

In 1982, he began working with washi (handmade Japanese paper), layering thousands of sheets and using a veneer press to condense and dry the papers into a solid block in a high frequency wood dryer machine. Each piece of paper is then separated one-by-one at one end of each work. These condensed layers of pulp are hung along the wall in long columns or triangular forms, where the fibrous, feathery edges of the paper are left exposed at the bottom. Rather than subjecting the materials to convey a concept, Kadonaga works with the natural properties of the paper to allow their form to come alive. 

In 1999, Kadonaga began his long-term process of working with recycled glass from fluorescent light fixtures resulting in translucent green glass from iron oxide. For years, Kadonaga went through many trials and errors experimenting with molten glass using a custom-made furnace. The recycled glass is melted at 1,250 to 1,450 degrees Celsius (2,282 degrees Fahrenheit) in a melting furnace, and this melted glass slowly drips a single stream of hot liquid glass into the slow cooling furnace, letting the form take its own shape by steadily decreasing the temperature between three to six months depending on their size. They result in solid, squat mounds that swell like a Buddha’s belly and taper towards the top. The glass sculptures exhibited at BLUM range in weight from 1,000 to 1,200 pounds. Through these sculptures, one can observe how the transparent fragility of glass is apparent through the surface formation of the coils, which belie their weight and heft. 

Each material is approached with the fresh eyes of a studied observer. Eschewing his artistic hand, Kadonaga unravels each work from the inside out as if the materials take on their own life and form. As one critic noted about Kadonaga’s process, “In a serial manner, each element became the topic of his scrutiny. He analyzed their component parts, tested their attributes, and examined their intrinsic characteristics, noting their change in environmental characteristics like fluctuations in humidity or reaction to forceful impact.”

Kazuo Kadonaga (b.1946, Ishikawa, Japan) is a contemporary sculptor celebrated for his material-driven practice. Coming from a family of foresters, he developed a deep appreciation for the natural properties of wood. While he initially explored painting and architecture, Kadonaga shifted his focus in the early 1970s, rejecting overt artistic expression in favor of processes that allow materials to shape their own form. Since then, he has worked with wood, bamboo, paper, and glass, using methods that emphasize the natural behavior of each material. From coiling molten glass into sculptural forms to reassembling cedar logs, his works reveal the subtle interplay between natural structures and transformational processes. While his practice resonates with the philosophies of Japan’s Mono-ha artists and Western process art, Kadonaga’s approach remains distinctly his own—one of observation, patience, and reverence for materiality. 

Kadonaga continues to live and work in Ishikawa, Japan. His artwork has been exhibited including significant solo presentations at the Mingei International Museum, San Diego, CA (2005); Salt Lake Art Center, Salt Lake City, UT (2001); The Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, TX (1988); and Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (1985). In 1983, he was an artist-in-residence at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His work is held in numerous public collections worldwide, such as the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Toyama City, Japan; Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque, NM; Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, TX; The Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, HI; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico; The Museum of Glass, Tacoma, WA; the Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, Japan; Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, the Netherlands; and the University of California Santa Barbara Art Museum, CA.

 
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.


Kazuo Kadonaga

KP Projects is pleased to present Famous Paintings, an exhibition featuring the work of J. Otto Seibold. His paintings are a response to online overstimulation. The works are, it follows, hyper-flat, full of 2D architectural renderings, blocks of landscape, broken geometries — all suspended in depthless plains. Populating the fields are untethered symbols: topiaries, trashed Warhols and pots of color, and dripping botanicals wrenched like wrought iron garden fences.

J. Otto Seibold (b. 1960) is a self-taught artist who was born in Oakland, California, and grew up an apricots-throw away from the John Muir home in Martinez, CA. He was able to sneak into the art world during the “outsider artist” craze of the 1990s and is the first person to use digital software to create children’s books with Mr. Lunch Takes a Plane Ride (1993). Seibold has continued publishing for the past twenty years and is best known for the Mr. Lunch series, as well as Olive the Other Reindeer (Chronicle Books, 1997), and Vunce Upon a Time (Chronicle Books, 2008).

Also a widely exhibited artist, he has shown work in galleries and museums including Deitch Projects, New York; Paule Anglim, San Francisco; Grass Hut, Portland, OR; MASS MoCA, Adams, MA; and Creative Time’s 42nd Street Art Project. In 2000, Seibold had a solo museum exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

Written by Theodora A. Walsh

J. Otto Seibold: Famous Paintings 

KP Projects

Night Gallery is delighted to present Fragment of the Self, an exhibition of new work by Reza Aramesh. The artist will exhibit four new series across a diverse range of materials and processes. This is Aramesh’s debut solo exhibition in Los Angeles and with the gallery, following our co-presentation, with Dastan Gallery, of his 2023 sculpture Site of the Fall: Study of the Renaissance Garden, Action 182: At 01:01 pm Saturday 03 Feb 1968 at Armory  Off-site, New York, NY (2023). 

Aramesh challenges representations of the subjected body within historical, cultural, and political contexts. He deconstructs scenes of violence from media coverage of international conflicts that span the mid-20th century through today. His approach critically examines race, class, and sexuality while engaging with the Western art historical canon: Goya, José de Ribera, Andrea Mantegna, and Caravaggio are particular influences.

In collaboration with non-professional models, Aramesh reenacts carefully selected source materials as he transforms journalistic imagery into new forms. By stripping away overt markers of war, he displaces his subjects from the immediate realities of conflict. A resulting tension between empathy and cruelty underscores the body's transformation into mythology.

Fragment of the Self introduces four distinct series: Study of the Head as Cultural Artefacts (photographs of plaster heads alongside a bronze sculpture), Study of Color as Colonial Delight (embroideries on silk), Study for Fragment of the Self (drawings on paper that serve as meditative studies on the fragmented body), and Fragment of the Self (three marble sculptures). 

In each of these series, Aramesh delves into the literal and metaphorical meanings of sculptural fragments. He challenges traditional notions of wholeness and identity, highlighting resilience and adaptability. His works invite reflections on how meaning and beauty persist even in imperfection. 

In Study of Color as Colonial Delight, Aramesh selects specific hues from historical Orientalist paintings, first translating them into drawings based on reportage images and then rendering them as hand-stitched embroidery figures on silk. 

Through these material and conceptual investigations, Fragment of the Self bridges the personal and the  collective, the historical and the contemporary. Aramesh says: “I’m in dialogue with artists and atrocities of the past, excavating history as I construct alternate narratives.”

Image: Reza Aramesh, Fragments of the Self Action 505: At 9:45 pm Thursday 10 April 2008, 2025

_____

Night Gallery is pleased to announce Lost Time, a presentation of new oil paintings by American-Pakistani artist Zaam Arif. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

The Romantic writer John Keats once observed that all one needs to write poetry is a “feeling for light and shade.” Zaam Arif’s cinematic compositions make a similar case for painting. Arif modulates illumination and darkness throughout his canvases for Lost Time. His sparsely populated interiors tarry the porous boundaries between day and night, photographs and reality, memories and waking dreams. 

Arif was raised in a family of painters. He sought to forge his own path, studying physics before pursuing the more subjective fields of literature, music, photography, and film. He finally heeded the call to painting, though his syncretic interests continue to inform his practice. Many of Arif’s compositions incorporate characters, architectural details, and atmospheres drawn from the novels of Marcel Proust and Fyodor Dostoevsky and the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Edward Yang. 

Arif’s process always begins with a sketch, which he translates to canvas via a process of trial and error, trust and revelation. He poses a question and moves oil paint towards new, interpretive possibilities. The subjects are, fittingly, male figures in moments of rumination or repose. They are alternately finely limned or blurred out, rendered in impasto or lambent brushstrokes. Arif frames them within domestic interiors or subsumes them in dark wood paneling and barren walls. In Lost Time (all works 2025), for example, a boy stands in a light-filled doorway, while a seated woman in front of him fades into a shadowed corner. The relationship between these figures, and between the pair and their environment, remains mysterious. 

While some figures resemble fictional characters, others reflect the artists who inspired them. The stark, mirrored profile in Egon, for example, recalls the bedeviled countenance in Austrian painter Egon Schiele’s innumerable self-portraits. And the man in The Memory of the Self who ponders a table scape with a hardback book, crystalline bottle, and glass, inspired by paintings of the late Pakistani artist Colin David. Arif sublimates the original likenesses into new images that integrate fragments of other aesthetic references, half-remembered dreams, and the artist’s distant memories. 

Arif’s palette features an unabridged thesaurus of browns—sienna, umber, taupe, and yellow ochre—punctuated by blues. These tones make his compositions both antiquated and timeless as they give his presentations a cohesive, immersive sensibility. Though the scenes may belong to different stories, they’re culled from the same world of rutilant light and burnished shadows. The paintings appear subdued and filmy, as if seen through a scrim. The style reflects the ineffable sense of loss that accompanies the passage of time. It also harkens back to the classic films and novels that inspired the work. Proust, the author from whom the show borrows its title, notes that instead of seeing one world, we see it multiplied by all the artists,  and their wholly original worlds, that came before. 

–Tara Anne Dalbow

Reza Aramesh: Fragment of the Self | Zaam Arif: Lost Time

Night Gallery North

Night Gallery is thrilled to present Color Test, an exhibition of new paintings by Atlanta-based artist Hasani Sahlehe. This is the artist’s debut solo presentation with the gallery, following his inclusion in our 2023 group show The Big Picture.

Sahlehe’s practice is rooted in contemplative investigations of color and abstraction. His simple compositions feature overlapping blocks of color, which produce a distinct visual rhythm. Sahlehe’s approach is akin to that of a jazz musician who reinterprets a familiar standard in surprising ways; he introduces elements of intuition and improvisation into his rhapsodic variations on color and material.

The artist applies paint on raw canvas via two alternate methods: by spraying diffused acrylic paint with an airbrush and by pouring viscous acrylic gels directly on top of canvas, working flat on his studio floor. He describes this process as a means of allowing color to become one with the canvas, to emerge from its surface with immanent luminosity. As Sahlehe repeats this process with idiosyncratic variation, his paintings become both artifacts of a meditative practice and experiments in color.   

The artist has used musical analogies to describe his work. The titles of his recent solo exhibitions include New Songs (106 Green, New York, 2021); Favorite Song (Tif Sigfrids, Athens, GA, 2023); and Song Ideas (CANADA, New York, 2024). Speaking about the new body at Night Gallery, Sahlehe offers a similar, lyrical distinction. While his previous paintings—characterized by deeply saturated hues and stark juxtapositions—evoke the raw expressiveness of hard bop, the new paintings represent a shift towards more mellifluous and harmonious visual melodies. If earlier works brought to mind John Coltrane’s piercing saxophone, these paintings share more in common with Alice Coltrane’s harp. Ethereal and serene, they reflect an almost cosmic perspective on color, form, and perception. 

Sahlehe doesn’t just employ abstraction as a stylistic mode, but raises questions about abstraction’s very nature, in art as in life. He notes that even to imagine what constitutes something as fundamental as “the world” or “other people” relies on the human capacity for abstract thinking. 

In this sense, Sahlehe’s blocks of color belong to a lexicon of forms that transcends the relatively recent history of abstract painting—they are the standing slabs of Stonehenge, the rudimentary building blocks of childhood playtime, shapes arranged and rearranged in order to make meaning out of what we see.

—Logan Lockner

Hasani Sahlehe: Color Test

Night Gallery South

Wilding Cran Gallery is pleased to present PSYCHOMANIA, an exhibition of recent oil paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Alex Becerra. 

 

In a visual reflection on his travels to the Yucatan Peninsula, Alex Becerra’s PSYCHOMANIA presents a fantastical landscape which explores the complexities and curiosities of the human condition. Across three large-scale canvases, a terrain inspired by the artist’s emotional experience encountering the vibrant scenery, heritage, and folklore of the Yucatan, invites the viewer through a vivid portal of contrasting pigments and rich textures.

 

Across his body of work, Becerra’s maximalist approach engages an improvisational dialogue between the artist and his materials. Whether using a brush, his fingers, a palette knife, or the last drops squeezed from a tube of paint, Becerra spontaneously fills every inch of his canvases. Within Chiccharon ( Happy Pretty ), the painted scene brims with the dense greenery of an untamed jungle. A tangle of striking reds and oranges cuts through the overlapping layers of lush greens, blues, and yellows in bursts of unexpected intensity, drawing the viewer into a mesmerizing scene ripe with harmony and unpredictability. The combination of both abstract and representational elements suggests a controlled chaos, granting points of entry, pockets of respite and clarity for the eye and the mind. 

The spontaneous brush strokes and vibrant colors of Becerra’s canvases reflect the artist’s aesthetic investigations into the ecstasy and catharsis of creation, as an experience of both raw freedom and extreme vulnerability. In the painting Bathers, Becerra references art historical depictions of the natural world as a setting for soothing, cleansing, and rejuvenation. Amidst hues of deep purple and bright orange, the outlines of four female figures stand out above the canvas in neon green, allowing the backdrop of the jungle to seep through, their forms are entwined in a mess of leaves, absorbed into the pulse of their surroundings. Inspired by the folklore of the Yucatan, the painting evokes a spiritual engagement with the land, channeling both the tranquility of the jungle and the internal conflicts it stirs.

Throughout the gallery space, the jungle of PSYCHOMANIA serves to mirror the emotional landscape of creation, a realm of entangled joy and frustration, curiosity and anxiety, so deeply intertwined as to become barely discernible from one another. Through an aesthetic exploration of both his internal environment and his travel experiences, Alex Becerra beckons the viewer to uncover the stories embedded within each painted gesture, daring us to lose ourselves within a labyrinth of unexplored consciousness. 

Alex Becerra (b. 1989, Piru, California, USA) lives and works in Los Angeles. Working in painting, drawing, and sculpture, he explores the way we view modernity, often chopped up into bits and sliced together.

Rooted in the deep history of Modern European painting, specifically influenced by German Neo-Expressionism, Becerra has an unparalleled ability in maneuvering oil paint as he layers it on in thick, sweeping lines of impasto raised inches off the canvas. His thoughtful compositions incorporate all classical types of painting from self-portraiture and the female nude to still life and genre scenes, all dotted with recurring context-specific objects like beer bottles and car rims.

Seemingly quotidian, these symbols carry personal significance relating to his adolescence in Southern California and subsequent entrance into the international world of art. In this way, Becerra’s highly referential work bears a distinct aesthetic and energetic vibrancy unique to the artist. 

Becerra has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Timonier, New York, NY; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, IL; Karma International, Beverly Hills, CA and Zürich, Switzerland; Weiss Berlin, Germany, and One Trick Pony, Los Angeles, CA. Selected group exhibitions include VETA by Fer Francés , Madrid, Spain; Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Kunstraum Potsdam, Germany; Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; The Journal Gallery, New York, NY; Richard Telles Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI; M+B Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Journal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Ben Maltz Gallery, Westchester, CA; and more.

PSYCHOMANIA is Alex Becerra's first solo exhibition with Wilding Cran Gallery.

Alex Becerra: PSYCHOMANIA

Wilding Cran Gallery

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

Wonzimer

Unveil Gallery is pleased to present Spoiler Alert, a solo exhibition by Jean Lowe that brings together new works on paper and small sculptural objects alongside Planned Community (2004), a largescale landscape painting. Through wit, irony, and a keen eye for cultural critique, Lowe continues her exploration of human vanity and ambition, weaving together historical references and contemporary concerns in a way that is both thought-provoking and humorous.

Rooted in the tradition of Dutch Golden Age ‘cloudscapes,’ Planned Community replaces the windmills and serene European flatlands found in a van Ruisdael painting with the sprawling developments of contemporary America. Against the backdrop of industrial expansion and suburban sprawl, a vast and luminous sky looms overhead, an omnipresent reminder of the transient nature of human endeavor. The work recalls the moment in War and Peace when Prince Andrei, lying wounded on the battlefield, gazes up at the sky, recognizing the insignificance of personal ambition in the face of eternity.

The exhibition’s new works on paper expand this theme, juxtaposing imagery with text in a format reminiscent of Lowe’s long-running "book" project. These pieces expose the absurdity of first-world preoccupations, offering a playful yet incisive commentary on our fleeting existence. Her sculptural works, including a selection of self-help books and papier-mâché recreations of everyday objects, blur the line between high art and the mundane. A painted carpet installed underfoot further disrupts traditional expectations, encouraging viewers to reconsider their physical and conceptual relationship with the artwork.

With Spoiler Alert, Lowe invites us to reflect on the narratives we construct around success, self-improvement, and material culture. Through her distinctive blend of satire and formal beauty, she challenges us to laugh, question, and ultimately acknowledge the fragile illusions that shape our daily lives.

Jean Lowe: Spoiler Alert

Unveil Gallery

What is an artist supposed to do?

Not only are there infinite ways of answering that question, at the moment there are multiple ways of asking it. I mean, like, what does one do in life? Or when a paramilitary coup is dismantling your country’s government and trumpling the rule of law?

Like many artists in the first months of this year, the ominous start of the 21st century’s second quarter, the New York painter Caroline Absher felt completely at a loss to grapple with the outside world, a feeling only amplified when working on a new body of work.

Trying to introduce some calm into her world, Absher started meditating. It helped quiet her mind at first, but soon, to her surprise, it also started bringing her unexpected visions, flashes of memory and insights into her past, both imagined and real — “deeply buried things and beautiful colored shapes along with states of calm I had never achieved,” she says.

So not only did it feel natural to start incorporating some of these flashes and shapes into new paintings, Absher took it a step further and began trying to portray the actual processes and motions in her mind of the warring forces and emotions that she was experiencing (since taming them was clearly out of the question). Becoming almost fully abstract, Absher’s new paintings began to represent various kinds of conflicts that the artist needed to reconcile on a daily basis. The pink-yellow pastel calm of clarity and order versus the jarring, jagged chaos of unfettered, earth-toned expressiveness. The desire to open and expand one’s curiosity to all fronts versus the need to close, filter and protect one’s inner self from an overwhelm of information.

“There’s an interesting soft beauty in these that contrasts with a different anergy and darkness that’s quite violent” says Absher. “And that’s something that I think about all the time, but I wasn’t even aware that I was doing it on purpose in these paintings.”

Having experienced nearly out-of-body experiences when meditating, Absher also became fascinated with the ancient idea of the silver cord, a mythic link that tethers the human body to its soul. Today it’s a central concept to the theory of astral projection, but to Absher the silver cord has many strands. The daughter of a neuroscientist, Absher believes there are any number of ways to look at the mind-body consciousness that bring new color and depth to its still-mysterious nature. No matter what anyone claims, no form of science or spirituality has even come close to mastering it yet.

In a way, Absher personified the silver cord in her works through vague figural outlines. These ghostly, sketchy presences act almost like mediums in the media, standing in for a perceiving, higher self. They are watchers, to use Absher’s terminology, helping mold, sort, mediate and modulate the cacophony. But they’re far from passive spectators. One rides a horse, one takes winged flight, one curls up with a fox.

The resulting paintings, fittingly about the size of a doorway, are marked departures from Absher’s more representational works in which human figures were often confronted with eerie hypernatural phenomena like great branching lightning bolts or the aurora borealis. (In those, the silver cord might be perceived as a link between an earthly observer and unearthly phenomena.)

But even in her works’ new abstract presentation, Absher exults in the way that the eye — the artist’s or the audience’s — seeks for patterns, faces, bodies, and meanings. “One aspect of these works I love is something that only happens in person,” says Absher. “From far away, they’re very abstract, but the closer you get the more you feel your brain tugging at you, asking what am I looking at? What is it? Where is it? And the figures just sort of jump out.”

The mind, like the artist, is always trying to inject meaning into what it sees — to try and find if not a happy ending, then at least one that makes some kind of honest and authentic sense of the chaos.

That is what an artist is supposed to do.

Caroline Absher: The Silver Cord 

The Journal Gallery

David Zwirner is pleased to announce Sidewalk Chalk, an exhibition of new paintings by American artist Katherine Bernhardt at the gallery’s 616 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. Featuring Bernhardt’s signature lively brushwork and vibrant palette, the works in this presentation continue to expand the artist’s unique visual lexicon, which culls from an irreverent pop vernacular as well as her own life and the broader culture. Here she focuses on newer motifs such as Lucky Charms cereal marshmallows and sticks of butter, which are playfully combined with iconic imagery from her oeuvre, including the Sesame Street character Cookie Monster, the Pink Panther, and Garfield.

Katherine Bernhardt: Sidewalk Chalk

David Zwirner | 616 N Western

Make Room Los Angeles is pleased to present The Mind’s Eye, an exhibition of works that brings together Dallas-based artist Sophia Anthony, Los Angeles-based Aryana Minai, and New Haven-based Bix Archer. 

The artists’ new works explore small interior moments that use serenity to examine the mind's internal processes. The show centers on memory as a place of worship where past experiences, emotions, and identities converge. The work draws inspiration from the concept of the “mind’s eye” and investigates memories as more than a collection of the past but as active, living spaces that inform our present and future beings.

The Mind’s Eye: Sophia Anthony, Bix Archer & Aryana Minai

Make Room

Diane Rosenstein Gallery is happy to announce Five Painters, a group exhibition with John Brooks, Canyon Castator, Kenwyn Crichlow, Pam Posey, and Vanessa Prager. The exhibition will present new work by artists who explore personal narratives through a range of formal practice from landscape painting and gestural abstraction to figurative portraiture and comic- fantasy tableaux. Five Painters coincides with the thirteenth anniversary of Diane Rosenstein Gallery.

John Brooks (USA, b. 1978) is an artist, poet, curator and writer based in Los Angeles. Brooks’ expressionistic paintings often depict his friends, as well as figures and sites sourced from historic and found photographs. He combines images “to create what I think of as the hint of a new narrative.” He will show a recent suite of portraits and tableaux, some with circus or theatrical settings, are “charged with a sense of longing, remote desire, empathy, as well as a kind of existential openness.” John Brooks received a solo exhibition, if the Lovers are Losers, at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Winston-Salem (2024).

Canyon Castator (USA, b. 1989) employs a maximalist comic-fantasy visual language to balance digital and traditional painting techniques on the canvas. Castator will present Cannon Fodder – a series of five large-scale paintings that use satire to address our social reality, bringing together an exuberant blend of figures culled from the internet, modern media, politics and personal experience. "This body of work is an attempt to...lay bare the ways mass media uses spectacle to instill foundational ideas about power, virtue, and violence, particularly in the imagination of young men.” Castator lives and works in Los Angeles.

Kenwyn Crichlow (Trinidad and Tobago, b. 1951) is a painter, arts leader, and educator with a studio practice in Curepe, Trinidad. He will show Radiance, a monumental gestural, abstract triptych influenced by Trinidad's topographic and cultural Caribbean landscape. Crichlow received a solo exhibition Incandescence, with our gallery in 2023, and his paintings were recently included in Infinite Regress, curated by Kevin Moore, at The Kemper Museum of Art (2024) in Kansas City and Keeping Time, curated by Ekow Eshun and Karon Hepburn, at Gallery 1957, in Accra, Ghana (2024).

Pam Posey (USA, b 1950) examines the natural world and how it can be represented through painting. Working from a studio in West Los Angeles, Posey reimagines landscapes by mapping the experience of being in nature while she paints. For her first exhibition with our gallery, Posey will show a series of recent landscape paintings, many on an intimate, small scale. “Landscape painting is a way of constructing boundaries on the boundless. Its
impossibility is what compels, what gives it the state of unknowing, what makes it a never- ending endeavor. “

Vanessa Prager (USA, b. 1984) is a Los Angeles-based artist who is known for an elaborate impasto painting technique that creates thickly layered and sculptural surfaces. Since 2021, she has presented two solo shows with Diane Rosenstein Gallery. In a trio of new paintings, Prager places characters “within storybook narratives, drawing inspiration from the heroic yet often tragic women of mythology and literature. These recurring figures, at times accompanied by children, intertwine to reflect the comedy and tragedy of modern life.”

There is an opening reception for the artists on Thursday, April 17 from 6pm - 8pm.

Five Painters

Diane Rosenstein Gallery

 Presented at a moment of catastrophic environmental urgency and social reckoning, amplified by recent events in Los Angeles, Baker Cahill tackles timely concerns that have long animated her practice. The exhibition includes new bodies of work in which Baker Cahill mines her own archive, refashioning archival drawings as raw material for works on paper, sculptural installations, and digital projects that plumb the constantly shifting crises of the current moment. This perceptual play interweaving natural and digital worlds is a keystone of Baker Cahill’s practice, which aims to alternately make sense of and combat cultural and geological instability through ecological concepts of interconnectedness, systems-thinking, and interdependence. 

Nancy Baker Cahill: SEISMIC

Charlie James Gallery

Perrotin is pleased to announce its global representation of the Estate of Young-Il Ahn (1934–2020). In conjunction with the announcement, Perrotin Los Angeles presents Young-Il Ahn: Selected Works 1986–2019, a historical survey of Ahn’s work over three decades.

Young-Il Ahn (1934–2020) vaulted to critical acclaim late in his career for his exquisite Water paintings. In 2017–18, an exhibition featuring Ahn’s abstract Water series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had the distinction of being the first one-person presentation at the museum to feature a Korean-American artist. Despite the late-career attention to his work, the full scope of Ahn’s painting practice was little-exhibited during his lifetime. Young-Il Ahn: Selected Works 1986–2019 introduces viewers to the breadth of Ahn’s work across multiple series, providing important historical context to his lifelong engagement with the relationship between abstraction and representation. 

Born in 1934 in Gaeseong, a city now geographically located in North Korea, Young-Il Ahn moved with his family as a young boy to Horikiri, northeast of Tokyo. In 1943 the Ahn family left Japan and returned to Korea when his father, artist Seung-gak Ahn, accepted a position as an art instructor at Cheongju Teachers College. A child prodigy, Ahn was awarded numerous prizes as a student, winning national art contests in 1949 and 1954. After graduating from the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University and serving in the military, Ahn eventually made his way to the United States, settling in Los Angeles in 1966. 

During the five-plus decades Ahn lived in Los Angeles, the light and atmosphere of California played a prominent role in his artwork. An avid fisherman, his painting practice was forever changed when, in 1983, a motorboat he was operating became engulfed by fog off the Santa Monica coast. Unable to get his bearings, Ahn drifted on the Pacific Ocean; as he later recalled, “I lost all sense of direction. I cut the engine and let the currents take me.” When the fog cleared, Ahn’s experience of sunlight rippling on the waves was an epiphany: “I became profoundly aware of the surface of the sea being reborn in each and every moment. What I witnessed was engraved deep in my heart. From that day on, the sea lived inside me and I became part of the sea.” 

Although Ahn’s epiphany at sea served as the inspiration for his celebrated Water paintings, the artist’s decades-long engagement with the refractory qualities of water are also present in other series of work. The earliest painting in the exhibition, Harbor, from 1986, is an early example of Ahn’s fascination with the color, motion, and variation of sunlight on water. Painted only a few years after Ahn’s experience on the Pacific, Harbor hints at the prismatic effect of the water’s surface, while still representing the abstracted forms of boats docked in a harbor.  In later examples from the series, Ahn’s Harbor paintings are almost fully abstract, the artist’s geometric strokes offering the barest suggestion of boat masts and sails. Viewing Ahn’s early and later Harbor paintings side by side, viewers can see a progression from representation to abstraction—a development that calls to mind similar artistic evolutions in the work of early twentieth-century artists such as Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian.

A highlight of the Los Angeles exhibition are examples from the Ahn’s California series. Begun in the 1990s, and featuring a loose style of gestural abstraction, the California paintings draw on the artist’s phenomenological experience of California’s space, sun, and atmosphere—concerns that similarly captivated the region’s Light and Space artists. In Ahn’s own words, his California paintings sought to capture “the clear and bright infinity of California, where space is filled with stunning colors, forms, and sound waves from living nature”—sensations, for the artist, that caused his body to “vibrate” with awareness.

The deeply personal nature of Ahn’s painting practice is especially evident in works from his Self-Reflection and Tal (Mask) series. These abstracted compositions carry embedded references to the artist’s cultural heritage, with strokes and marks that hint, with varying degrees of legibility, to the forms of Korean writing and Korean masks—poignant gestures of self-inscription within the space of painting.

Finally, the exhibition will present a suite of Ahn’s Water paintings, the series for which Ahn is most well-known, and that he painted in with sustained attention up until his death in 2020. Looking back in 2017 on the formative experience from which these paintings developed, Ahn reflected, “I painted and painted and could not stop…. Ideas about water are forever overflowing; no matter how many water ideas I manage to express on canvas, more water ideas continue to surge.” 

In addition to his 2017–18 solo exhibition at LACMA, Unexpected Light: Works by Young-Il Ahn, the artist was also the subject of two solo shows at the Long Beach Museum of Art, A Memoir of Water: Works by Young-Il Ahn in 2014, and Young-Il Ahn: When Sky Meets Water, in 2017–18. Upon his death in 2020, ArtNews described the artist as a “trailblazing painter of radiant abstractions.” Ahn’s work is in the permanent collections of the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea.

Young-Il Ahn: Selected Works 1986–2019

Perrotin

headspace

“we should talk more” 
Now that I'm looking at it thinking of calling it "we should talk more”
“Been thinking about the kind of headspace of talking on the phone, on a landline. Like absent minded but also totally present in that conversation
     Oh, I immediately remember that hovering state of mind, a sort of suspended time—
          Yeah! Sitting there on your bed twirling the phone cord in your finger…
Hah! I mean, I didn’t do that—and these are cordless—but I definitely get the headspace thing,”

     or, the different language of that space/time: of the way phases of objects and technologies generate specific kinds of irreplaceable (but reproduceable?) relations, pleasures, desires. That’s what disappears or sublimates into obsolescence, that way of talking. Those speeds or paces of connection or communication. And they might not even evolve (like a technology itself), they might just be replaced, substituted, subtracted, exchanged, transacted-on. And all for the sake of faster, faster, fastest?—everyone’s always saying at the prime rate of the market. Instant items.
    But not talking…. There’s a necessary lag there, an unavoidable waste of time. A functional forgetting.

I'll keep you posted and stay in touch. For the show I’m feeling “the middle of the end”

For the microphone piece you already have. What do you think about the title cross-talk
Crosstalk

I keep forgetting my phone when I go to the studio which is actually great but I'm a little ahead of my photos now.
I'm trying to ignore the urge to set up the space too much and just fill needs as I come to them.
Thinking about multiples and contextualizing them with each other and some king of buffer with the space

Thinking about how I can make different changes at different stages of the process. Happy about the cross section.
     Loving all of this. Definitely interested in hearing how working with different stages of the process is going (seems like an important exploration route in general). And sorry for the lag we've been stuck in the trenches….
          Happy New Year!
Thank you. Unbelievable what’s going on down there. We can catch up when things settle down. Things are good here if anyone needs to get out of LA

     Hey hey! Absolutely love the way this one came out. It would be great to catch-up this weekend—how is Sunday afternoon for you? Any time after 4 on Sunday works for us if you're available
     The fires took over. And with all the political chaos on the menu it's a bleary slew of feelings.
     Hope you're doing alright up there!
     (Seeing the objects in the molds really creates some strange sense of time)

I usually just do old fashioned but it might be fun to do a video chat here to show you some new stuff.
5ish Sunday sounds good.

          Woah! I think it really hits me when moving between the more translucent and the opaque color like this—very different emotions and memories are triggered depending on it being solid-looking or not. 

Thanks! I had a really "illuminating" experience with this one. Under fluorescent lighting all I saw was surface but later I looked at with no lights except a high window and the clear part was glowing. The contrast read beautifully.
     Also interesting because there’s a tension between the trace of the form (the actual shape of the calculator) and the pattern of the material itself. So there’s a double if not triple awareness of material and object (and context).

Hoping to get this off craigslist free. The text from the post would be a great title

Been having some fun
Web cams for the eyes. My roommate’s nose (alginate mold), clay mustache and a computer speaker mouth

“The idea of security” The shape of a thing and the guts of a thing. What makes the thing the thing? Use or function? Around and around like a game of telephone until it reaches the end of the line and the screen dims and the theater lights fade on lifting the suspension of disbelief and again you find yourself alone and thinking about how we should all talk more. So check the ground beneath your feet. Is it safe? Up to code?

The lifesaver is made of glass and it might break or it might sink.

Hope I can pull it off
     Will definitely be something no matter what: as a finished result, a ‘failed’ achievement, or just an experiment
Thanks! I'm definitely of that mind. That the work is the result of my actions and I have to take it at face value too. I want to get my thoughts a little more documented and go through it all with you. For me to get it out

          Woah that looks amazing! All of the bits and color in it. Can't wait to see it in person :)
The cassette is depression pink, post-consumer, and vintage uranium glass with found electronics

Hey, want to set some time this weekend to talk about the press release?

This was the one that failed in the kiln I was showing you. Sorry to text late. It just got so weird especially the nose. 
     Like you said the nose is especially wonky (but in a great way). It is also strangely stoic; to me, it looks super proud despite the disintegration, like a captain solemnly going down with his ship lol  

Morning. I emailed you (even) more notes just now. Just got into an idea I've been kicking around. Hope it's not too dark or crazy lol. I've been a studio rat and am really looking forward to coming down and being part of the community, seeing art, and eating everything

     Definitely not too dark or crazy, if anything it's just the right amount of honesty with yourself hah. And what you're thinking seems evident in the works even if I weren't reading or listening to your thoughts. So far all the works follow a similar movement along their own dis/identifications with themselves: they were something, maybe even more than one thing, and now they've arrived at what's not-them. But the 'not-me' and 'not-them' that makes it possible to be themselves to begin with, and also to not be themselves by the end (of their transformation, their lifespan). It’s more ‘Me,’ ‘I,’ and you that makes them, them. So to me what you're thinking is right-on in terms of recognizing and wielding this movement between these polarities that aren't really poles or dualities but multiplicities and spectrums. It's right there in the "middle of the end" place. Sounds like the works and the weight of their message is all falling into place together. That vertigo. That point where a work isn't even recognizable to ‘the artist’ as something 'they' made anymore—it’s more like the work just happened. Like some wu wei …
The forms and materials and ideas began subtractively, filtering out "noise" seeking "information" like tuning an analog radio or television. Tracking a VCR. Later it became additive, altering and combing objects, images, experiences. Like finding a familiar tune. This shift marks the transition to the not-me. As the dialog with studio and process developed rapport and eloquence, I found myself in more of an observer/supporter role.
     Lingerers: a sense of humor that’s also a sense of loss and despair. But only as much as the connections to other people that these objects use to hold. The (melancholic) precariousness, fragility, and vulnerability of objects, technologies, systems—and the impossibility of any industry keeping-pace with its own rate of production, its own languages and populations. 
Anyway, looking forward to setting the stage—everything is coming along in its own way and I'm happy to see all the thoughts you're sharing summon what we've been experiencing with the work.

Everything is in the truck. Fingers crossed I don't arrive with more pieces than I left with :)

     There’s a weird back-and-forth I go through where at one point I’m recognizing/remembering the object and then completely forgetting where I am once I’m lost in the coevals of the insides and outsides. It feels like I’m (at least) two places at once, which makes sense because I’m lured toward some kind of nostalgia in the same instant as I feel completely alienated, and pretty sad despite the initial sense of humor the work brings near me. “Laugh and cry, laugh and cry, what’s the difference?” kind-of-a-thing. An alienation from commodity fetishism? 
     It’s amazing how lucid these are at their breaking point. (Drunk with clarity, or something like that.)

Thanks it's nice not just having this experience in a total silo. Let me know when the press release is ready. I'm excited. Also been thinking more about the night stand idea for We should talk more and End of the line. Looking back I did a night stand (milk crate) in my thesis. Would be kinda neat to update that to a real one. Speaks to where I'm at a bit and thus what I brought to the show. 

(All of my poems are written in sand)



_____________

Born in Los Angeles, Maccabee Shelley studied environmental and Earth sciences before earning degrees in studio art and ceramics. Intrigued by the perception and projection of value and obsolescence, Maccabee translates refuse through various materials and processes exploring the space between object, image, and experience.

Works by Maccabee have been exhibited in: “spleen iiiii” (Reisig and Taylor Contemporary: Los Angeles, California); “Junque Show” (Morris Graves Museum of Art, Eureka, California); “Power of Ten” (Steve Turner: Los Angeles, California); as well as numerous other group shows and projects in Los Angeles and Northern California (where he currently lives and works). In 2019, he earned an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles.

{Biographical information courtesy of the artist. (c. April 2025).}

_____________________________________ 

Image: It seemed like an important decision at the time . 2025. Post-consumer glass (VHS). 12 x 8 x 8 inches.



Maccabee Shelley: the middle of the end

Reisig and Taylor Contemporary

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

Sebastian Gladstone is pleased to present Denzil Hurley and Brian Sharp, an exhibition that brings together the work of the late Denzil Hurley (1949–2021) and contemporary painter Brian Sharp, organized by Jonas Wood. This exhibition is a reflection on mentorship, influence, and the lasting conversations that take place in the studio. It is a gesture of gratitude and remembrance, a recognition of the ways artists carry forward the teachings of those who shaped them.

Denzil Hurley, a painter of quiet rigor, made work that invited deep looking—paintings that held space rather than demanded attention. A native of Barbados, he studied at Yale in the late 1970s before settling into a long career as a professor at the University of Washington. His paintings, often monochromatic and meditative, explore structure and depth, with surfaces that shift subtly within a swath of deep blacks, yellows and blues. The pictures are reminiscent of Ad Reinhardt’s expansive surfaces, and Jack Whitten’s material ingenuity. His students, including Jonas Wood and Brian Sharp, found in him a teacher who valued dedication over quick results, and whose critical impulse followed them in and out of the classroom.

Hurley’s work carries a quiet gravity, his surfaces layered and deliberate. Sharp, who studied under Hurley in the early 2000s, embraces suggestion and layering in his paintings, often drawing from the visual language of everyday life. His compositions pull from moments of observation— patterned household textiles, shifting shadows, the textured surface of the city. An open ended, pictorial presentation offering associations as solutions. His work reflects a devotion to painting as both a craft and a way of seeing values instilled during his time as Hurley’s student.

This exhibition is about relationships, it is about the ways in which ideas filter through generations, changing shape but holding onto something essential. For Wood and Sharp, this is a way of honoring a mentor, recognizing that some debts are never meant to be repaid, only acknowledged. Hurley’s presence lingers in the choices they make, and the artists they have become. The exhibition is less about looking back and more about seeing what endures.

Denzil Hurley & Brian Sharp, Organzied by Jonas Wood

Sebastian Gladstone

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

Simchowitz is pleased to present Charged Memory, Gene A’Hern’s first U.S. solo exhibition at Hill House in Pasadena. Please join us for an open reception on Saturday, April 26th from 11am – 4pm – RSVP for address and parking information here.

In Charged Memory, Australian artist Gene A’Hern explores the profound interplay between personal identity, lived experience, and place. This new body of work draws deeply from his lifelong connection to the Blue Mountains of New South Wales—his birthplace, which serves as a wellspring of reflection, and a source
of enduring spiritual resonance.

A’Hern’s practice merges meditative reflection with instinctive, gestural mark-making, resulting in layered compositions that shift between contemplation and impulsiveness. Based in Katoomba, a town in the Blue Mountains region, he approaches art-making as a dialogue between internal experience and the surrounding environment. His visual language often incorporates organic symbolism first sketched in notebooks and evolves through varied materials—oil, pastel, wool, ink, and monk’s cloth—building layers of form and texture over time.

The exhibition spans a wide range of works—from the expansive, windswept energy of Sky Painting 42 (2023) to the dense, earthbound tactility of Canopy 6 (2025). In Flicker (2024), layers of distemper on linen evoke fleeting movement, while the twin works titled Cecil Road (2024) mirror one another as embodiments of landscape filtered through lived memory. Across the show, A’Hern articulates a personal mythology shaped by the cyclical nature of existence—“from dust and returning to dust.”
A central thread in A’Hern’s work is his intimate awareness of place. The Blue Mountains function not merely as a setting but as an active collaborator. Elements like shifting light, wind, and birdsong contribute to what he describes as the “ceremonial choreography” of painting. His practice of “skywatching” becomes a quiet ritual, captured in works such as Sky Drawing 64 (2025) and Sky Painting 57 (2024), where expansive gestures convey both scale and emotional resonance.

A’Hern’s work inhabits a liminal space—between past and present, interior and exterior. Rather than seeking critique or resolution, he leans into this threshold. His material choices—hessian, wool, distemper—speak to both raw immediacy and a connection to the elemental and handmade. The resulting pieces form an intuitive visual language of remembrance and transformation—offering traces of where the artist has been, and glimpses of where he is headed.

A’Hern holds a BFA from the National Art School in Sydney and has exhibited in Australia, Denmark, and the United States.

Gene A'Hern: Charged Memory

Simchowitz Hill House

Westwood Contemporary, a gallery supported by Cal American Corporation, presents the pop-up exhibition "Skip Victor: No Words," a thought-provoking exhibition of multimedia artwork. Skip Victor is a Los Angeles-based artist working in various media including printmaking, painting, digital art, photography, and neon. His first solo exhibition, "No Words," prompts the audience to reflect on the ambiguities, absurdities, and contradictions of culture and society, from social structures to life experiences, and from the commercialization of art to human loss and connectivity. Victor approaches these themes both playfully and ironically with a spirited interaction of language and imagery. 

"Skip Victor: No Words" is curated by the Wende Museum’s Associate Curator Emma Diffley and Chief Curator Joes Segal, with support from Nicole Blue, Cynthia Greenwald, Alfredo Hernandez, Julian Banks, and Justin Jampol, and in collaboration with Los Angeles-based neon artist Michael Flechtner. "Skip Victor: No Words" opens on Sunday, May 4, 2025, with an opening reception from 4pm to 7pm, and speeches at 5pm. The exhibition will be on display until May 25, 2025.

Skip Victor: No Words

Westwood Contemporary

In Speaking in Translation, Michael Henry Hayden examines systems of meaning and their limits, underscoring the permeability between legibility and perception. Across the six works on view, patterns emerge, natural formations echo human codes, languages dissolve into abstraction, and surfaces conceal as much as they reveal. By disrupting scale, material, and interpretation, works challenge the instinct to impose meaning, asking whether the act of reading is akin to projection rather than discovery.

–––

Ryan Flores' ceramic sculptures lure with the initial promise of bounty and sustenance, before slowly revealing rot and decay in equal measure. Through his masterful use of complex, handmade glazes, Flores mimics the effects of chiaroscuro, translucency, and surface texture seen in historical still-life paintings, creating sculptures that are both lush and unsettling. His glazes crackle and ooze, evoking the processes of spoilage, while the interplay of matte and glossy finishes, along with the organic unpredictability of fired surfaces, adds a painterly illusionism to the work. In this way, Flores bridges the aesthetic principles of painting with the tactile immediacy of sculpture, reinforcing the visual and conceptual dialogue between two-dimensional representation and three-dimensional form.

Michael Henry Hayden: Speaking in Translation | Ryan Flores: The Undergrowth

Moskowitz Bayse

Butterfly Dream documents the people and places that make up the community of trans women Gomez has found in Los Angeles, all captured in her signature documentary style. The exhibition also tackles the concerns of the artist’s past work, including issues of labor and immigration, now through a trans lens. Butterfly Dream is the artist’s fifth show with the gallery, and her first exhibition post-transition mounted in Los Angeles.

Jay Lynn Gomez: Butterfly Dream

Charlie James Gallery (2nd location)

AMPHI is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition, “Mining In The Age Of”. Curated by Alan Chin and Lu Chen, the exhibition brings together 13 contemporary artists presenting works in painting, sculpture, fiber, assemblage, and mixed-media installation. Through diverse artistic approaches, the exhibition explores humanity’s relationship with mining and extraction, examining its impact on the environment, culture, and illuminating the delicate balance between what we take from the Earth and what we create in return.

From the dawn of civilization to the California Gold Rush and today’s relentless pursuit of earth's resources, extraction has shaped landscapes, economies, and identities. As Jim Melchert says, when you drop a tile and it breaks, there's a shock that shoots through and follows the path of least resistance, which suggests something alive. The artists in this exhibition mine the vitality that emerges from these cracks formed by the extraction of natural resources, the distribution of social capital, the acceleration of technology, the pressures of cultural assimilation, and the imprints of personal memory. Through alchemically transforming material into profound visual and conceptual statements.

This exhibition highlights California’s influence as a global cultural hub, shaped by its history and ever-evolving landscape. Honoring the contemporary renaissance of California’s art scene, it celebrates California as a vibrant space of artistic optimism, self-expression, and possibility.

Artists in the exhibition:
Carlotta Guerra
Mik Gaspay
Tom Franco
Cara Levine
Keith Magruder
Alex McAdoo
Higinio Martinez
Erick Medel
Jim Melchert
Raymond Saunders
Linnéa Spransy
John Toki
Griff Williams

Courtesy of the Gallery 16, San Francisco and Jim Melchert Estate. Courtesy of Charlie James Gallery.

Special thanks to DAMU Arts.

Image: Installation view of ‘Mining In The Age Of’, AMPHI, Los Angeles, 2025. Photo by Carlotta Guerra

Mining In The Age Of

AMPHI gallery

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

Human life is fleeting, and yet man remains wildly optimistic—a contradiction-riddled, unpredictable, scatterbrained creature, to be sure.
-Sakaguchi Ango, Discourse on Decadence, 1946

Nonaka-Hill brings to Los Angeles the works of Japanese artist, Key Hiraga (b. 1936 - d. 2000). The self-taught painter, a violator of convention, who briefly belonged to the Narrative Figuration movement, lived and worked in post-war, restructured Tokyo and from 1964 to 1974, in an idealist, radicalized Paris. The Elegant Life of Mr. H opens on Saturday, April 12, includes paintings and works on paper spanning from the late 1950’s to 1980’s, and will be on view through May 31, 2025.

A 29-year-old Hiraga received the National Young Artist Award, a prestigious prize in Japan that granted in 1964 a residency in Paris. That same year, William Lieberman, head curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), visited Hiraga's studio which led to Hiraga’s inclusion in MoMA’s The New Japanese Painting and Sculpture. The exhibition of forty six artists sought to track Japan’s postwar shift from traditional styles of expression to the burgeoning development of broader international tendencies. Once in Paris, Hiraga settled in the Pigalle district, the quartier established as the emblem of the sexual revolution that blazed its way through Europe in the 1880s and which, to date, houses peep shows, venues for lap dances, and nightclubs. Journalist and curator Stéphane Corréard, writes of Hiraga initially finding it “difficult to deal with the proximity of permanent temptation, and no doubt the impossibility of decoding or responding to the erotic enticements and the evolution of the balance of power between men and women, which was particularly rapid in the late 1960s” Hiraga’s surrounding environment comes to shift and permeate the central themes of his paintings, generating debaucherous, erotic, actively vibrant, hallucinogenic work.

Key Hiraga: The Elegant Life of Mr. H

Nonaka-Hill | Highland

Kat Lowish: Short Stories

de boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to present Short Stories, the debut solo exhibition of British born, New York-based artist Kat Lowish. Comprising a suite of meticulously rendered paintings, the exhibition unfolds like a sequence of cinematic stills—each frame charged with intimacy, absence, and the quiet drama of ritual.

Lowish’s work invites viewers to linger on the edge of a narrative, suspended in the ambiguity between public and private. Never revealing a full face, the artist constructs her tableaux around obscured identities and fragmented bodies. In one painting, a figure's hand languidly brushes against a curtain hem as wine pools across a tiled floor; in another, a woman crumples facedown on a parquet floor, her body a quiet punctuation mark against a backdrop of blood-red drapery.

To call the work voyeuristic would be too easy—Lowish instead draws attention to the very nature of looking. Through compositions that echo the framing devices of film and theater—curtains, corridors, mirrors—she reflects on the painter’s gaze and the viewer’s complicity. In Myselves, painted masks lie scattered on the floor beneath a table, suggesting the roles we perform and the faces we choose (or refuse) to show.

Textiles recur throughout: a lilac dress sequined like a night sky, a pair of white slippers adorned with transparent bows, or a towel being shed next to the pool. These domestic details are not incidental—they are quietly central to Lowish’s world, anchoring her work in the sensual realm of lived experience. Beauty here is not ornamental, but evidentiary. It is the texture of memory, the trace of a presence, and the echo of an unseen drama.

ABOUT KAT LOWISH
Kat Lowish (b. 1989, London, UK) lives and works in New York. She received her Bachelor's degree in German and French Studies from University College London and her MFA at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions Moosey, London UK; Myriam Chair, Paris, Badr El Jundi, Madrid. de boer, Los Angeles; Half Gallery, New York, NY and Thierry Goldberg, New York; NY.

_______________________________________________________________

Alex McQuilkin: Obviously, Doctor

de boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to present Obviously, Doctor, a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Alex McQuilkin. Known for her rigorously conceptual yet deeply personal approach, McQuilkin’s new paintings excavate the interwoven threads of gendered performance, domestic aesthetics, and media archetypes. Through a deft juxtaposition of found imagery and wallpaper motifs, she stages an inquiry into the construction and instability of feminine identity in contemporary culture.

Rendered in labor-intensive, muted monochrome palettes, McQuilkin’s paintings isolate and recontextualize visual tropes drawn from film stills, advertisements, Pinterest boards, and the artist’s own girlhood bedrooms. From the pastel fragility of floral wallpaper to the iconic image of Lolita’s heart-shaped sunglasses, these works unmask the unseen architecture of influence embedded within our visual environments. What appears innocent—chintz prints, hair bows, ballerina slippers—becomes charged with unease, memory, and critique.

Drawing inspiration from theorists such as Legacy Russell, McQuilkin aligns her practice with a glitch feminist ethos: a refusal to perform, a breakdown of media as resistance. Her paintings intentionally reveal their own construction—unfinished trompe-l’oeil borders, interrupted labor, digital compression marks—suggesting not only the artifice of the image, but the artifice of the roles the images project and perpetuate. As in Not Winning an Unwinnable Game is Not the Same as Failing, the fragility of analog and digital simulations alike underscores the impossibility of living up to their coded ideals. Each work in the exhibition functions as a double exposure: a nostalgic echo of aspirational femininity and a critical dismantling of its machinery. In #hysterical, a viral image of performance artist Marthe Fortun—captured mid-lecture with milk leaking through her shirt—becomes a quietly radical act of embodied refusal, tenderness, and truth.

McQuilkin’s practice is not about nostalgia, but about recognition: of the subtle indoctrinations we live with, and of the ways we might undo them. By suturing the decorative with the digital, and labor with critique, the exhibition opens a space to reconsider how identity is curated, performed, and sometimes—when we’re lucky—reclaimed.

ABOUT ALEX McQUILKIN
Alex McQuilkin combines psychoanalysis, maudlin sentimentality, dark humor, and deep sincerity in her videos, drawings, objects, and installations, through which she explores the construction of female identity in Western culture. McQuilkin’s work has been exhibited internationally since 2000. Her paintings, drawings, videos and sculptures explore themes such as the role of cultural aesthetics in defining female identity and the power structures embedded within artifice. McQuilkin has had solo exhibitions de boer, Los Angeles; Georgetown University Museum, Washington D.C.; Plymouth Rock, Zurich; Marvelli Gallery, New York; and Galerie Adler, Frankfurt. Group exhibitions include those at MoMA PS1, New York; KW Institute, Berlin; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Konig Gallery, London; Tick Tack Gallery, Antwerp; Marlborough, New York; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville; McQuilkin’s work has been reviewed in the NY Times, the Village Voice, FlashArt, Art Magazine, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from New York University.

Kat Lowish: Short Stories | Alex McQuilkin: Obviously, Doctor

De Boer Gallery

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

-, for the sake of this moment in time, is an exhibition. It is one of many lives the hyphen will live. The other lives existing simultaneous to the exhibition are as an interrupter, a bridge, a magnet between identities, even a horizon line. The horizontality of - negates the decidedly upright and favors hybridity of a paradoxical nature. Verticality suggests a hierarchical stance, as I might offer Adriana Cavarero's noting of who else..the philosophus erectus...who has straightened himself up according to the luminous axis of truth," a decisive halt in anything surrounding man and his connection to the divine above. But what is to be made of everything along the horizon line, as far as the eye can see? The inherent unlivable quality of this moment in time recalls a many-headed hydra: familiar faces like climate change, a televised genocide of Palestinian people, fascism alive and well in the "greatest country or earth", eradication of trans and immigrant rights - I will interrupt myself here, because we know the rest. But as we acquaint ourselves with the many lives - possesses, we will step outside of this luminous y-axis of truth and instead walk along the ever-extended x-axis presented in -'s exhibition. You and I, all of us, we'll hold the many lives lived and understand that this moment is a short pause, a brief respite in the world that demands singular truths and savor the exhibition's permission to contemplate the -

[—] a Group Exhibition

Cevera Yoon Gallery

Michael Kohn Gallery is pleased to present NOT YOUR WOMAN, the third solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Heidi Hahn, opening April 25.  Comprised of eight large-scale paintings and fifteen smaller works, the exhibition unfolds in two distinct yet interconnected experiences—one driven by scale, the other by genre as a point of rupture. Hahn’s paintings hover between image and material, allowing the physicality of paint to dictate form, meaning, and perception. Rather than adhering to figuration, her work uses abstraction to reshape narrative, destabilizing conventional readings of the body. Paint itself becomes an active force, shifting the boundaries of representation and revealing a more elusive reality. 
 
Following the trajectory of her previous series—Soft Joy, Thoughts That Break the Soul, and Flex, Rot, and Spi(l)t—this new body of work introduces a renewed dialogue between scale and expression. The larger paintings remain open-ended and experimental, posing questions about presence, perception, and form. The smaller works, by contrast, engage with genre—landscape, the pastoral—subverting tradition to offer an alternative narrative. If the larger paintings pose the question, the smaller works attempt, or complicate, a response.
 
Hahn’s compositions—characterized by exaggerated forms, expansive color fields, and gestural layers—foreground the tension between surface and depth, material and meaning. Figures are fractured, displaced, and abstracted, not to erase them but to strip away expectations. “I think the paintings are protective of the body,” Hahn notes, “I always angle [subjects] to distort or turn out the meaning of a feminine body. These paintings are not interested in figuration, or representation, but in dealing with the nature of abstraction as a means to find a different narration.” This approach allows her work to exist in a space where meaning remains fluid, shifting between what is seen, what is felt, and what resists being fully known.

Heidi Hahn: Not Your Woman

Kohn Gallery

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

Simard Bilodeau Contemporary is thrilled to present Caribbean Stages, a solo exhibition of works by Alexandre Arrechea. At its core, Caribbean Stages explores cultural identity and its constantly shifting nature—reshaped by time, distance, and context. Painting these works speaks to the illusion of proximity—how memory, place, and identity can feel close, even intimate, yet remain just out of reach.

Alexandre Arrechea: Caribbean Stages

Gana Art LA is excited to present you with our Spring Collection. This exhibition brings together the distinct yet resonant practices of Donald Judd, Park Dae Sung, Park Sukwon, Kang Minsoo, and Keun Young Yoo—artists whose works span continents, generations, and mediums, yet are unified by a shared commitment to visual symbiosis, conceptual rigor, and the silent rhetoric of physical material.

Donald Judd’s horizontal sequence of minimalist sculptures presents ten units of stainless steel, each marked by a saturated red. With its exacting geometry and rejection of illusion, the work emphasizes objecthood and the unmediated presence of form in space.

Park Dae Sung’s visually poetic ink paintings, grounded in calligraphy, distill memory, gesture, and nature into raw, expressive compositions that pulse with energy and introspection. His depiction of a black vessel encapsulates the shared theme of physical material in figurative form—an idea echoed by the nearby moon jars of ceramicist Kang Minsoo, placed on pedestals just before the surrounding canvas works. Kang’s moon jars, crafted from traditional Korean white clay, embody imperfection and subtle asymmetry, suggesting both restraint and warmth in their quiet pursuit of balance.

Park Sukwon offers a sculptural language shaped by repetition and transformation. His method of accumulating and layering natural materials reflects an ongoing inquiry into essence, structure, and time. His practice emanates a peaceful, rhythmic silence, offering the viewer a welcoming yellow and deep blue—a return to elemental simplicity.

In vivid contrast, Keun Young Yoo’s expressive paintings expand the natural world into abstraction, transforming flowers and plants into surreal, painterly meditations on beauty, distortion, and imagination. Hovering between realism and invention, his work is grounded in observation yet freed from convention, seamlessly integrating into the larger conversation of the exhibition.

Together, these five artists create a space where form speaks for itself, where process and meaning are inseparable, and where the tactile meets the philosophical. This exhibition is not about grand gestures, but about what endures—material, rhythm, and the quiet force of intention.

Image: Donald Judd "Untitled," 1974. Stainless steel and red enamel.10 units, each 12 x 24 x 14 inches (30.48 x 60.96 x 35.56 cm)

Spring Collection

Gana Art Los Angeles

An Installation by Giovanni Jance

FOYER-LA

Shadows cast
by dusk-led creatures
lose form in the
lineless light,
limb upon limb
live, uprooted
echolocating in their
protected playground.

Led away by heat,
that arrow of time, they arise -
bodies of light unbounded
from fragile bulbs of glass,
spill forth from the slipstream
in wax and paint
for us and for our salvation
unfurling onto canvas.

Umwelt, Juliana Keyser, April 2025


parrasch heijnen is pleased to present Rosy Keyser: ultraUMWELT, the gallery’s second solo exhibition with New York-based artist Rosy Keyser (b.1974, Baltimore, MD). 

The works of ultraUMWELT explore the synthesis of time and form as Keyser asks how we can propagate new beauty, new language, new structures, and new tools using the elastic language of painting. She negotiates the shifting relationships of creation and destruction simultaneous to the attendant sensuality and brutality that characterize nature.

Keyser engages Umwelt - the phenomenon in which the experience of reality is shaped by the differences in sensory and perceptual systems between organisms—within her material and conceptual process. As writer Mary Blair Taylor wrote about the work in this show, “Keyser imagined [and created] a machine that would act upon her works-in-progress, like an in-house contractor of sorts. Keyser designed [and developed in her studio] this contraption to sit on the floor like a giant printing cartridge or press, through which she could push the paintings. The machine both heats and applies pressure to the support surface, like a rotating doorway whose threshold imprints (or mono-prints) on everything that passes through. Despite inventing and building this mechanism herself, Keyser cannot control the manipulation, but over time she has come to understand certain likely operations.”

As Keyser describes, "In the context of [Italian physicist and writer] Carlo Rovelli, 'heat is the arrow of time'. I dreamt up the machine because I wanted to work into a ‘live surface.’ There is an ‘all-at-onceness’, an embrace of chance image-making, and a fostering of conditions that are unpredictably beautiful and impossible to fully control. The intentions that I bring to the process are very much embodied as there is no time to overdetermine. Additionally, the materials (oils, wax, resins) respond with their own wills. The canvas is rendered more transparent, more responsive, more synthesized and its edges or Umwelt more diffuse.”

Rosy Keyser earned her BFA at Cornell University in 1997 and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. Keyser has shown extensively throughout the United States and internationally, with the solo exhibitions: Arp 273, parrasch heijnen (Los Angeles, CA); I’ll Fly Away, Nunu Fine Art (Taipei, Taiwan); The OtherOther, Maccarone (New York and Los Angeles); Medusa Pie Country, Peter Blum Gallery (New York); and We Sing Sin, Contemporary Fine Arts (Berlin, Germany). Group exhibitions include: Rosy Keyser & Eleanor Mikus, Parts & Labor, Beacon, NY; Painter Painter at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, and Pink Caviar at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark. Keyser’s work is held in the permanent collections of: the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK. Rosy Keyser was a Fall 2017 artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation (Marfa, TX) and a 2022 artist in residence at the Læsø AiR, Denmark. Rosy Keyser is represented by parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles; Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, Germany; Nunu Fine Art, Taipei, Taiwan; and Sevil Dolmaci, Dubai, UAE.

Rosy Keyser: ultraUMWELT will be on view at parrasch heijnen, 1326 S. Boyle Avenue, Los Angeles from April 26 - June 7, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, April 26, 4-7p.  The gallery has secure, private parking onsite. 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.

Image: ROSY KEYSER, Pink Deer, 2024, oil, wax and spray paint on silk cotton with custom steel frame, 59-1/4 in x 41-1/4 in. 

Rosy Keyser: ultraUMWELT

parrasch heijnen

Tappan is pleased to present Forward, a group exhibition. Through gestures of ascent—soaring, reaching, and moving forward —this exhibition traces the energy of uplift. Whether through achievement, loss, encouragement, growth, or factors often out of our control, we are forced to deal with the shifts brought by change. Artists capture moments of transformation, where momentum meets possibility, and the weight of the past gives way to new horizons. A celebration of flight in all its forms, Forward invites us to rise.

Artists featured in the exhibition include: Aliya Abs, Katie Burdon, Ethan Caflisch, Catherine Lucky Chang, Michael DeSutter, Lola Erhart, Brittany Ferns, Marc Gabor, Anatole Heger, Cheryl Humphreys, Virginie Hucher, Loralee Jade, Jeff Kraus, Brianna Lance, Sara Marlowe Hall, Júlia Martins Miranda, Brian Merriam, Alice Neave, Firoozeh Neman, Bart O'Reilly, Emma Ortiz, Vince Palacios, Arran Rahimian, Petra Schott, Jessica Sellinger, Lauren Skunta, Stacy Solodkin, Philip Soucy, Chala Toprak and Astrid Verhoef.

Forward

TAPPAN

Brand Library & Art Center is proud to present "Opulent Mobility: Re-Imagine Disability and Mobility," curated by founder A. Laura Brody and Anthony Tusler in collaboration with students from Glendale Unified School District (GUSD). Founded in 2015, Opulent Mobility has been hosting annual open calls for artworks which tell stories that humanize, uplift, and celebrate disabled artists and disability art. The events have built a community of artists and activists who place disability issues at the forefront of their endeavors. "Opulent Mobility" will feature artworks by Amabelle Aguiluz, Anahid Boghosian, A. Laura Brody, Vanessa Hernández Cruz, Diana Elizabeth Jordan, Patricia Fortlage, Kellie Gillespie, Francesca Hummler, Aragna Ker, Monica Marks, Larissa Nickel, Rebecca Niederlander, Tom and Linda Peters, Jaklin Romine, Katherine Sherwood, and Rachel Ungerer as well as Glendale Unified School District (GUSD) student artists representing Anderson W. Clark High School, Crescenta Valley High School, Daily High School and Glendale High School.

Artists from Opulent Mobility and Glendale Unified School District will be present at the opening reception on Saturday, April 26, 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM accompanied by a live performance from artist and composer Tom Peters. ASL interpreters will be in attendance to assist hearing impaired and deaf attendees as well as detailed descriptions of artworks in large print and braille booklets online via QR codes for blind and low vision attendees.

The exhibition will be on view April 26 – June 21, 2025. For more information, visit: BrandLibrary.org/Gallery

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Image: Larissa Nickel, "Human Limb Object /Architech Me," Still, 2014

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Free, limited parking is available in Brand Park. The opening reception will be well attended, so please consider ridesharing. Brand Park features six (6) handicapped parking spaces, four (4) are located adjacent to the Brand Library building. Attendees may be dropped off adjacent to the library side entrance if all spaces are occupied.

For additional information, please contact Brand Library & Art Center at (818) 548-2051 or send us an email at Gallery@BrandLibrary.org.

Opulent Mobility: Re-Imagine Disability and Mobility

Brand Library & Art Center

The Abstract Future, curated by Alia Dahl,
documents a new generation of artists who are
redefining abstraction by merging sculpture,
painting, photography, and performance. Spanning
both our Los Angeles galleries, the exhibition
highlights over thirty artists who are simultaneously
exploring process and materiality while addressing
themes of identity, culture, and political beliefs to
reflect their unique personal narratives.
California has a rich history of abstraction, from
the Light and Space movement and Finish Fetish
to the development of geometric abstraction
and conceptual art. The Abstract Future builds
upon this legacy, presenting artists who infuse
abstraction with fresh perspectives–drawing inspiration from historical influences, current
events, environmental changes, astronomical exploration, and advancements in technology
and science.
The Abstract Future is an international exhibition, featuring artists from Europe, South
America, and Africa, alongside those based across the United States. This global perspective
underscores the universal relevance of abstraction as a method of creative production and
its capacity to offer insight into the human experience across cultures and contexts.
THE ABSTRACT FUTURE

WWW.DEITCH.COM
FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION, CONTACT ALIA DAHL AT ALIA@DEITCH.COM
The artists participating in The Abstract Future are:
Anthony Akinbola
Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio
Loriel Beltrán
Elaine Cameron-Weir
Allana Clarke
sonia louise davis
Aria Dean
Guillaume Dénervaud
Tomm El-Saieh
Sam Falls
Alteronce Gumby
Madeline Hollander

Kahlil Robert Irving
Rindon Johnson
Lotus L. Kang
Bronwyn Katz
Antonia Kuo
Maia Ruth Lee
Hannah Levy
Manuel Mathieu
Jeffrey Meris
Kayode Ojo
Michael Andrew Page
Brian Rochefort

Tariku Shiferaw
Diego Singh
Shinique Smith
Diamond Stingily
Tadáskía
Chiffon Thomas
Uman
Raphaela Vogel
Kristin Walsh
Kennedy Yanko
Stella Zhong

The Abstract Future 

Jeffrey Deitch | Orange

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

The Wende Museum

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

Joaquin Villarino is a contemporary multidisciplinary artist known for his futurist-expressionist style in murals, oil paintings, and beyond. Originally from Chile, Joaquin’s artistic journey is inextricable from his personal life; injecting emotions and memories directly into his work. He began painting chaos as a reflection of childhood trauma, but after undergoing a personal rebirth, he realized his art directly reflects the perfection of life through the idea that everything is as it is meant to be.

Joaquin studied Graphic Design and graduated with a degree in Fine Arts from San Diego State University (SDSU). During that time, Joaquin won Best in Show for an oil painting which the university bought and still hangs in the halls today. His acclaimed "Inner-Child" collection was showcased at the Culver City Art Walk, and sold out entirely. The success of this collection solidified his place as a contemporary art visionary, drawing eager minds and eyes to connect with his evocative work. Other artistic achievements include exhibitions worldwide, multiple awards, and a feature in Playboy Mexico's prestigious art book. 

During the pandemic Joaquin discovered tattoo artistry. This led to the establishment of Alium Tattoo Studio, a five-star parlour known for its elevated experience, innovative approach, and high artistic standards. It features dedicated space from which Joaquin can work and showcase his art.

Joaquin's process is spontaneous and intuitive. Dance and physical dynamism are integral to his creative process. His upcoming exhibition, "The Shedding," unmasks his transformative vision by incorporating movement and mixed media to create immersive experiences. This approach results in art that captures and captivates raw energy and emotion. It feels alive.

Joaquin envisions his art like music—inviting and transporting viewers to join in the journey. To get lost in it. His compositions possess a rhythmic quality; layers of color and texture harmonize to create an experience that resonates far beyond the visual.

Joaquin's presently working on “Polarities,” a new collection exploring duality; light and dark, past and present, harmony and cacophony. He captures tension and balance between opposing forces through striking contrasts, layered textures, and dynamic compositions. Each piece is a visual journey, pulling the audience into a deeply personal yet universally resonant experience.

Joaquin Villarino’s "Polarities" collection explores the dualities that shape our existence—chaos and order, masculine and feminine, life and death. Through his signature futurist-expressionist style, he delves into the harmony and cacophony of opposing forces, revealing how they naturally coexist in perfect balance.
﻿
This series reflects Joaquin’s view of contrast as a dance of transformation. His fluid process beckons each piece to emerge through movement, texture, and paint. It invites viewers to embrace the paradoxes within while revealing unity of the whole. Within every extreme, there is an inherent balance. Everything is as it is meant to be.

JOAQUIN VILLARINO

Taylor Fine Art

bocas indomables/untamable mouths is an installation that creates embodied experiences of materials, mythologies, mother-goddesses, writings, dreams and sounds from rebel and disobedient water, creatures, and women that wildly speak from the cracks between worlds. If water has memory, then to tap into its substances means that we can still hear the rushing voices of the things—ancient and future—interrupted and displaced.

bocas indomables/untamable mouths is based on a series of ritual-performances that were activated in collaboration with the L.A. River and the border rivers between Mexico and the United States. Informed by matter’s dynamism and agency, multispecies collaboration, indigenous knowledge, and speculative fabulation, this multidisciplinary project offers alternatives to our dominant water imaginaries and aims to build a closer relationship between bodies of water, humans, and the creatures that inhabit them. Through wearable sculpture, installation, video, sound, photography, and natural dyeing, this exhibition invites audiences to rethink materiality, reflect on the ways colonial history is constructed, and reconsider how we craft and share stories.

bocas indomables/untamable mouths weaves together the stories of the Pacific Lamprey, a jawless fish native to the L.A. River but now extinct; of La Malinche, the enslaved Nahua woman who served as an interpreter for the Spanish conqueror Cortés during the colonization process in what is now Mexico; and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which arbitrarily designated the Rio Grande, the Colorado River and the Gila River as borders.

On view gallery hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 12 – 5pm, and by appointment by contacting kiyoguti@usc.edu

Kiyo Gutiérrez bocas indomables/untamable mouths 

USC Roski Graduate Gallery

PHASE GALLERY is pleased to present FORUM, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist David Schafer. The exhibition critically examines the intersections of power, control, and symbolic representation in contemporary society. Through immersive environments that merge sound, sculpture, and visual elements, Schafer explores how social structures are shaped by coded signs, corporate spectacle, and institutional influence.