
NOON Projects is honored to present "Slow Opening" by Jay Stern, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. This new body of work unveils a series of expressive, layered oil paintings that explore the intricate relationship between memory, time, and transformation. "Slow Opening" invites viewers into a space that feels both familiar and distant, capturing ephemeral moments of transition and quiet introspection. Much like memory, Stern assembles his compositions from fragmented elements into expansive forms, employing directional light to subtly evoke the emotion arising from the fleeting nature of information over time. The exhibition title reflects Stern’s fascination with the hidden layers of activity within what is considered 'still,' and the slow, unfolding blooms that emerge from looking.

Through rapid brushwork and built layering, Stern’s paintings balance domestic intimacy with the rawness of nature. He seeks to capture these instants just before the relentless tide of life carries them from the present into the past. Stern’s work meditates on the generosity of time, a concept symbolized through imagery of flowers and landscapes, and echoed in the words of curator Hilton Als: “Time can be very cruel, but it can also be very generous to artists who are paying attention.” The works urge viewers to appreciate the quiet beauty and respect the active nuances of daily life often overlooked, while emphasizing the majesty and conflict of each passing moment and encouraging reflection on how our identities are shaped by both presence and absence. 

Since moving to Maine in 2021, Stern has been inspired by the region’s landscapes and rich artistic history, while maintaining a conscious distance from idealized reverence or sentimental representation. Interested in presenting nature in a pure way, works like Roofline Sunset, Kezar Lake and Desire Destination find Stern making a deeper connection between man-made objects that often inform nature’s fluid sensibilities. This evolving queer perspective fosters a unique form of voyeurism that goes beyond the ordinary, shedding light on and celebrating the aspects of his surroundings that Stern finds most captivating. "Slow Opening" reflects Stern’s belief that memory, much like his paintings, is not a fixed point but a living, evolving entity—always in the process of becoming, reshaped by time, perception, and the quiet moments of transformation.

"Slow Opening" will be on view at NOON Projects from December 13, 2024, to January 25, 2025, with an opening reception on December 13, 2024, from 6–9 PM.

For more information email info@noon-projects.com or call +1-971-341-6648

Jay Stern: Slow Opening

NOON Projects

Why do we love things that bear a glow of grime? Why are some so intensely somatic in their effect on us? As Jun'ichiro Tanizaki describes in his 1933 essay, In Praise of Shadows, we love that which is marked with "soot and weather, things that bespeak a sheen of antiquity that call to mind the past that made them." 1‍

Attuned to the thingness of things, Kati Kirsch envisions a vital materiality through which the experience of loss is conjured through surreal fragmentation—where cinders become unsettled, flickering with a suspicious nostalgia. Kirsch's paintings and ceramics often begin as meditations on found and familiar objects. A tender, playful sense of care is garnered in Kirsch's interest in didactic ephemera, embedded in the seemingly frivolous, ornate details and whimsical designs of found paper goods such as a bridge tally card, a children's how-to book, illustrated calendar cards, rose-contoured bookmarks.

These are objects that wear their purpose on their sleeves, organizational tools and emblems of "progress," instructing with a particular logic, which Kirsch relentlessly warps, teases, unravels. Her practice is alive with the residue of this process. A tattered towel, a pencil pouch, a weekly calendar: these are not afterthoughts but anchors, markers of a method that privileges the ordinary and insists on an inner vitality. In the compositions that emerge in this space, this process, a keepsake becomes a question, an object for meditation, an immanent thing that speaks, its “decorative” details bridging the timeless and urgent.

Hinting at multiple realms of interiority in the painting School zone Company Alphabet flashcards - the letter q (2024), a head peaks out of a checkered quilt, its translucent geometry revealing a strange infrastructure beneath, an intestinal jumble, warm and pulsating, illuminated by a rosy glow. Gridded motifs function as permeable, structural topographies bridging the seen and unseen, an interplay unfolding further in Days of the week (2024) in which an uncanny index of temporality is recorded on found flashcards and craft paper, resulting in a compartmentalized imagining of temporality.

Informed by a keen sense of materiality, Kirsch gathers both found and self-fabricated media into assemblages that feel both broken and reborn—shattered, unstitched, and veiled by molten patinas. Her work recalls the layered intricacy of a paper accordion doll—terrains of infinite depth emerge, inhabited by overlapping figures yearning to unfurl. These teeming, immanent forms resist the pull toward tidy resolution, offering compositions that remain, instead, elaborately intractable.

– Lauren Guilford


Kati Kirsch (b. 1999, Washington, D.C.) lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, in 2022. Solo and two-person exhibitions: “Paper Goods,” Cheremoya, Los Angeles, 2024; “The Secret Life of Doubters” (two-person), Kaleidoscope, Brooklyn, 2024; “Wish Fulfillment Chart,” Bahnhof Gallery, New York (2023); “How Could it Be Once Wa”s (two-person), Pratt Institute, Brooklyn (2022). Selected group exhibitions: “Internet Personality Quiz,” Popgun, Brooklyn (2024); “Angel Tech,” Gern en Regalia, New York (2024); “Growing Down,” Known Studio, Los Angeles (2024); “Museum of I Love You So Much,” Quarters Gallery, Los Angeles (2023). Exhibitions as curator: “Ice Cream House,” The Alcove, Brooklyn (2024); “Cold Email”, Osseous Matter (online) (2023); “Selective Attention Test,” Private location, Brooklyn (2022). She has been a Teaching Artist in Residence at The Oxbow School, Napa, CA (2024) and a guest lecturer in Professional Practices at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn (2024). Paper Goods is the artist’s first solo exhibition on the West Coast and her debut with Cheremoya.


1 Tanizaki, Jun'ichiro, In Praise of Shadows (1977): 11.

Kati Kirsch: Paper Goods

Cheremoya

A solo exhibition of collages, photographs, and paintings by Sarah Schumann (GER, 1933-2019), a Surrealist feminist artist who was based in Berlin until her death in 2019.

This presentation of significant works from 1959-1998 is Sarah Schumann’s inaugural exhibition in Los Angeles.

A figurative painter and collagist, Schumann drew on her personal life as a queer artist to create heroic depictions of women in post-war Europe. 

_____

An exhibition of selected photographs and works on paper created between 1972 - 1977 by iconic conceptual artist Eleanor Antin, depicting the artist in performance as her personae The Nurse, The Ballerina, and The King of Solana Beach.

Sarah Schumann: Shock and Beauty | Eleanor Antin: Persona

Diane Rosenstein Gallery

Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Aristotle is a skeleton., an exhibition with one work by each of the gallery’s artists. The exhibition takes a series of adages by the American poet Wallace Stevens as a point of departure, of which the title is one.

Aristotle is a skeleton.

Moskowitz Bayse

Paul McCarthy is known for his wide-ranging and often provocative works, which encompass performance, photography, film, multimedia installations, sculpture, drawing and painting.

Whether absent or present, the human figure has been a constant in his work, either through the artist’s performances or the array of characters he creates to mix high and low culture and provoke an analysis of our fundamental beliefs. These playfully oversized characters and objects critique the worlds from which they are drawn: Hollywood, politics, philosophy, science, art, literature and television. McCarthy’s work, thus, locates the traumas lurking behind the stage set of the American Dream and identifies their counterparts in the art historical canon.

Tomato Head (1994), one of Paul McCarthy’s most important works from the 1990s, creates a life- size, cartoon-like figure that explores the relationship between modern culture, consumerism and innocence.

In this work, McCarthy plays out the allegories of a beloved and immediately recognizable cast of characters ranging from Santa Claus and Pinocchio to Mr. Potato Head and Popeye. Tomato Head (Green) (1994) is both a nomenclative and visual play on the children’s toy “Mr. Potato Head.” Developed in 1949, the original “Mr. Potato Head” was the first toy ever to be advertised on television and has remained popular even today. This post-war symbol of children’s entertainment symbolizes the beginning of a new consumer-driven era in America.

Much like “Mr. Potato Head,” Tomato Head (Green) has holes in place of eyes, nose, mouth and ears, where various pegs affixed with these human parts could be inserted randomly to give the figure different appendages or expressions. Unlike the toy, however, there are holes in its groin and anus where pegs could also be inserted. The work suggests an ability to construct gender identity: making these changes and substitutions allows the figure to play with potential self-iterations and explore all the possible identities available to it. However, even though the figure has several items at its disposal with which to auto-configure, these are a prefabricated, predetermined set. This limitation speaks to the restricted number of identities and lifestyle choices available to individuals in normative contemporary culture. Raw, visceral, and deeply disturbing, McCarthy’s work unmasks the vile, dysfunctional truth behind the American Dream. Through these twisted perversions of American cultural icons, McCarthy undermines a central theme of the American myth of equal opportunity–– the notion that one can realize oneself to the fullest degree regardless of origins and social status, is here invalidated through the message that society mandates one’s options of choice. Thus, the idea of freedom of choice is turned on its head.

Paul McCarthy: Tomato Head is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Post Human, and it is accompanied by drawings and sketches that allow audiences to discover the thought process behind one of McCarthy’s most significant artworks. The exhibition will also presentbehind present Wolf-Pig (2024), an AI-generated video work that shows McCarthy’s latest interest and experimentation with new technologies.

Paul McCarthy: Tomato Head

Jeffrey Deitch | Santa Monica

Sidecar is pleased to present An Artificial Place, a presentation of new and recent works by 2024 Guggenheim Fellow Won Ju Lim, organized in collaboration with Parapet, St. Louis. The artist’s career retrospective, curated by Rory Padeken, will open at the Denver Art Museum in 2026. At Sidecar, collaborative work with artist Matthew Brannon will also be on view.

The title of this exhibition sets the scene for the audience in a seemingly straightforward manner. Galleries, it reminds us, are unnatural places, reserved for artifice. But there is more to those words, which in fact derive from literature, specifically the writings of Marcel Proust. They are resumed inside via a series of “magic lanterns” that Won Ju Lim has produced over the past three years, and which form the bulk of this show. When their titles are read in sequence, the textual fragment is rounded out:  

That sense of the complexity of the Bois de Boulogne which made it an artificial place and, in the zoological or mythological sense of the word, a Garden, I captured again, this year, as I crossed it on my way to Trianon, on one of those mornings, early in November, when in Paris, if we stay indoors, being so near and yet prevented from witnessing the transformation scene of autumn, which is drawing so rapidly to a close without our assistance, we feel a regret for the fallen leaves that becomes a fever, and may even keep us awake at night.

This meandering sentence comes from the novel Swann’s Way (1913), the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. A monumental feat of remembrance, it looms large over the proceedings, plunging every work on view in the febrile uncertainty of the past tense. Arranged on gently rotating platforms are items of various sorts—handmade architectural models, hobby kit renditions of environmental details, and a wide assortment of domestic bric-a-brac gleaned from thrift-stores, swap meets, and estate sales—all pertaining to episodes from Proust’s grand adventure in introspection. Accordingly, one could say that these are things summoned from another time, infused with a mental atmosphere, perhaps mere figments of reverie. And yet, unlike the words that 

appear on the author’s pages and are so readily translatable into thought, these things constitute a phenomenal reality, available to our eyes here and now. Moreover, raked by the light of the small desk lamps at their side, they gain an uncanny sense of agency, projecting past their given form as shadows and reflections—images.

Also included is a new series of wall-hung works collectively titled Regained (2024) after the seventh and final volume of Lost Time, which are based on documentation of these objects in action. Every distinction between causal agents and their effects is here erased as the spatial depth of the source photographs compresses into delicately overlapping arrangements of colored shapes, screen-printed onto mirrored Plexiglas. At every step in this translation process, the Proustian point of origin grows more distant. That which initially took shape in perception, then memory, and then imagination was written down, was read, and was again memorized, reimagined. Words were congealed into objective sculptural forms, these subsequently captured by camera, and then reproduced as pictures beset by a whole host of remediations. What we see upon their surfaces is something from far away brought close, because the room we are in is there too, as are we, seeing ourselves seeing.  

In Casting II (2023), a 39-minute single-channel video also featured in the show, a voice-over narrator once again takes us to the novelistic scene of a garden. This work could be slotted into the “making of” category. In it, we observe Lim working on one of her shadow-play lightboxes, a genre she began exploring in 2003. An example hangs on the opposite wall, dominated by Man Ray’s famous portrait of Proust on his deathbed. One might wonder if he is still dreaming of his childhood; the video suggests as much. Throughout, the lights flicker on and off. At the extreme, a white screen suddenly turns black, but which is more full or empty from the perspective of memory? Hands move small objects across a tabletop stage where, caught up in a play of brightness and obscurity, they occasionally lock into virtual tableaux, only to again decompose into the stuff they actually are. In the drawn-out finale, which amounts to a kind of credit sequence, each “takes a bow.” These diverse things, already so steeped in memory and storytelling, double down on their illusionistic aspect, effectively representing “themselves” as imaginary entities, the flora and fauna of an artificial place.

—Jan Tumlir      

Won Ju Lim: An Artificial Place

Sidecar

Sebastian Gladstone is thrilled to present the first US solo exhibition of the Berlin-based artist Leon Eisermann at our Los Angeles gallery. The exhibition will open Saturday, January 4th with a reception from 6PM to 8PM, and be on view through February 8th, 2025.

Leon Eisermann: Bothered by the past, burdened by the future.

Sebastian Gladstone

The gallery at Keystone Art Space presents Creature(s &) Comforts, a group show curated by Kim Marra.

Featuring a diverse group of artists, this exhibition invites the viewer to reflect on the ways in which all living beings interact with the natural world in search for sanctuary, survival and companionship.

Through a variety of media including painting, sculpture and photography, Creature(s &) Comforts reflects on the different ways we all seek comfort - through the furnishings of our homes, time spent in nature or through our own imaginations. 

Considering the harmony between humans and the creatures that inspire us, from the earthly to the surreal, this exhibition will feature pieces that explore the contrast between the comforts of modern life and the beauty of the untamed.  

Creature(s &) Comforts celebrates the depth of human need alongside creatures of all kinds. It’s cozy, it’s colorful, it’s dark, it’s alien. It’s alive. 

Opens: February 1st, 2025, 5-9pm
Runs: February 1st - February 9th, 2025


Featuring:
Katie Berka
Gary Brewer
Zander Fieschko
Kim Marra
Samuelle Richardson
Mayra Villegas

Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 12pm - 5pm
For more information contact Kim Marra at kmarra03@gmail.com

*50% of artwork sales will be donated to Grief and Hope, raising money for artists who have been impacted by the Los Angeles wildfires. 


Creature(s &) Comforts

Keystone Gallery

"Robert Standish: "New Terrains, a solo exhibition by Robert Standish. 

Join us at MASH Gallery on February 1st to ring in the new year with an immersive experience like no other. Explore innovative art, connect with fellow creatives, and expand your horizons. This in-person event is your chance to discover new perspectives and be inspired by groundbreaking work. Don’t miss out on this exciting opportunity to delve into uncharted territories of creativity. See you there!"

Robert Standish: New Terrains

Mash Gallery

 Transience to the Infinite: A Scientific Exploration of Time and Space Curated by Cynthia Penna
Opening: 5 pm-10 pm, Friday January 17th 2025
Dates of Show: January 17th - February 14th 2025
Wonzimer Gallery
341-B S Avenue 17 Los Angeles 90031 / wonzimerinfo@gmail.com
Featuring: Bonita Helmer, Laddie John Dill, Ann Weber, Alaïa Parhizi, Max Coppeta, Todd Williamson, Khang Nguyen, Amedeo Sanzone, Nurit Avesar, Lisa Bartleson
Transience to the Infinite brings together a diverse group of ten artists whose works offer unique perspectives on the ephemeral nature of existence and the boundless possibilities of the universe.
In “God, Science, Evidence: The Dawn of a Revolution”, Olivier Bonnassies, alongside Michel-Yves Bolloré, posits that contemporary scientific research inexorably points to the existence of a Creator God—an assertion that may seem provocative in the realm of empirical inquiry. The authors intertwine cosmology, physics, history, and theology in an ambitious attempt to bridge the oft- assumed divide between faith and reason. The premise is bold: "With the discovery of thermodynamics," they argue, "we learn that the universe is wearing down, heading toward thermal death. If the universe had a beginning... then there must be a God."
This concept hinges on three core scientific principles: first, the recognition that the universe is inextricably composed of time, space, and matter; second, the certainty that it had an absolute beginning; and third, that its fine-tuned laws seem almost tailored to allow for the emergence of complex life. With such findings, the authors claim that science itself defines what ancient philosophies and religions have long identified as God—a transcendent, external force that crafted the universe, ultimately allowing for human existence.
Yet, despite these weighty claims, the exhibition tied to this discourse does not seek to validate or refute the existence of such a divine entity. Rather, it aims to explore the nuanced intersection between human experience, daily struggles, and spiritual transcendence—where art becomes a means of navigating the liminal spaces between the physical and metaphysical.
The transcendental, often viewed as timeless and spaceless, resonates deeply with the core of artistic creation. Far from the strict boundaries of scientific inquiry, art ventures into those vast unknowns where metaphysics and human consciousness collide. This exhibition invites viewers to contemplate moments of "divine" revelation, not in the religious sense, but as profound instances in which the mind perceives beyond the material world, tapping into a realm that surpasses time and space.

 In art, humanity seeks such revelations—a desire to transcend the mundane and ascend to a higher, perhaps mystical, plane. This echoes across cultural and religious contexts, in which the ultimate goal is to connect with what is often referred to as GOD. The role of art in this quest for spirituality is fundamental. As a visual medium, art provides the vehicle for meditative introspection, offering viewers a window into higher truths.
Saint Paul’s assertion in his Sermon at the Areopagus of Athens that “God created man so that he might seek Him” resonates here, as art becomes the catalyst for such a search—an intimate and often silent dialogue between the viewer and the ineffable.
But what of mysticism in the contemporary era? Is there still space for such contemplation in our material-obsessed world? Wassily Kandinsky provides a prophetic answer. He once remarked on the "tragic collision between matter and spirit" in his era, foreseeing the rupture of a purely materialistic worldview. Kandinsky's words, spoken over a century ago, describe a cultural crisis that feels remarkably familiar today—a time marked by uncertainty, disorientation, and spiritual yearning.
His own artistic journey shifted from representing the objective world to delving into the inner Klang (the “inner sound” or “inner need”), striving for a spirituality and transcendence that go beyond the mere physical representation of reality.In this sense, Kandinsky’s message is uncannily relevant to our current moment. As we grapple with a world increasingly dominated by superficial material concerns, the existential questions of theearly 20th century resurface. His call for spiritual awakening, through art, suggests that refuge in the spiritual or even in art itself is insufficient on its own. Rather, what is required is a fundamental transformation of our way of being, rooted in introspection and a relentless pursuit of justice—both personal and collective.
This transformation begins with an acknowledgment of our own smallness within the vast, intricate mechanism of the universe. If we could pause to truly grasp the magnitude of what lies “OUT THERE” beyond our limited world, perhaps only then would we see art and introspective thought as the fragile but powerful tools they are: means of reconnecting with a broader, more profound sense of existence.
The exhibition thus calls on us to reflect on this urgency for change. It urges a recalibration of our behaviors, anchored in the realization of our finitude and insignificance in the grand cosmic design. And yet, it also reminds us that, within this immense scope, we have the capacity for profound insight, expression, and—through art—a connection to the infinite.
by Cynthia Penna


Transience to the Infinite

Wonzimer

Marcus Leslie Singleton: Winter Atlantic Summer

The Journal Gallery

An exhibition of new watercolor paintings and the artist’s first at the gallery. Edelstein mines her own family history in works that transform vintage photographs into compositions that acutely capture the color and texture of a particular moment in time. 

Lisa Edelstein: DANCE ME TO THE END OF THE WORLD

Charlie James Gallery

Julia Elise Hong: Today 

de boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to present Today, a solo exhibition by Korean-born Los Angeles-based artist Julia Elise Hong. The exhibition debuts a series of new oil paintings on canvas. The title, Today, reflects the core theme of the paintings representing the present moment and an ongoing, continuous sense of existence.

Hong begins each picture by building the canvases to the exact dimensions of a historical painting, setting the stage for a deep exploration of both past, present and future. Without reference to photography, she builds the compositions with expressive brushstrokes, seeking to unearth figures from within the paint itself.

For Hong, her paintings serve as an intimate dialogue, akin to a conversation between two people. “Yet, for the flatness and opacity of the image, neither can fully access the other.” she explains. In these moments of separation, Hong strives to grasp something elusive, a fleeting understanding that can only be described as miraculous. Roland Barthes’ concept of Punctum—that which touches us deeply in a photograph—mirrors Hong’s exploration of this sensation, which she identifies as a moment of realization: the feeling of knowing someone or something fully, if only for an instant.  

In Young Man Seated Beside the Sea (after Flandrin’s Young Male Nude Seated Beside the Sea, 1837), 2024, Hong reinterprets the dimensions of the 19th-century masterpiece by French artist Hippolyte Flandrin, leaving the compositional elements intentionally ambiguous. The result is a work that challenges viewers to question the essence of the scene, inviting them to consider not only the fleeting moment of realization, but also the moments surrounding it—the anticipation, the aftermath, and the space in between. For Hong, the pursuit of a painting is not simply about capturing a singular moment, but rather exploring the journey toward it, the ever-shifting sense of time and perception.

ABOUT JULIA ELISE HONG
Julia Elise Hong (b. 1985 in South Korea) currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Hong received an MA from Columbia University in 2010, an MFA from Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2014, and an MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2023. Recent exhibitions include Tide Pools, Nous-ance at TRYST by the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; GLAMFA, California State University Long Beach, Long Beach, CA; Play It As It Lays, de boer, Los Angeles, CA; Daydream Jelly, la BEAST gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Vague Domains, Alt Projects, Arcadia, CA; At Home, IKEA residency at Surely Work Studios, Los Angeles, CA. Alongside a dynamic studio process Hong curates and writes with notable accomplishments in each arena. Today (2025) will be Hong’s first solo exhibition with de boer.

-----------------------------------
Aaron Maier-Carretero: New Works

de boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to present a new solo exhibition featuring the work of Los Angeles-based artist Aaron Maier-Carretero. The exhibition will include paintings and sculptures rooted in Maier-Carretero’s dynamic drawing practice. 

Maier-Carretero’s process begins with intuitive mark-making, where repetitive movements and spontaneous gestures form the building blocks of his work. In this exhibition, Maier-Carretero returns to recurring motifs—ranging from playful figures like "scaredy cats" and "sardines," to the familiar comfort of flowers and still lifes—imbuing them with a tension between humor and melancholy. The result is a body of work that is light and introspective.
"Drawing is where everything begins," says Maier-Carretero. "It’s about finding rhythm in my lines and pushing the boundaries of what feels comfortable." This tension between freedom and constraint is central to his process, whether working in monochrome or through collaborations with his younger self—“little Aaron”—who provides a fresh, unfiltered perspective that disrupts the artist’s usual instincts.

ABOUT AARON MAIER-CARRETERO
Aaron Maier-Carretero is a Latinx artist born in 1987. He obtained his BFA from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Maier-Carretero has exhibited at the Queens Museum, NY; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Sculpture Center, NY; The National Arts Club, New York City; The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; The University of Maryland Art Gallery; the Washington Project for the Arts; NADA New York, EXPO Chicago, and UNTITLED Miami. His work is held in the collections of the Phillips Collection, Washington; The Ned Nomad Collection, Washington, D.C., The University of Maryland Art Gallery, College Park, MD; the Art Bank Collection and the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities in Washington, DC; The Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; The Bunker: The Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, Palm Beach, FL, and numerous private collections. He lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.


Julia Elise Hong: Today | Aaron Maier-Carretero: New Works

De Boer Gallery

Night Gallery is delighted to announce Morning Star, an exhibition of new paintings by Cathleen Clarke. This is Clarke’s debut solo exhibition in Los Angeles and with the gallery, following her inclusion in The Wrong Sea, Night Gallery x Dunes, Portland, ME (2024).

In the titular work, a yellow sun adorns a bright red barn. A starry mark on a horse’s teal snout offers a visual rhyme, another reflection of the cosmos here on earth. A blue figure holds reins that appear to blur into a forest, further connecting the worlds of the natural and the manmade. This hazy, borderless quality permeates all the work in Morning Star. Suns have faces, while bodily contours dissolve into air.

Clarke takes inspiration from family photographs and her recollections of the rural Illinois farm where she grew up. Her mother painted a sunrise mural across the family’s red barn, an incident the artist calls the beginning of her creative life. To this day, she continues to explore representations of nature and domesticity. Her paintings suggest the potency of memory and a sublime integration of human and environment.

Clarke’s process, too, evokes the presence and absence integral to any act of remembrance: Each time we think of the past, and what’s been lost, our memories shift. The artist continuously loosens her paint as her compositions progress. She wipes her surfaces, blurring her images until she reaches an ideal tension between recognition and distortion.

Clarke also notes a disparity between day and night on the farm, between sunlit pastures and the moonlit activities of coyotes, who preyed on more vulnerable animals in the middle of the night. Her palette similarly negotiates between shadow and light.

As the artist hovers between past and present, reality and dream, thresholds become a natural metaphor. Windows, stairs, doors, and ladders appear throughout her paintings. In The Porch of Shadows, figures young and old dapple a porch, which is divided into three sections by two long, brown bars. Many of the figures wait behind blue guardrails, which themselves seem to ripple with anticipation. In the middle section, a man in a white shirt places one foot on a step, one foot on the porch, poised between the residence and what lies beyond. “This is a painting of these people from my past,” the artist says. “They’re welcoming the viewer back home.”

Cathleen Clarke (b. 1988, Illinois) has presented solo exhibitions at Margot Samel Gallery, New York, NY and Fou Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. She has participated in group exhibitions at White Columns, New York, NY; Margot Samel Gallery, New York, NY + Pangée, Montréal, QC; Workplace Gallery, London, United Kingdom; Dunes, Portland, ME; Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York, NY; and Ames Yavuz Gallery, Sydney, Australia, among other galleries. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Cathleen Clarke: Morning Star

Night Gallery North

“The dream hints, “This spirit should manifest . . . here are the stones in which it lives.” Bones, bricks, shells, ash, pine sap, and beeswax become paint, each painting a revivification of the Earth. The dreams are symbolic yet rooted in the patterns of physical sensations: breathe in-out-in, wake-sleep-wake, become-cease-become, daily tides, yearly seasons, and heart beating. We are the waves taking shape.” - Ellen Picken

Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present Waves Take Shape, Ellen Picken’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Consisting of a series of paintings and a mural encompassing the upper level of the gallery space, Picken utilizes materials from the land surrounding her home in Spokane, Washington, and items that contain a personal connection through a friend or neighbor to create handmade paints. These works explore the liminal space between the physical and spiritual realms while synchronizing with the cyclical nature of earth’s rhythms and their impact on our own lifecycle’s perpetual transformation. Waves Take Shape takes the form of a guide, opening the consciousness to investigate transitions—pathways and boundaries, secret places to protect, danger to avoid, and reactions to keep in check.

Picken’s process begins by gathering her materials—bricks found in the Spokane river, fallen off a crumbling building; yellow ocher collected from the site of the last home her great aunt and great grandmother lived in; eggshells from a neighbor’s hens; beeswax from a local beekeeper; bone from a deer found in a friend’s backyard; pine resin from the forests around her home; and salt from the Great Salt Lake and the Pacific Ocean are just some of items that become pigments for her paintings. Charged with meaning and sentiment these materials become the basis for her process. Shape and form begin to emerge on the clayboard panels while the subject matter is abstracted from dreams.

Symbolism plays an imperative role in these works. The snake is a protector of secrets and part of the consciousness that warns of the overwhelming power of the unconscious, fish imply nutrition both physically and spiritually, fire is a source of life and destruction, and a starburst is a release of condensed energy and indicator of new beginnings—these are a few of the readily visible images that appear. In the lower level of the gallery, the red glow of the ocher in the works is a reference to the Lammergeier vulture, alluding to the interconnectedness of life and death with its practice of covering itself in iron ocher and feeding off the bones of other animals. Picken utilizes the gallery’s layout to envision another level of symbolism. The gallery's upper level, painted throughout with undulating geometric patterns, suggests that one is entering a dream space within a dream. A reminder that the physical world is both incomprehensible yet unavoidable. A molecule of water is hardly observable, but an ocean is too large to see in its entirety. Between those extremes where matter appears solid and God becomes an icon, we can grasp meaning.

Ellen Picken (b. 1980) explores complex themes of existence, ritual, and nature, reflecting her deep engagement with the materials and landscapes that shape her practice. Best known for her monumental public artworks, Picken has created large-scale murals across the United States for prominent organizations like Adobe, Google, and NYC Department of Transportation. She has exhibited regionally and internationally at venues including Samsøn (New York, NY); Gage Academy (Seattle, WA); GlogauAIR (Berlin, GER); Gallery One (Ellensburg, WA); and Entropy Gallery (Spokane, WA). She is a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship recipient, and is most significantly influenced by her time living with the Benedictine Monks of St. Gertrude's Monastery in rural Idaho. Picken holds a BFA in Printmaking and a BA in Visual Communication Design from Eastern Washington University. She resides in Spokane, Washington.



Ellen Picken: Waves Take Shape

Lowell Ryan Projects 

“… then today’s society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of  cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions  seriously. The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not of an illusion masking the real state  of things but of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we  are of course far from being a post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way… to  blind ourselves to the structural power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things  seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.” - Slavoij Žižek  

Make Room is delighted to present Astra Huimeng Wang’s second solo exhibition “Polite Infidelity”, in Los Angeles. The exhibition title Polite Infidelity perhaps allures to our mentalities as members of a “post-ideological” society. It may seem unbecoming, even offensive, to commit fully and unironically to a single ideology or belief system. Instead, society unironically commits to the delusion that we are not witnessing the slow collapse of western empires—once powerful but now faltering. So is this what Wang is signaling towards, with the works in “Polite Infidelity”?

The plush vibrancy of the raw-liver-red flocked curtains in Mildly Entertaining, Keenly Felt, the gilded-age attire of the audience attending the spectacle central to the painting, the conspicuously jaunty attire of the processioners in In Time’s Ruins, and the joyful romp that concludes the funeral parade—These elements seem to offer satire on a silver platter, inviting us to reflect on our disillusionment. However, all of her works, in particular In Time’s Ruins, belie something more sincere and lacking in real “ironical distance.”

In Time’s Ruins is on one hand, a public execution of the piano in its role as a symbol of western cultural supremacy, and on the other hand, an earnest religious sacrament, a ritual sacrifice, an appeal to some unconscious fantasy for deliverance from suffering. The piano is carried, like Christ bearing the cross, into the desert for execution. Then a funeral procession, spectral and incongruous with its surroundings, journeys out from the desert through a ghost town and into the jewelry district of downtown Los Angeles, before it returns to the studio and the gallery as Damage Control, an altarpiece, painted on the lid of the original shot piano. The desert, often seen as a place of testing and revelation in Abrahamic religions, holds great symbolic significance. Neither can the fact that the funeral procession, once it reaches Los Angeles, first arrives outside an evangelical church with a sign reading “Pare de sufrir”, or “end suffering”. Whether the members of this cult-like procession are true believers or are merely indulging in collective fantasy, they seem to have found their deliverance, whether spiritual, ideological, or emotional, in the end.

The tension between ironic distance and true belief mirrors a similar tension between reality and unreality present in both the paintings and the film. For example, in Mildly Entertaining, Keenly Felt, there is a clear division between the audience loosely outlined in white, and the spectacle at center stage flocked chromatic. From across the room, the figure on the horse seems to vibrate off the painting’s surface, appearing more real than its surroundings. However, as the viewer approaches, the spell is broken, and the figure on the horse dissolves like a weathered relief on an old stone wall. At arm’s distance, only the audience members remain truthful about the fidelity with which they were rendered. In this way, Wang separates the painting into two spaces, encouraging viewers to navigate the boundary between reality and fantasy.

Wang achieves a similar contrast in In Time’s Ruins through the inclusion of her lonely acolyte, the piano mover. The film is bookended by sequences showing the piano mover hoisting the piano onto a trailer. If the piano is a ghost on its palanquin, then in its trailer it’s a corpse. The contrast between the measured, stoic walk of the pall-bearers and the conspicuous effort with which the piano mover works, again underscores a division between the real and the fantasy.

Only The Night is like a Strange Day resolves this division between realms. Unlike the other paintings, this work was meticulously hand-carved into the lacquer of the piano lid. Without the obvious presence of society, humanity, and its ruins as in Thank You for Coming Home, or the dissonant coincidence of fantasy, this work is suspended in a third supercritical state. Reality becomes slippery, untethered from the unconscious fantasies that structure it. Starry leaves and quicksilver seas, the Picardy third at the end of the overture to the decomposition of fantasies—all in all Mildly Entertaining, Keenly Felt.

Astra Huimeng Wang: Polite Infidelity

Make Room

Abstract artist Sharon Cannon’s "The Painting Knows" reveals a world where art takes on a life of its own. With each brushstroke, her work transcends mere visual representation, becoming an emotive force that speaks directly to the individual observer. The exhibition explores spontaneity and intuition.  Each piece is guided by an innate process where both artist and canvas engage in a profound and poignant dialogue. This interactive process ensures that the final work is not pre-determined but rather evolves organically, with each subsequent element guiding the next, inviting the viewers to interpret the emotions presented in their own personal way.

Sharon Cannon: The Painting Knows

The Artists' Gallery (TAG)

NOON Projects is honored to present “Between Cheeks”, a solo exhibition by Finnish artist Artor Jesus Inkerö, opening on Saturday, January 18 from 6–8 PM. Known for their multidisciplinary practice, which incorporates poetry, painting, performance, filmmaking, and research, Inkerö investigates the fluid intersections of contemporary culture through language, drawing on themes of oral history, domesticity, queerness, the body, and relationships.

At the core of Between Cheeks is an exploration of poetry and language’s power to critique, shape, and forge society and history. Inkerö’s series of autobiographical poetry paintings merges text and materials, using narrow horizontal canvases as a site for experimentation. Furniture and house paints—chosen for their connection to bodily fluids and domesticity—are scraped, layered, and painted over, evoking the cyclical nature of lived spaces, like apartment walls being repainted after a breakup. The poems, dripped and smeared onto the canvases in a process reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s action painting, create a visceral interplay of text and texture.

Works such as “Can we talk tonight?” and “In the park And by fire we found a mutual Sense of us…” evoke inner dialogue or conversations between new lovers, while “Before this we just licked them” and “On this flat earth we lay” reflect the fragmented ways we encounter language in modern life—through text messages, tweets, stranger-than-fiction news headlines, safety signage, and gossip. Inkerö’s works also engage with the historical canon of queer art, referencing Derek Jarman’s autobiographical paintings on HIV/AIDS and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ text-based installations that span entire galleries.

The exhibition further investigates metaphors of gaps, orifices, and holes, extending these ideas to themes of loss, ambiguity, and openings. These concepts resonate in Inkerö’s film A Taste of Every Dish You’ve Ever Eaten, commissioned by Somerset House in London. Created in collaboration with Juulia Haverinen and Sam Taskinen, the film combines poetry, operatic soundscapes, and a fragmented narrative. Described by Inkerö as a “poetic meditation” on memory, identity, and sensory experience, the film’s lyrics and dialogue reverberate throughout the gallery, reinforcing the exhibition’s focus on ambivalence and fluidity.

Artor Jesus Inkerö is a Finnish visual artist whose work has been exhibited internationally, including at the New Museum (New York), Neuer Aachener Kunstverein (Aachen), and Helsinki Contemporary (Helsinki). They have participated in prestigious artist residencies, such as Somerset House (London), the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (Amsterdam), and currently at the MAK Center Residency for Artists and Architects (at the Schindler House), Los Angeles. Inkerö’s practice centers on themes of queer identity and belonging, expressed through exhibitions, performances, poetry, research, public art, and multidisciplinary projects


Artor Jesus Inkerö: “Between Cheeks”
Opening Saturday, October 18, 2025 
6 – 8 PM
508 Chung King Road, Los Angeles

On view through February 22, 2025

For more information contact info@noon-projects.com

Artor Jesus Inkerö: Between Cheeks

NOON Projects (2nd Location)

your voice is in every shell reconsiders the odyssey as a mapped search between contiguous impressions rather than a physical return. The interdisciplinary exhibition includes video, painting, sculpture, writing, and ephemera. It spans huang’s long-term perseverance of the horse as a shifting but consistent emblem in their work, from the horse, centaur, and unicorn, to the pegasus. 

stephanie mei huang is a Shanghai/Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist. A core examination of their work is bearing witness to the aftereffects of globalization through inhabiting new embodied and synthetic configurations––parafictional avatars: extended myths both woven together and ruptured by autobiography. They completed their MFA in Art at the California Institute of the Arts (2020) and were a participant at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (2022). Select exhibitions include the Autry Museum of the American West (Los Angeles), Sargent’s Daughters (Los Angeles), Jeffrey Deitch (Los Angeles), Pulpo Gallery (Munich/Murnau), Artists Space (New York), the Hauser and Wirth Book Lab (Los Angeles), Contemporary Calgary (Calgary), the MAK Center for Art and Architecture (Los Angeles), the New Wight Biennial at the University of California Los Angeles (Los Angeles), and the Arizona State University Art Museum (Tempe). huang’s work has been featured in the New York Times, South China Morning Post, CNN, Tokyo Shimbun, PBS Artbound, ABC7 Eyewitness News, and Artsy.

Join at 7:30pm during the opening reception for Precipice portal––a collaborative performance with stephanie mei huang & Red Rae

stephanie mei huang: your voice is in every shell

Murmurs

On the occasion of Frieze LA, and celebrating the opening week of ‘George Rouy. The Bleed, Part II’, please join us for the US premiere of ‘BODYSUIT’ by Sharon Eyal and George Rouy at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles.

Commissioned by Hannah Barry Gallery and co-produced with Hauser & Wirth, ‘BODYSUIT’ is a visionary live work for five dancers by artist George Rouy and internationally acclaimed choreographer Sharon Eyal. Their first collaborative creation, ‘BODYSUIT’ is a multidisciplinary live event, with exacting, rigorous and liberated practices in movement, light, sound and environment. ‘BODYSUIT’ brings together new electronic music composed by Rouy with the signature punctuating choreography of Eyal, centered on a large silver and graphite painting by Rouy—together alternating from austerity to crisis and euphoria.

Performed in combination with a mirrored dance floor, dynamic lighting systems and costumes designed by British fashion house 16Arlington in collaboration with Rouy, ‘BODYSUIT’ creates a total stage environment that juxtaposes technical precision with rapturous, unapologetic freedom, forcing the world to challenge itself and its boundaries and giving form to the inalienable battle between our deepest feelings.

The performance is approximately 45 minutes long with no intermission.  
 
Doors open at 7 pm and the performance will start promptly at 7.30 pm. No late admission. 

T﻿ickets

Tickets prices range from $10 - $40 per person. All seats within each ticket price are general admission.

Proceeds from ticket sales will be donated to the LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund. 

Unrestricted view: $40 + ticketing fee
Partially restricted view: $20 + ticketing fee
Restricted view: $10 + ticketing fee
Standing room: $10 + ticketing fee

For press ticket enquiries, please contact samaradavis@hauserwirth.com.  

Click here to purchase tickets.

About ‘George Rouy. The Bleed, II’
‘The Bleed, Part II’ is British artist George Rouy’s first US solo exhibition with the Hauser & Wirth. Following upon Rouy’s recent London presentation, this ‘second chapter’ will feature all new works extending his exploration of human mass, multiplicity and movement. In works characterized by a distinctive dynamism, Rouy captures 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.

About ‘BODYSUIT’
The creation of ‘BODYSUIT’ took place in France, kindly supported by the Domaine de Courances, Théâtre-Sénart, Lieusaint and Palais de Tokyo. The London performance lead supporter is Suneil Setiya. ‘BODYSUIT’ is supported by a generous circle of donors: Tavakoli Foundation, Sydney, Australia; Jie Du; Simon Nixon; Bob Shaw; and those who wish to remain anonymous.

The music is composed by George Rouy in collaboration with Liam Toon and Oscar Defriez.

About Sharon Eyal
Sharon Eyal is one of the most radical choreographers working today. Her work is staged worldwide and her award-winning unmistakable style is startling. Known for propulsive performances that fuse classical dance with underground culture, she seizes darkness with intention. Punctuating her sharp and brutal choreography with vulnerability and emotional depth, Eyal harnesses the human body to assume a grave beauty, capturing the raw condition of human expression—the brutal journey of the heart. As well as creating a repertoire of critically acclaimed original works for dance companies around the world, she has made notable projects outside the dance world, working closely with the music label Young on projects such as ROSE, Maria Grazia Chiuri Creative Director at Dior and electronic musician and producer Koreless.

About George Rouy
George Rouy is recognized as a leading figure in a new generation of international artists. His dynamic and signature use of the human figure—vexed with desire, freedom, alienation and crisis—speaks to the extremities of our time. Focused on the relationship between interior landscapes and the body in motion, Rouy’s approach to the body—and his pursuit of painting—is one of contradiction, harmony and perpetual transformation. Bodies, captured alone and at times gathered in quiet pairs or imprisoned in crowds of amorphous energy, move from diminuendo, absorption and poise to expansive forces of crescendo, incitement and charge. Together they present rhapsodic portraits of identity in a globalized and technologically-driven 21st Century, alluding to recurring themes of the face as a mask, the individual as a copy and the self as a shadow. This bold and subversive corporeal language— constrained and liberated—captures the grave and arrested beauty of our contemporary moment.

About 16Arlington
Marco Capaldo, Creative Director of British fashion house 16Arlington, co-founded the brand in 2018 and continues to captivate with his visionary approach to design. Capaldo’s rise within the industry has been marked by his affinity for beauty – whether in art, architecture, books or design – which profoundly influences his work, leading to creations that transcend conventional boundaries and redefine fashion. The 2024 recipient of the British Fashion Award for New Establishment Womenswear, 16Arlington’s influence has grown through red carpet appearances, high-profile media coverage and endorsement by the world’s most notable retailers. 

About Hannah Barry Gallery
Hannah Barry Gallery is a contemporary art gallery based in London. The gallery programme is focussed on realising ambitious solo and group exhibitions, live performance and new commissions, supporting publications and programming and producing cross-disciplinary projects led by the artists we represent. Hannah Barry Gallery is committed to artists and projects that value experimentation and risk, discussion and debate and continues to operate according to the principles on which it was started: dedicated to the progress of artists and their ideas, to the development of a language and network of support around artistic practice, and to bring the work to the broadest possible audiences. Opening in 2008, Hannah Barry Gallery grew out of a series of temporary exhibition projects in South London before establishing a permanent home in Peckham.

Bold Tendencies is a not-for-profit arts organisation set up by Hannah Barry in 2007 which continues to run alongside the gallery. Established in the rooftop spaces of Peckham’s Multi-Storey Car Park, it has transformed a disused building into an iconic, much-loved place of culture and assembly. Supporting a new generation of creative voices alongside acclaimed international artists, it delivers an ambitious annual programme of experimental Visual Arts, Creative Learning and Live Events open to the public, offering access, participation and enjoyment of the arts for everyone.

In Performance: ‘BODYSUIT’ by Sharon Eyal & George Rouy

Hauser & Wirth DTLA

The exhibition explores the interrelation between nature and technology, prompting us to consider both their effects on our society, humanity and its horizon, and our own positionality in earth’s future. Like a call to adventure beckoning us to explore these connections, the exhibition challenges our understanding of these two seemingly opposing forces.

Nature has long been a source of inspiration for artists over the last 40,000 years, the natural world being depicted in prehistoric cave paintings found across the globe. Despite human attempts to control it, nature will reclaim its space after our technological innovations fade, a thought best illustrated in the image of wildflowers that bloom in derelict factories in many provincial locations globally. This exchange reminds us that while modern technologies enhance our lives and agricultural advances feed vast populations, it is nature’s virility that forms the foundation of our existence. 

Nature also finds ways to endure despite humanity's insatiable appetite for expansion and subjugation. Gillian Brett's work (France) reflects upon the decline of traditional farming methods and the increasing reliance on precision agriculture technologies. Brett invites viewers to consider the delicate balance between human intervention and the natural world. 

Similarly, Beverley Duckworth’s (UK) research into global landfills materializes in sculpture and installation that takes a regenerative approach to the infinite mountains of discarded garments and electronic waste by implanting them with seeds and utilizing them as foundations for roots of new life to emerge. 

Helena Sekot (Austria) attends to the formal symbolism of the natural world, leaning into the grace and grit of flora and fauna. Sekot’s series of digital prints of rhubarb skins wrapped around body parts contain a sensuality and eroticism that references both digital cultures and art history. 

Ewelina Skrowronska’s (Poland) paintings use natural dyes, departing from a human-centric framing of the world to reveal a deeply interconnected biophilic reading of Earth. The works offer us a potential dreamscape of a future where humankind and the natural world work in symbiosis.

Permission to Bloom

DON’T LOOK Projects

Murmurs is pleased to present Resurrectura, a solo exhibition of multimodal, kinetic sculptures by Sasha Fishman opening November 9, 2024 from 6-9pm. The works on view––composed largely of moving image, biomaterials, and running water––exemplify Fishman’s sustained engagement with an aesthetics of transcorporeality. Disgust, pleasure, identification, and desire commingle within the interstices of both Fishman’s material structures and the interspecies encounters they speak of.

Sasha Fishman is a NY based sculptor and researcher. She is particularly interested in marine biomaterials, toxicology and energy harvesting as points for critical analysis and mechanisms for sculpting. She is a recent MFA Sculpture graduate from Columbia University where she collaborated with labs on salmon, fountains, and carbon capture materials. Sasha is a 2024 Puffins Grant recipient and a current Artist in Residence at Smack Mellon.  

Fishman has exhibited her work at Below Grand (New York), Resort (Maryland), Hesse Flatow (New York), Bozomag (Los Angeles), ILY2 (Portland), The Jewish Museum (New York), and The Indian Ceramics Triennale (New Delhi, India). She has participated in residencies at Smack Mellon (New York), Art Ichol (India), Acre (Wisconsin), NAHR (Italy) and the High Desert Observatory (California). Fishman has presented her work and run workshops at Printed Matter (New York), Genspace (New York), Navel (Los Angeles), UCLA (Los Angeles), UDenver (Colorado), UColorado Boulder (Colorado), Kenyon College (Ohio), MICA (Maryland), Caltech (California), and CSULB (California). 

Sasha Fishman: Resurrectura

Merchant Modern is proud to present L.A. Rise, a group show bringing together an extraordinary roster of Artists within the L.A. community to raise money for those who have been impacted by the wildfires. This exhibition celebrates the power of art with 100% of Art Sales going directly to multiple organizations to fundraise for Wildfire Victims.

‘L.A. Rise’ features works from over 50 notable and emerging Artists that live and work in Los Angeles, California. This extensive exhibition showcases a mix of painting, sculpture, drawing and photography. In times like these it's important for the art community to come together, lean on each other and support one another. We are grateful for our community of Artists that have generously donated their work to make this initiative a reality and Keystone Art Space for giving us their gallery. The exhibition is sponsored by Madre Mezcal, Ghia, and Las Jaras Wine, whose contributions further amplify the spirit of collective action. Los Angeles is a city of dreamers and creatives that have always supported one another. We look forward to sharing this exhibition and coming together.

Artists featured: Abda Collective, An De Smedt, Allison Kunath, Anaïs Wade, Brandon Michael Young, Cara Lasell Bonewitz, Carolina Cortella, Cheryl Humphreys, Chris Di Vincente, Clement Leonardo, Dana Funaro, Darren Oorlof, Dax Henry, Eric Wareheim, Haley Bradley, Janet Levy, Jennelle Fong, Jonathan Cross, Juliana Giraffe, Kate Berry, Katie Thompson, Kassandra Thatcher, Lynda Keeler, Marleigh Culver, Mambo Jambo, Melinda Forster, Merchant Modern, Meredith Ambruso, Michael Harnish, Mike McMullen, Mikki Itzigsohn, Neil Kryszak, NFS, Nicola Giraffe, Nik Nik, Paige Stewart, Pascal Shirley, Pascale Vaquette, Polina Perl, Rachel Traub, Raina Lee, Rami Kim, Rebecca Rich, Ren Von Hasseln, Renata Daina, Salamat, Sara Marlowe Hall, Shoshi Watanabe, Skylar Hughes, Tetsuo Kashiwada, Todd Anderson and Vanessa Chow.

Merchant Modern Group Show: L.A. Rise

Rhett Baruch Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of paintings and sculptures by artist Richard Shapiro. He is an internationally recognized creative in the worlds of design and art. Over the last forty years his greatest love has been Arte Povera, the Italian movement of the mid 20th century. Its hallmarks and references have almost always found their way into his work. Unconventional materials and fabrication methods are broadly employed in his ongoing search for what he calls a “new language”. This is the inaugural exhibition for the gallery at its new location as well as the first solo exhibition with Shapiro

The opening reception is on Saturday, January 25, 2025 from 5-8pm at 357 N La Brea Ave

Richard Shapiro: Incursions 

Rhett Baruch Gallery 

Lucky Cat Gallery is proud to present its first event of the new year. ‘Fun Dip’ is a group show showcasing local creative talent from the Los Angeles area. The artists in this show were chosen for their playful styles and subject matter. From spirit animals to gum balls to surrealist fever dreams, the works on display are celebrations of the whimsical inner worlds that manifest the weird and wonderful.

Featured artists: Lauren Mendelsohn-Bass, Ethan Cranke, Jason Mascow, Adrienne Kinsella, James Frost, Vlad Bibik, RJ Quiralta, Cat Charles, Brayden Bugazzi, Steven Morrell, Godfrey Mawema, Wayne Chang, Lance Paulin, Shanna Cox

Fun Dip: A Group Show

Lucky Cat Labs

“WANDERLUST TRAILS” Solo Painting Exhibit
Curator Dena D'Angelo is proud to present the Los Angeles premiere solo show of Carlos Buitrago, a distinguished artist born in Colombia and raised in California. In "Wanderlust Trails” Carlos invites viewers to drift through landscapes imbued with a sense of adventure and introspection. Each composition portrays the challenges, dreams, and vibrant settings encountered along life’s road.

The paintings reflect the exhilarating and unpredictable nature of journey, drawing parallels between the physical trails one traverses and inner paths of self-discovery. Canvases are saturated with vivid intricacies of color, geometric patterns, and organic forms that transform the human condition into a multi-faceted visual dialogue.

Buitrago’s work stirs the emotions, fills the viewer with wonder, and brilliantly blends abstraction, expressionism, and a modern nod to Cubism. The tender stories that accompany the work are on their own worthy of contemplation.



Carlos Buitrago: WANDERLUST TRAILS

CadFab Creative Gallery

In an effort to raise funds for those who lost their homes, studios, and possessions in the recent devastating Los Angeles wildfires, LAST Projects is proud to present “ Artist Relief Fundraiser Exhibition” opening Saturday, Feb 1st with over 60 artists participating. The exhibition brings together many artists from disparate communities and proceeds generated from sales will be donated directly to the Flintridge Center Dena Relief fund supporting displaced African American residents of Altadena and to artists who’ve been severely impacted by the fires.

We are honored to include work from 10 Altadena artists who been displaced by the  Eaton Fire.
This exhibition has been organized by Rachid Bouhamidi and Ilona Berger

Liv Aanrud
ABDA Collective
Nick Aguayo
Anthony Ausgang
Mario Ayala
Troy Barrett
Joe Baiza
Raul Baltazar
Rachel Borenstein
Rachid Bouhamidi
Meagan Boyd
Becky Brown
Daniela Campins
Rafael Cardenas
Keenan Derby
Tomory Dodge
Patrick Donovan
Greg Edwards
Rafa Esparza
Edie Fake
Luka Fisher
Karen Lofgren
Edgar Fabían Frías
Michelle Garduno
Michael Green
Sam Greenfeld
Howard Goldberg
Trulee Hall
Derrick Harlan
Valerie Hastie
Matt Haywood
Daniel Herr
Hugo Hopping
Raina Janke
Chris Johanson
JPW3
Peter Kalisch  &  Abby Martin
Markus Linnenbrink
Manuel Lopez
Nick Lowe
Susanna Mills
Louise O’Donnell
Jacky Perez
Jean-Guerly Pétion
Felix Quintana
Colin Roberts
Alex Andrew Sanchez
Rebecca Yeretzian-Santana
Skip Snow
Karim Shuquem
Kayla Tange & Sal Treviño
Molly Tierney
Joi Marie Tillman
Sasha Tivetsky
Ever Velasquez
Celeste Voce
Dorian Wood
Liz Walsh
Tara Zorthian


Artists Relief Fundraiser Exhibition, benefiting the DENA FIre Relief Fund & displaced artists in our coomunity

LAST Projects Gallery

Residing in the Eastern Sierra Nevadas, artist James Newton is a graduate of the prestigious Mexico City Art School and Chouinard Institute.  Newton’s work is  anti-art joy.   Not only is wit and mockery on full display here,  but Newton plays with the commonsensical expectations of modern art. 

CURATED BY: Richard Jackson and Samantha Smith 

Jim Newton: New Work

The LMF Gallery & Darkroom

Take Me to Heaven, Sylvester (1984, excerpt)

All I wanna know
Do you wanna rock me
The lights are low
And you know where to go
So baby, let’s hit the floor

Won’t you take me to Heaven
Take me to Heaven
Oh, take me to Heaven

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is thrilled to present the dazzling woven, beaded tapestries of John Paul Morabito in their first one-person exhibition with the gallery. The title of the exhibition, Take Me To Heaven, references the famed Black, Queer, disco icon of the 70’s and 80’s, Sylvester! Sylvester’s music, lyrics, and gender fluid persona gave voice to the cultural and political shifts in America when sexual energy pulsed in clubs throughout urban centers, where seduction, drag, sparkle, protest, coming out, demands for equal rights and decriminalization began ripping through the hetero-normative walls of the United States. Morabito’s luminous tapestries tower as a metaphoric rallying cry, “This is a retracing of the queer resistance born in urban discos of a prior generation. As social and political forces once again seek to eradicate queer people, I, like those who came before me, reach for the promise of queer futurity.”

Improvisation guides Morabito’s woven abstractions; bold intersecting geometry with electrifying gold and hot neon colors are the intuitive gestures of “the body pulsing to the rhythm of the beat.” Morabito’s work delivers “a spark of divinity,” reaching back in time to the cultural zenith that celebrated queer spaces. However, citing health as the orthodoxy of reason, AIDS provided political heft for the erasure and censure of queer public centers in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Morabito’s unabashed emphasis on metaphor, beauty, and sensuality fuels the recovery of queer identity, community, and place—“where glamour, glitter, sweat, and low light open embodied pathways to find something greater than yourself.” Glass beads, hand-dyed wool, and cotton in the hands of Morabito become the sacrament of possibility, defying voices that would choose to turn back the clock of time.

In our first group exhibition with Morabito, (A Chorus of Twisted Threads, 2023) the gallery presented selections from For Félix (love letter), an homage to Félix González-Torres, who succumbed to AIDS in the ’90s. This series was a corollary to the exquisite homoerotic beaded curtains of González-Torres, a powerful metaphoric veil between sex, life, and death. Morabito’s beaded tapestries offered a ravishing tribute to González-Torres but also delivered a celebratory fist to subsequent Queer generations. Like González-Torres’, Morabito’s art is a protest against religious and institutional policies as the guiding moral orthodoxy. Their subtle but powerful interventions in For Félix (love letter) reinterpret sanctity with a seductive queer protest. Beading the long strands of thread is analogous to the beaded rosary; only instead of contrition, Morabito’s act is erotic, lacing their tapestry with desire, intimacy, exaltation, and remembrance.

John Paul Morabito was awarded the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship in January 2024. They are Assistant Professor and Head of Textiles at Kent State University in Ohio. From 2013 to 2022 they were on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies.  They hold a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In tandem with their studio, John Paul Morabito pursues a practice-led scholarship that positions weaving as a critical platform of cultural production. Their writing has been published in Art China, The Textile Reader 2 (China Academy of Art), The Journal of Textile Design Research and Practice, Textile: Cloth and Culture. They are the editor of Weaving Beyond the Binary, a special issue of the international peer reviewed journal, Textile: Cloth and Culture. Their work has been included in museum exhibitions, including the Art in Embassies Program, Washington, DC; The Threads We Follow, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), Winston-Salem, NC; Queer Abstraction, curated by Jared Ledesma, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA, and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Arts, Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou City, China. Their tapestries are included in public and private collections, with a recent placement at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.

Image: John Paul Morabito | Untitled (fever) | 2024 | linen, wool, gold leaf thread, glass beads | 47 x 92 inches

_____

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is excited and honored to feature Los Angeles-based artist Ferne Jacobs in her First Los Angeles gallery exhibition! The gallery’s focus on artists who engage in conceptual material practices aligns with Jacobs’ pioneering career.

Ferne Jacobs’ sculptures have been included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Art and Design, the MFA Boston, the MFA Houston, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the De Young Museum, and many more over several decades. Recently, Jacobs was a finalist for the prestigious 2024 Loewe Craft Prize. Currently her work is on public view at the MFA Boston and the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation.

At 82 years old, Jacobs is a ground-breaking pioneer in the International Fiber Art Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She continues her daily studio practice today, intuitively coiling and twining compelling abstract forms that infer historical provenance beyond their making.

On view will be coiled and twined free-standing sculpture and wall work, including new as well as work spanning over her 50-year career.

Jacobs is recognized for her technical mastery of material and process. Reinventing and advancing traditional techniques used for basketry and inventing countless other methods along the way, Jacobs has generated an entirely fresh format for sculptural art. Her acute sense of color melded with her poetic and intuitive approach are characteristic traits. Each piece begins with an idea, a dream, a story, or a picture in Jacobs’ mind, but it grows and takes on its own form over the months in which she shapes the artwork.

Jacobs plays with duality in terms of textures, contrast of color, interior and exterior, solids and voids. In terms of concept, she investigates the significance of masculinity and femininity, spirituality and religion, and the destruction of the natural world… Her pieces are meditations on the fiber of society and the nature of humanity in the modern world.
– Emily Zaiden, Essay: Connected Cells, Breathing Forms, Craft in America Exhibition, 2022

When I begin a piece, I create a line by wrapping thread around a cord with a color that has been in my mind. From then on I live in a mystery, creating each cell (wrap) and connection, of what I hope is a living form. The cells make up a body, and I have no idea about what it will become until it is finished. There is no direct intention, only a hope that it has life and through that, is moving in some way.
– Ferne Jacobs, from Connected Cells, Breathing Forms, Craft in America Exhibition, 2022

John Paul Morabito: Take Me To Heaven | Ferne Jacobs: A Poetry of Thread

Patricia Sweetow Gallery

 Fuji interweaves Japanese myth and folklore with contemporary iconography to explore ideas of identity and space, history and heritage. The title of the exhibition refers to the particular feeling of a certain place, and the works negotiate the constant push and pull of living between two continents and two cultures. Fuji populates remembered Japanese interiors with ancestors, playful deities and spirits, imagining them all coexisting in the modern day. The work celebrates traditional Japanese craftsmanship and spiritual tradition while simultaneously embracing a playful, modern sensibility.   

Maya Fuji: Igokochi・居心地 

Charlie James Gallery (2nd location)

(paradise)

Reisig and Taylor Contemporary

Niches of the Mind
Todd Carpenter

Dark Sublime
Tom Pazderka

Opening Reception:
Saturday, February 8th, 5pm-8pm

February 8 - March 1, 2024
﻿﻿
Gallery Hours:
Thursday-Saturday: 12pm - 4pm and By Appointment

LAUNCH Gallery
170 S. La Brea Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90036﻿

LAUNCH Gallery is proud to present two solo exhibitions by artists whose work is defined by their monochromatic paintings in black. Both Todd Carpenter and Tom Pazderka examine landscape painting through use of materials and techniques that heighten and enhance the relationships and interactions among natural forces, history, science, and humanity. Todd Carpenter presents complex themes through richly detailed oil paintings examining landscapes in their natural and majestic stillness. While Tom Pazderka’s medium of paint and ash portrays the natural world violently disrupted by powerful forces of both nature and man.

Todd Carpenter, Under Sheltered
Todd Carpenter returns for his fifth solo exhibition with LAUNCH Gallery since 2010, continuing his deep exploration of our landscapes and humanity’s place in it. While Todd’s paintings, in either urban or wilderness settings, radiate the positive energy of a healthy and inhabited environment, they never include creatures of any kind. Thanks to our advanced conscious and subconscious minds, we are able to interpret the black, white and gray scale imagery as a colorful, robust and lively vista.
My paintings attempt to capture this unconscious connection between humans and places. In particular, I focus on the features that are most effective at conveying the feel of a landscape, and to this end I break scenes down, dissecting them to find the essential organs that give life to land. The subjects become simplified, reduced to the factors that appeal to our genes, as I search for the features that are most intriguing. I concentrate on characteristics such as the subtle shadings of light, the fragments of perspective we don’t consciously see, or the angle of the lines under our feet, as I strive to paint distillations of light and atmosphere, and condensates of shadow, awe, and fear.

Light itself is often the principle subject of my paintings, for frequently it is light that tells us about the dimensionality of a place, while at the same time light is what makes a scene evocative, infusing even the mundane with feeling. It imparts places with atmosphere and intrigue, watering the seeds of our memory with vagaries of shadow that imbue a view with mystery.

My paintings thus examine our attachment to our surroundings, attempting to capture the ability of landscapes to evoke something in our sense of being. They are about place: not particular places, but the more generic idea of place, the place in our ancient past that our minds are searching for. I am trying to depict our niche, our sense of the world as it relates to our sense of self, the unconscious link between the mind and the environment. These are the brains hidden scenes, forgotten by us but remembered in our genes.

Tom Pazderka, Nostalgie XXXIII The Eschaton I﻿
Similarly awestruck by the splendor of nature in all its manifestations of beauty and complexity, Tom Pazderka pays homage to it by documenting its energy and power. In 2016, Tom began photographing and collecting ash of local California wildfires. Combining ash with white oil paint on wood panels that he burned and charred with torches, Tom painted the pyrocumulous ash clouds produced by fires. Applied in thin layers, systematically, over long periods, the images emerge out of the ashy abyss. The subject matter of this body of work has slowly has begun to expand as Tom’s curiosity about human and natural power grows along with his command of this unique medium.
For this exhibition, I wanted to explore the similarities between human technology and the forces of nature, to put the atomic bomb explosion on a similar footing with an exploding volcano or a massive wildfire, not so much for their magnitude, but for the awe, reverence and fear they inspire. That an exhibition of ash clouds and explosions coincides with one of the worst wildfire disasters in Los Angeles history is not lost on me. In the ten years I’ve lived in Southern California I’ve had close calls with the raging fury of fires. They are dangerous, and often apocalyptic and today an ever present reality waiting to erupt at any moment. It is that strange ‘subconscious’ of the Southern California landscape that continues to inspire my work.
About the artists:

Tom Pazderka is a Czech American painter, installation artist, writer, and curator. His work interrogates ideology, nostalgia, loss, and belonging using a black-and-white palette of ash and oil. Pazderka’s solo exhibitions include Gallery 825 (Los Angeles, CA), Bender Gallery (Asheville, NC), Silo118 (Santa Barbara, CA) and The Basic Premise (Ojai, CA) with group exhibitions at Santa Monica Art Museum, Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, Bardo Fine and Performing Arts Center in Cullowhee, NC, Sullivan Goss Gallery in Santa Barbara, Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts in Ojai and the Santa Barbara Center for Art Science and Technology.
As Curator for the Santa Barbara County Office of Arts and Culture, Tom engages the county community and artists to produce and exhibit art in public spaces and galleries. Prior to serving as County Office of Arts and Culture Curator, he served as our Lead Preparator and Exhibitions Designer since 2017. He also held significant roles with the UCSB Art, Design and Architecture Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara.

Todd Carpenter uses black and white paint to examine the capacity of landscape paintings to convey the sense of places. He holds a MS in Neuroscience and a BS in Psychobiology, and brings this background into service when making art. His paintings explore the mechanisms of perception and aesthetics, probing the relationships between humans and our environment by examining concepts such as how the depiction of light can impart realism and mood. Before becoming a full-time artist Carpenter worked in the sciences, and in the past has taught neuroscience, environmental science, and photography. He currently teaches painting through the community education program at Santa Monica College. He is based in southern California.
 
LAUNCH LA believes exposure to the arts enhances quality of life and strengthens community for all through the shared appreciation of creative expression in all its forms and hybrids. LAUNCH LA is passionate about providing all artists regardless of background, race, color, creed or sexual orientation with quality opportunities to present themselves and their creations that reflect our times to curious and enthusiastic audiences at our Gallery and at important happenings throughout Los Angeles County.﻿
LAUNCH LA recognizes our presence on Tovaangar, the unceded ancestral lands of the Gabrielino-Tongva people who are its rightful caretakers and whose connection to the land. Water, and culture we benefit. rom.

Todd Carpenter: Niches of the mind | Tom Pazderka: Dark Sublime

LAUNCH LA

La Luz de Jesus Gallery is excited to announce the upcoming exhibition of Complicated Characters, a collaborative exhibition with Jon Langford as Father Drogo and Jim Sherraden as Bishop Biscuit and Sugar and Spice, a solo exhibition with Don Fritz. The exhibitions open February 7th and close March 2nd. The free to the public reception is Friday February 7th from 7pm to 11pm.

Master Printer Emeritus Jim Sherraden and prolific musician and visual artist Jon Langford have been collaborating since 2016. This exhibit, Complicated Characters, will be their fourth such show, featuring a blend of Sherraden’s woodcut artwork and Langford’s extraordinary drawing skills. The show’s title is a nod to the alter egos the artists took on during their collaborative process.

Don Fritz busts out two series of drawings that at first glance may seem congruent but only in Fritz’s iconic stylistic approach to composition. Often his drawings involve layers and layers of discombobulated iconography, figures and text, all hinting towards a larger story filled with many complexities and layers.

The first series is Sugar and Spice, based around a 50’s childhood juxtaposed against the background of a brewing Cold War sentiment, emerging neo-liberal ideals, and attempts at holding up fundamentalist traditions. Many of his children emulating the perky and innocence of a Precious Moments figurine than actual children, furthering this satirical difference.

The other series is Demon and Dolls, taking a dirtier turn as Don Fritz satirizes Mexican pulp fiction and comics. These comics, not unlike the lowbrow pulp of other countries, are beyond exaggerated, both in character design and plot.



Jon Langford & Jim Sherraden: Complicated Characters | Don Fritz: Sugar and Spice

La Luz De Jesus Gallery

Scientia Sexualis is an ambitious group survey of contemporary artists whose work confronts, dissolves, and reimagines sex and gender within the scientific apparatus. Organized by Jennifer Doyle (Professor of English, University of California, Riverside) and Jeanne Vaccaro (Assistant Professor of Transgender Studies and Museum Studies, University of Kansas), the exhibition will take place in fall 2024 as part of the ambitious collaboration across arts institutions throughout Southern California led by the Getty known as Pacific Standard Time, and will be accompanied by a major scholarly publication produced by ICA LA.

Scientia Sexualis centers research-driven interventions into raced and gendered assumptions that structure scientific disciplines governing our sense of the sexual body. The artists in this exhibition bring attention to the material, conceptual, and psychic forms of the lab and the clinic as aesthetics that operate across scientific and artistic discourses. The exhibition catalogue will feature new writing by leading interdisciplinary scholars who will map key concepts (sex, race, Indigeneity), materials (instruments, specimens, biomatter), and disciplines (psychiatry, anthropology, reproductive medicine) that the artists engage through their work. Together with the catalogue and related programming, Scientia Sexualis aims to examine and reconfigure the relationship between art and science and, in turn, to create an alternative access point to the history of science where sex, gender, and pleasure are concerned.

Scientia Sexualis takes its title from Michel Foucault’s landmark text, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976), in which Foucault describes the nineteenth-century development of a “scientia sexualis”—the clinical pursuit of a “uniform truth of sex” as evidenced by an endless scanning of the body and a relentless cataloging of sexual types and deviations. In contrast, over the past 35 years, feminist and queer artists have approached sex and gender as sources of experimentation, knowledge production, medical management, and biotechnical information, resulting in a wide range of works that address difficult subjects such as the origins of modern gynecology and its ties to the torture of enslaved women; the pathologizing of the sexual body; the entanglement of colonization with sexual violence; and the nonconsensual gendering of trans and intersex people. The artists featured in Scientia Sexualis not only explore these painful histories through their artistic output, but they also work from its wake, reclaiming and redeploying scientific discourses to produce speculative technologies of transformation, map embodied forms of knowledge, and radicalize practices of healing and care.

While several major museum exhibitions have addressed issues of gender, sexuality, and representation, Scientia Sexualis is distinct for the coalitional possibilities it generates between Black, feminist, trans and decolonial approaches to these subjects. The project is intentionally heterogenous, situating Black feminist work that confronts the abuse of Black women’s bodies alongside decolonial interrogations of a settler colonial anthropology, trans reclamation of medical practices, and intersectional feminist interventions in reproductive medicine. As a whole, the exhibition addresses the aftermath of our encounters with scientific discourses and institutions as the featured artists surface the contradictory energies that circulate through the lab and the clinic, the library and the archive, exploring and re-constructing frameworks that tell us not only what sex and gender are, but what a body is and can be.

Featured artists include: Panteha Abareshi, Dotty Attie, Louise Bourgeois, Nao Bustamante, Andrea Carlson, Demian DinéYazhi’, Nicole Eisenman, El Palomar, dean erdmann, Jes Fan, Nicki Green, Oliver Husain & Kerstin Schroedinger, Xandra Ibarra, KING COBRA (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner), Joseph Liatela, Candice Lin, Carlos Motta, Wangechi Mutu, Young Joon Kwak & Gala Porras-Kim, Cauleen Smith, P. Staff, Joey Terrill, Chris E. Vargas, Millie Wilson, and Geo Wyex.

Image: Jes Fan

Scientia Sexualis

ICA LA

KP PROJECTS is pleased to present Conversations with Cryptids and Sea Monsters, a delightful new body of work by Travis Louie that brings the legends of hybridized cryptids to life in painted form. Rooted in the artist’s lifelong fascination with mysterious creatures, the exhibition pays tribute to the search for elusive beings that haunt our collective imaginations.

Travis Louie: Conversations with Cryptids and Sea Monsters

KP Projects

Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles, is delighted to announce ‘A More Distant Present’, a solo exhibition of new works by John Riepenhoff.

Riepenhoff’s Night Sky paintings began as a way to distill ego out of authorship. For over a decade, he painted solely in the dark of night, letting the experience of seeing – not his hand – guide the work. The paintings are emergent, existing in the space between abstraction and realism, where perception blurs into sensation. The only realism that can exist is the present; the moment it slips into the past, it becomes abstract. Painting is the present suspended. Rooted in observation yet open to improvisation, Riepenhoff’s process draws from the natural and social landscapes that surround him. The newest works, all painted in Milwaukee, deepen the sense of atmosphere and interiority, shifting from the outward searching of earlier iterations to a more layered and ambient experience. Multiple passes build up over time, reframing and reforming the layers below, much like the night sky itself – a shifting, recursive continuum.

John Riepenhoff: A More Distant Present

Tanya Leighton Los Angeles

Gallery Luisotti is delighted to announce our fourth solo exhibition with New York-based artist Shirley Irons celebrating the release of her first comprehensive publication, Composition, and the gallery’s parallel presentation of paintings showcasing four-decade of work mixing her industrial landscapes and anonymous highways with her most recent focus, the flower.

Irons subtle oil paintings made between 1988 and 2019 of landscape fragments and urban interiors based on photographs taken as she drives through exurban landscapes, blends realistic details with abstract applications of paint to explore how much information is necessary to render an image legible. These fleeting landscape scenes often capturing the perspective of someone on the move, gives meditative attention to side-glances and everyday objects. Influences include late Manet, Morris Graves, Janice Biala and particularly Vija Celmins in the way she extracts moments in the landscape and creates a simple, nuanced rendition of a lamp or a tiny section of the ocean or sky, fleeting moments of infinity.

The flower paintings represent a paradigmatic shift as Irons transitioned to painting directly from observation, rather than using photographs as references. As such, these new paintings consider a different way of seeing, reinforced by a salon-style hang where the movement of one’s eye across the canvases parallels the motion of the artist’s hand across the canvas. Moments of heartfelt consideration, visual pleasure, or poignant passages echo in Irons paint handling—the tenuous strokes of pale green that portray a fragile stem, the bristly pointillism of the flower’s luminescent fronds, and the subtly monochromatic shading of the flowers themselves—meditating on the passage of time and the joys of close looking.

By highlighting these in-between moments and spaces the artist expands how we think about the world around us, eloquently capturing the fragmentation of modern life and the ephemeral nature of our existence with elegant pulses of painterly movement through time and space.

Please join us on Saturday, February 1, 5 – 7pm to celebrate the artists new exhibition and book launch. Composition is published by MACK Books, UK.

Image: Shirley Irons, 2nd Black Highway, 2003

Shirley Irons: Composition: Landscsapes, Highways and Flowers

Gallery Luisotti

Sean Kelly, Los Angeles is delighted to announce Keep Your Wonder Moving, the West Coast debut of Chicago-based artist Lindsay Adams and her inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery. Titled after a note written by poet Patricia Spears Jones to philosopher Audre Lorde, the exhibition, presented on the third floor, consists of eleven abstract paintings. Keep Your Wonder Moving emphasizes the artist’s longstanding interest in world-building – Adams’ exploration of abstraction as a conduit for expanding the imagination while embedding deeply personal narratives. The exhibition opens on Saturday, January 18 from 5 - 7 PM. The artist will be present.

Adams’ work interrogates the boundaries of abstraction and representation, seamlessly weaving together the materiality of paint with the intangibility of memory and cultural identity. Her layered approach—where pigments are built up, washed away, or otherwise manipulated—imbues each canvas with a sense of flux, reflecting her assertion that painting is as much alchemical as it is artistic. Her process leaves behind not only a complex surface, but also an ambiguity that invites sustained contemplation.

Keep Your Wonder Moving pivots from her earlier figurative depictions of nature and Black subjects to a complex abstract vernacular. As Adams describes, this transition emerged as “an inevitable shift toward expressing a conceptual story, allowing myself latitude in my storytelling and cultural reflection.” The works on view highlight her interest in constructing imagined ecologies, spaces in which rhythmic gestures and dynamic hues engage in a continuous dialogue. For instance, in Rhythm With Blues, electric yellow and lavender forms bloom against an inky blue background, evoking a field of abstracted flowers that resist traditional representational constraints. Adams challenges the viewer to question the delineations of form to embrace the unknown.

Thematically, Adams situates her practice at the intersection of resilience, freedom, and the quotidian realities of Black womanhood. Her work transforms the canvas into an aspirational site—one that allows for intimate encounters with self-discovery and resistance against societal constraints. This ethos resonates with her political and cultural identity, as her paintings assert their presence within a broader discourse of artistic and social transformation. The exhibition thus positions painting as both a reflective and generative act, with Adams’ compositions acting as sites where meaning is not prescribed but rather discovered.

Lindsay Adams is currently finalizing her MFA in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received a BA in both International Studies and Spanish from The University of Richmond. She has already garnered critical recognition, including the prestigious Helen Frankenthaler Award in 2024 and the New Artist Society Merit Award in 2023. Her work has been exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, Washington, D.C., and is included in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art and Northwestern Law School.

____

Sean Kelly, Los Angeles is delighted to present Fading Origin, Wu Chi-Tsung’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Known for his experimental approach to photography, Chi-Tsung’s work bridges traditional Chinese art techniques and contemporary media, integrating Eastern and Western aesthetics. The exhibition features new works in Chi-Tsung’s signature Cyano-Collage series and marks innovative new developments in his Wrinkled Texture works. There will be a reception from 5 to 7 pm. The artist will be present.

Wu Chi-Tsung was initially drawn to the cyanotype – an early form of photography requiring only basic chemicals and sunlight – in response to the rise of digital photography. For Chi-Tsung, what digital photography loses, and what his cyanotypes capture, is the medium’s openness to chance and its connection to the material world, qualities that make each cyanotype unique. Chi-Tsung’s renowned Cyano-Collage series synthesize his dual interests in Chinese landscape painting and experimental photography. This process begins by washing sheets of Xuan rice paper in photo-sensitive materials, which, when dried, Chi-Tsung creases by hand and exposes to sunlight. The subsequent abstract elements are collaged together on aluminum panels. The resulting images are open to interpretation perhaps evoking sublime mountainous landscapes or tumultuous seascapes. With their stunning formal cohesion and classical grandeur, the Cyano-Collages belie the inventive process of their creation. While Chi-Tsung conjures his panoramas through experimental photography, his use of the cyanotype process retains a connection to both the artist’s hand and the natural world. In this way, Chi-Tsung captures the spiritual depth of Eastern painting traditions dating back over a thousand years, while renewing it with a contemporary aesthetic.

In the new Wrinkled Texture Fading Origin series the diptych and quadriptych works begin with a single, full sheet of exposed cyanotype paper. This print then becomes the basis for recursive cyanotypes within the same work, with each image becoming the negative for the adjacent sheet. The result is a mesmerizing shift between blue and white tones, where the original image gradually dissipates into a field of color. This process captures the ephemeral and transient qualities of the natural world whilst also emphasizing the slight, irreproducible differences unique to analog processes. By double-exposing the paper and exploring the faded origin of the image, the Wrinkled Texture Fading Origin series reflect Chi-Tsung’s commitment to advancing the medium while preserving the poetic, tactile qualities of analog photography.

Wu Chi-Tsung believes his generation is the last to transition from analog to digital photography, a shift that profoundly informs his practice. Unlike digital images, where copies retain perfect fidelity, analog processes embrace subtle variations that reflect their individuality. In his Cyano-Collage series, breathtaking images emerge from the meticulous accumulation of numerous cyanotype prints, while his Wrinkled Texture works explore cycles of emergence and disappearance through innovative multiple exposures. Together, these works emphasize the conceptual depth, material innovation, and aesthetic sensitivity that define Chi-Tsung’s body of work.

Wu Chi-Tsung’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Katonah Museum of Art, New York and TAO Art, Taiwan. His work has been included in international exhibitions at institutions such as the Mori Art Museum, Japan; the National Museum Cardiff, United Kingdom; the Long Beach Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art Contemporain, Luxembourg; the Museo Del Palacio De Bellas Artes, Mexico; the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing; the Shanghai Art Museum and the Minsheng 21st Century Museum, Shanghai, China; the Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea; the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan amongst others. Wu Chi-Tsung was the recipient of the Liu Kuo Sung Ink Art Award, Hong Kong in 2019, the WRO Media Art Biennial award in 2013 and the Taipei Arts Award in 2003. His work is included in renowned collections such as the Xie Zilong Photography Museum, the Post Vidai Collection, M+ Hong Kong, The Vero Beach Museum of Art, The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection.



Lindsay Adams Keep Your Wonder Moving | Wu Chi-Tsung: Fading Origin

Sean Kelly Los Angeles

Yoshitomo Nara
My Imperfect Self
Curated by Yeewan Koon

BLUM Los Angeles
January 18–March 8, 2025
Opening reception is postponed to late February

BLUM is pleased to present My Imperfect Self, Yoshitomo Nara’s tenth exhibition with the gallery, commemorating thirty years since the artist’s first US show, entitled Pacific Babies, at Blum & Poe in 1995. 

A standout piece from that first exhibition, titled There is No Place Like Home (1995), employs dark humor to explore the complexities of belonging for a young Japanese artist living in Germany on the cusp of international acclaim. Today, that restless uncertainty has given way to a deep-seated sense of connectedness, including attunement to remote places that remind him of growing up in Northern Japan. It was in Sapporo, Hokkaido, when Nara first started using remnants of unused clay to deconstruct his iconic image of the child into misshaped forms that bear traces of his hands, reestablishing his connection to the material and his sense of place. This process culminated in a new series of bronze sculptures, eleven of which are presented for the first time in this latest exhibition. Seen together, these works highlight how far Nara has transformed the kawaii aesthetic into an alternate realm of beguiling misfits. 

My Imperfect Self: Yoshitomo Nara

This exhibition highlights Nara’s evolving sculptural practice, featuring eleven mid-size heads exuding a quirky strangeness and dark charm that defines the artist’s work. These heads, presented for the first time, are integral to Nara’s exploration in clay, intertwining ideas and techniques developed since 2011, but also express a poignant return to his roots. The exhibition also includes paintings and drawings that resonate with the sculptures, inviting deeper reflection on his ongoing experimentation throughout a career that gained international acclaim with his seminal work, The Girl with the Knife in Her Hand (1991).

This collection of heads is full of contradictions that lean toward the peculiar and anomalous. Although cast in bronze, they were first made in clay as palm size pieces, and then enlarged and cast in bronze. In their transformed state, the malleable nature of the clay’s original form remains evident, enticing viewers to retrace Nara’s touch across its pillowy surface. Many feature a flattened face on which Nara cleaves lines, pokes holes, and scratches indentations on their matte white planar surfaces, wrapped within marshmallow globs of hair. However, these markings are not aggressive inflictions but rather embedded scarifications that lend the figures a raw, carefree quality of oddity. The overall effect is of a child, but one who we have never seen before in Nara's oeuvre. Gone are the rounded cheeks that we expect from his stylized depiction of the child motif, instead Title to be confirmed bears a shy smile with gouged eyes, and retreats into deep folds of imperfect hair; while Long Tall Peace Sister, the largest of the sculptures in the show, has flowers in her hair formed by using traditional tile molds. She smiles with delight, even with the five skeletal lines that form each eye. 

The awkwardness of these heads embraces the possibilities of mischance and imperfections. They form their own gang of misfits. For Nara, this reflects a renewed engagement with the praxis of making—the dynamic interplay between hand and body, craft and object—which directs his curiosity toward possibilities of incompleteness.

The artist’s turn toward this more embodied practice is shaped by three significant sources. The first comes from his response to the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, which left an indelible mark on Nara, whose natal home was close to this site. Struggling to paint, he took a large block of clay and threw his entire body against the solid mass of grayness, attacking it as if he were a sumo wrestler. It was a method of freeing himself to paint again, while also rekindling his interest in clay. The intensity of his bodily approach left imprints that, when cast in bronze, became permanent traces on his figurative heads—a contrast to the impermanence of life so clearly brought home by Fukushima’s fate. 

A second source, from around 2016, is drawn from Nara’s time spent in Northern Japan, including Tobiu, a remote village with Ainu roots in Sapporo. It was there that he began making his palm-size heads, initially as something playful where he would mindlessly give in to the material. These small, more spontaneous, heads speak to his wandering spirit, where forested landscapes and remote settings deepen his sense of being in the world. By working at a small scale, he sculpts with a gentler touch, shifting his bodily energy to reconnect with nature, rather than fighting with the clay as he had done in 2011. Scaling up, however, affords the artist a chance to experiment even more with the paring down of the figurative into quirkier forms of existential inelegance.

A third, less direct source, is a return to Nara's earliest paintings and drawings, especially of works that may have received less attention, such as figures with elongated almond-shaped bodies or squashed circular heads. It demonstrates a practice of Nara’s where he retrieves older works that may have once been considered imperfect, finding the open potential yet to come from that which is flawed. 

There is a strong connectivity across Nara’s works—evident when considering the paintings and drawings as a spectrum from the meditative to the spontaneous, exploring the potential of the unformed and of returns. The iconic figure in his large painting Blurry Mind draws viewers in to see the many layers of radiant colors that dance and glimmer across the canvas. This painting is a testament to Nara’s deep interest in the painterly effects of color, and its ability to hold viewers’ attention. This work is, however, also an iconic image of the “Nara-child,” one which the artist is seeking to deconstruct with these eleven sculptures, to find a new form that can push him into different directions. His process of taking apart his own pictorial language or returning to earlier, perhaps forgotten, drawings and paintings as inspiration also underscores the theme of this show. 

In the past decade, while continuing to exhibit in major museums worldwide, Nara has embraced a slower, more reflective approach to his work. He enjoys the tactile nature of his materials and the connective charge between hand and mind—elements that are evident in his latest paintings and sculptures. Notably, Nara aligns these methods with his own way of being in the world—where attentiveness to small, seemingly imperfect acts can yield a deep sense of freedom. 

– Yeewan Koon

Yoshitomo Nara (b. 1959, Hirosaki, Japan) graduated with an MFA from the Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music, Nagakute, Japan, in 1987, he completed his studies at the Kunstakademie, Dusseldorf, Germany from 1988 to 1993. Nara began his career during the decade he spent in Cologne, and from the mid-1990s, he exhibited widely in Europe, the United States, Japan, and all over Asia. His return to Japan in 2000 coincided with a surge of global interest in Japanese pop culture, particularly in the United States. While he is primarily a painter, his practice encompasses drawing; sculptures made of wood, FRP, ceramic, and bronze; installations that incorporate scrap materials; and photographs that document everyday landscapes and the encounters he has during his travels. Influenced by music, literature, and his own life, Nara's works transcend cultural and linguistic barriers, touching people globally.

Nara’s numerous solo exhibitions include Yoshitomo Nara, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain; traveling to Frieder Burda Museum, Baden-Baden, Germany; Hayward Gallery-Southbank Centre, London, UK (2024–25); Yoshitomo Nara: The Beginning Place, Aomori Museum of Art, Aomori, Japan (2023); Yoshitomo Nara: All My Little Words, Albertina Modern, Vienna, Austria (2023); Yoshitomo Nara, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; traveled to Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China; Kunsthal Rotterdam, Netherlands (2021–23); Yoshitomo Nara for better or worse, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Aichi, Japan (2017); Life is Only One: Yoshitomo Nara, Asia Society Hong Kong Center, Hong Kong, China (2015); NARA Yoshitomo: a bit like you and me…, Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan; traveled to Aomori Museum of Art, Japan; Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, Japan (2012–13); Yoshitomo Nara: The Little Little House in The Blue Wood, Towada Art Center, Aomori, Japan (2012); Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool, Asia Society Museum, New York, NY (2010); Yoshitomo Nara + graf, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle, UK (2008); Yoshitomo Nara + graf: A to Z, Yoshii Brick Brew House, Aomori, Japan (2006); Yoshitomo Nara: Moonlight Serenade, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Ishikawa, Japan (2006); Yoshitomo Nara— From the Depth of My Drawer, Hara Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan; traveled to Kanaz Forest of Creation, Fukui, Japan; Yonago City Museum of Art, Tottori, Japan; Yoshii Brick Brewhouse, Hirosaki, Aomori, Japan; Rodin Gallery, Seoul, South Korea (2004–05); Yoshitomo Nara: Nothing Ever Happens, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, OH; traveled to Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, PA; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MI; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, HI (2003–05); I DON’T MIND, IF YOU FORGET ME, Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama Japan; traveled to Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan; Ashiya City Museum of Art and History, Ashiya, Japan; Asahikawa Prefectural Museum of Art, Hokkaido, Japan; Aomori Museum of Art, Aomori, Japan; Hirosaki Yoshii Brick Brewhouse, Hirosaki, Japan (2001–02); Walk On: Works by Yoshitomo Nara, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL (2000); and Yoshitomo Nara: Lullaby Supermarket, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA (2000), among many more.

_____

BLUM is pleased to present New York-based artist Hadi Falapishi’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Edge of the World.

Exhibiting Falapishi’s new body of shrewdly deskilled panels alongside photorealistic paintings and bold ceramic sculptures, Edge of the World demonstrates the remarkable range inherent to the artist’s practice as he examines the widely varying possibilities for visual representation. Falapishi’s works cannibalize a vast quantity of reference material—from the Surrealists to Spaghetti Western films—to create a carefully selected composite of signs and signifiers. Deconstructing the vulnerabilities within both the act of viewing and of being viewed, Edge of the World is insightfully humorous, art historically allusive, and stylistically multifaceted. 

Growing up in Tehran as the son of two photographers and later studying photography at Bard College, Falapishi’s now interdisciplinary practice has a unique and expansive approach to the mechanism as medium. For Falapishi, the mechanism that he now activates to make work is the art and cultural historical canon. Deploying imagery from this pool of reference material, the artist situates his and other bodies therein. In his photorealistic paintings in Edge of the World, such as Professional Painter in a Tree on the Sixteenth of September (2024) or Professional Painter in a False Mirror (2024), for instance, Falapishi inserts his likeness into famous compositions by René Magritte while facetiously giving himself the title of “Professional Painter” as both a rebuke and an assessment of the painting style.

Stemming from the photorealistic paintings, Falapishi’s ceramic sculptures and panels with cardboard allow the artist to playfully explore the psychological state that drives his practice. Rendered in a loose style—with flat colors, crude shapes, and blocky horizon lines—these works borrow from the ethos of the CoBrA art movement in their hue and sentiments prioritizing spontaneity and experimentation. Simultaneously, in a gesture reminiscent of Mike Kelley, Falapishi grants new intellectual and emotional depth to that which might otherwise appear childlike, embedding art historical references in his faux-naïf scenes for those that know to look. Still Life with Cat and Mouse (2024), for example, adds a cartoonish cat and mouse to a still life with a bottle that clearly alludes to the oeuvre of Giorgio Morandi.

Falapishi leverages the humor that is intrinsic to an unlikely pairing to great effect. Transposing his face onto the bosom of a Roman statue in Professional Painter in a Roman Statue (2024) or inserting a lamppost referencing artists’ artist Martin Kippenberger into a work with simple depth and imprecise lines, Falapishi asserts a truth that has echoed through time with other great storytellers such as William Faulkner. Complex thoughts on the grand nature of existence can sometimes come from the most uncomplicated or unexpected places.

Hadi Falapishi (b. 1987, Tehran, Iran) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including SEARCHERS in Three Acts, ART&NEWPORT, Newport, RI;  Almost There, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2023); As Free As Birds, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London, UK (2022); Young and Clueless, The Power Station, Dallas, TX (2022); and In Practice: Total Disbelief, SculptureCenter, New York, NY (2020) ), among others. His work is found in public collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

About BLUM

BLUM represents more than sixty artists and estates from seventeen 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.

Press Inquiries

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

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



Yoshitomo Nara: My Imperfect Self | Hadi Falapshi: Edge of the World

BLUM

Roberts Projects is pleased to present Schwarzweiß, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Lenz Geerk, marking the artist’s fifth solo presentation with the gallery. Using the German word for “black-and-white,” the monochromatic works in Schwarzweiß straddle the line between drawing and painting, allowing the artist to probe the emotional and psychological spaces of anxiety, uncertainty and disconnection.

Geerk’s oeuvre is renowned for its use of a figurative language that hearkens back to early Modernism as a means for exploring the strangeness and alienation of contemporary life while also attending to moments of hope and possibility. His paintings regularly depict solitary figures absorbed in contemplation, or groups of people where the possibility of connection has been replaced by the certainty of isolation. His figures are archetypal rather than specific; he sets them within spaces both descriptively vague and poetically alive. The compositional restraint of the scenes Geerk constructs and the placid, dreamlike manner in which he paints is often at odds with the inner turmoil his figures seem to be experiencing. By eschewing obvious references within the works to a specific historical period, Geerk allows them to assume a timeless and universal quality, one that prompts viewers to reflect on details in their own lives without being imaginatively confined by them.

Though the existential and thematic focus in Schwarzweiß is consistent with previous bodies of work, the form of expression is decidedly new, as these works are rendered entirely in black and white. For Geerk, the simplification of his palette into a range of monochromatic values is a way of expressing the increasing polarization of society and the absence of nuance, complexity and uncertainty as a result. His figures continue to express these states and qualities, as do the scenes of landscapes, still-lifes and interiors where figures are conspicuously absent. Even when the emphasis is on the inanimate or non-human, Geerk still places viewers in a precarious situation where, though certainty of meaning may be unattainable, the experiences of levity and joy are not.

Geerk’s investigation of the vast space between seemingly rigid positions takes place not only on a metaphoric level, but on a formal one as well. Although the spectrum of color has been narrowed in these works, they nonetheless contain a wide range of tonal variation and pictorial subtlety which belie any notion that they are truly—and only—black and white. Working in this evasive space where drawing meets painting is just another example of Geerk’s brilliance in using his materials and creative process to express a state of flux and indeterminacy. In Schwarzweiß, works that might have previously been understood as studies or preparations are embraced as both provisional and complete. 

_____

Roberts Projects is pleased to present Finding Figures, an exhibition of new works on paper by Daniel Crews-Chubb, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Building on his previous exploration of the figure's formal and philosophical possibilities, Crews-Chubb’s new works take an increasingly abstract direction, aiming to uncover the timeless and universal rather than the contemporary and specific.

For nearly ten years Crews-Chubb has centered the figure in his work, using it as a flexible motif that blends ancient references to Aztec deities and Hindu gods with more recent art historical influences, including Cubism, Abstract Expressionism and the CoBrA movement. His figures, whether solitary or in groups, are intentionally devoid of defining features that might tie them to specific races, genders or cultural identities. By allowing them to be read as archetypes rather than embodiments of specific historical periods, Crews-Chubb invites viewers to consider the body in a more fundamental and primary sense—as a vessel of energy rather than a container for subjectivity.

Though Finding Figures marks the first time that Crews-Chubb will solely exhibit works on paper, he has retained the materially dense, compositionally frenetic and formally complex qualities that are typical of his works on canvas and which are due in large part to the manner in which he paints, a process he likens to sculpture. Beginning with his substrates on the floor, Crews-Chubb then covers them with a wide array of materials, including acrylics, oil pastels, charcoal, sand and inks, while seldom using brushes for the application or refinement of his compositions. Once the rough outline of a silhouette or compositional structure has emerged he moves each work onto the wall and continues to both add and remove material as he searches for the right balance of figure and ground, shape and atmosphere. Like his choice of materials, Crews-Chubb’s palettes are varied and expansive and they express his interest in pairing colors and materials evoking the organic and natural with those that seem artificial, industrial and irrefutably new.

The drive towards greater degrees of abstraction in these works is reflective of Crews-Chubb’s ongoing interest in pareidolia, the psychological and perceptual phenomenon whereby humans perceive order, patterns or structure in otherwise random and diffuse stimuli, as when a face or object is seen amidst fleeting cloud formations. This deeply human and universal drive to convert the abstract into the concrete takes on a formal dimension in Crews-Chubb’s works, in which figures are somewhat discernible and seemingly on the cusp of dissolving into the larger world of their compositions. The internal split between order and its absence is never resolved in these works. Instead, both possibilities exist simultaneously and in productive tension with one another.

The exhibitions will open to the public on January 25, 2025. However, due to current circumstances, there will not be an opening reception.

Lenz Geerk: Schwarzweiß | Daniel Crews-Chubb: Finding Figures

Roberts Projects

Inspired by the infamous ballot and orchestral concert by Igor Stravinsky, this dynamic group curation examines the inescapable dichotomy present in the world of today. The ecstasy of spring, though vivid and full of bliss, is invariably counterbalanced by an equally potent force; that of violent upheaval.

In this polarizing exhibition, artists Liz Walsh, Jonathan Ryan, Marco Minaya, Chyrum Lambert, Justin N. Kim, Alyss Estay, Zaki Christensen, Albert Kyu Hyun Choi, and Troy Barrett, earnestly present an existence of growth and decay.

'The Rite of Spring' opens with a reception on Saturday, February 1st, from 6-9 pm at la BEAST gallery in Cypress Park. The show will conclude on March 8th.

The Rite of Spring

la BEAST Gallery

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

Bryan Ali Sanchez

Baert Gallery

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to present Moonbliss Riverdream, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles painter Kim DeJesus on view from January 25 to March 8, 2025. This exhibition marks DeJesus’s first solo show with the gallery and features a selection of her recent abstract paintings, created using acrylic, oil, and mixed media on canvas.

Kim DeJesus employs skilled techniques such as staining, pouring, and blurring, resulting in voluminous, vibrant canvases that resonate with the complexities of nature, perception, and the human psyche. Drawing from historical movements like Color Field and Action Painting, DeJesus’s work contributes to the rich tradition of American abstraction. These historical connections are enriched by an intuitively driven feminist perspective and a spiritually ritualistic approach to process.

DeJesus’s bold explorations of form, light, and depth evoke the ethereal and emotional. Each painting reflects on and builds upon the next. This creative progression allows DeJesus’s picture planes to develop through both surrender and intention, chance and control. She choreographs energetic and vivid compositions that pulse with life and offer space for transformation—equally for the artist herself and for the viewer—by creating a harmonious balance of introspection and expansion, form and formlessness.

Her approach to color field painting offers insights into the fleeting nature of memory, perception, and the depths of consciousness, highlighting abstraction’s potential as a poetic language. The works in Moonbliss Riverdream evoke the vastness of outer space, suggesting an analogy to the enormity of the spiritual realms we each hold within ourselves. This shift from outer to inner space encourages viewers to tap into their own perception of space and consciousness to access nuanced levels of awareness.

Kim DeJesus: Moonbliss Riverdream

Vielmetter Los Angeles

MODEST common is proud to present CAVE TECH, the first Los Angeles solo show of artist and animator Matt Reynolds. The show comprises sculpture works made by Reynolds in the last two years, as well as projected animations, exploring the artist’s preoccupation with “cartooning” as an abstracted process of distillation and construction of visual language.
Using fabrication techniques borrowed from the illusionist art of production design, Reynolds has created a coherent vernacular of sculpted forms that read as organic morphologies molded into rectilinear confinement. Anatomy and architecture collide to create pyscosexually-rich totems of an imaginary neolithic origin. CAVE TECH playfully demonstrates an urge to embrace our troglodytic impulses and return to the caves to reconnect to a path towards meaning.  

Matt Reynolds is an animated filmmaker, artist, and educator raised in the California Bay Area. He received an MFA in Experimental Animation from CalArts in 2016. He was an invited artist in residence at GlogauAIR Berlin in 2013, and the Santa Monica Camera Obscura Art Lab in 2020. Consistent across his work in animation, sculpture, and graphic arts is a fascination with the grotesque and fantastical. His sculptures, made primarily from styrofoam and stucco, articulate a personal visual lexicon that melds cartoon exaggerations with anatomical and architectural forms to create playful - yet menacing - hybrid morphologies. Reynolds currently teaches animation and media arts with the Los Angeles Community College District and the non-profit organization LA Promise Fund.

Artist Workshop: February 15, 2025 1 - 5 pm

Matt Reynolds: Cave Tech

MODEST common

YOU AND ME AND EGO
Artist statement written by Steven Dayvid McKellar

It’s 4am 
Winter is on it’s way 
And it’s dark and cold outside 
The comings of a bacteria rain in the distance 
From the upstairs of the FH, 
I can see over the small houses 
The neighborhood is dead quiet
And will remain so most of the day 
Not a lot of life in these streets
An area of a small Kentucky river town where drugs are rampant 
and children (if seen or heard)
speak with foul language 
and inherited distrust 

I feel like a maiden in a tower 
transmitting some lonely frequency 
Beep beep beep 
Silently 
It is very quiet here 
And the stairs leading down to the bottom floor 
create a moaning song arrangement 
as i descend 
But at the bottom lies all this paint 
and canvas 
and power tools 
and old bicycles parts 
and piled scaffolding 
and tall planks of wood leaned against the red brick walls
tarps 
and wood ships on the concrete floor 
Along with dirt 
and hay 
And seeing all this 
My heart is singed with excitement 
and i put my headphones in
I’m barely awake 
But i feel like I’m the only person alive
And three hours could be three seconds 
And all of this could burn 
and be whittled down to 
a small pile of ash 
And in imagining this 
I could think of no greater manifestation 

bitches brew 
In a silent way 
On the streets 
The sound of it 
within a soft-dream mind 
is an avalanche in the head 
circular 
Perpetual 
Relentless 
Like pushing through a violent wind
no destination
in the thick of it 
where nature puts me 
Unmerciful toward circumstance 
and emotion 
Unceasing 
to our rules of comfort and conduct 
And Miles rages 
And i tumble and rage with him 
along with my guides 
who have ventured with me 
through all of it
And the break
when it comes 
and I step away 
is like life itself 
I have no idea what to think of it all
Cause that, was never the purpose 
It was to exist in it 
Of it 
Eat it 
Drink it 
Puke and shit 
Collapse 
Get up 

Drop the mic
Or the brush 
Or the trumpet 

And bow out 

And then, years later 
I was reunited with these works 
My mental and emotional state 
entirely different 
Seeing them again 
Spread out on the floor 
of my parents flat in Nashville 
It was like seeing old friends again 
Ones that are pretty new and unknown to you 
but your bond is that of brotherhood/sisterhood
bonded over the fire of life’s intensity 
Like tour mates 
If you allow it, you will find yourself
forever connected to the people you journeyed with 

One thing that isolation of that kind did to me 
It opened my subconscious more 
My conscious mind slowly realized 
that it wasn’t gonna be disturbed 
Phone off, no one i knew coming round 
And my subconscious followed suite 
eventually letting it sink
that it was not gonna be interrupted 
if I sat and staired at a wall for three hours 

Truth is 
I was ..really confused at the time 
About relationships, identity and purpose 
And I had to walk through it

It was a necessary wrestle


About the Artist
Steven Dayvid McKellar is a musician, painter, and poet from Cape Town, South Africa. After a 20-year music career, touring globally with his band, Civil Twilight, Steven began releasing his first solo records and returned to his roots in painting. As a child, he was trained in realism by his aunt and renowned South African artist Donna McKellar before finding community and creative outlets through music and poetry.

In September 2022, Steven released ‘Nama,’ a textural and rhythmic exploration of his South African roots and identity. ‘Nama’ is a follow-up to two earlier musical releases, ‘Ethio’ and ‘Belleville Demos’—soon to be reissued.

After a debut solo show of his early paintings in Nashville, TN, and a solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Nooit Ge Dacht, Steven has continued his exploration of both the mundane and the esoteric, stripping away layers of identity with You and Me and Ego.



Steven Dayvid McKellar: YOU AND ME AND EGO

El Nido 

Are We Here Yet?, Hannah Lupton Reinhard’s second solo exhibition with Rusha & Co., opens Saturday, February 8th, 6-9 pm.

Traveling among larger works and intimate drawings, women in transit carry baskets, light candles and take moments of rest in response to uncertainty. Their brightly patterned headscarves, icons of Yiddishkeit, are offset by contemporary references that locate diaspora in the here and now.

Set against burning landscapes and impossibly bright skies, these works explore the tension between beauty and awkwardness, movement and stiffness. Oversized hands, twirly hair, and rhinestone embellishments challenge effortless beauty, celebrating the weight and complexity of the feminine experience with meticulous, obsessive detail.

Hannah Lupton Reinhard: Are We Here Yet?

Rusha & Co

Jessica Taylor Bellamy’s complexly layered works for "Temperature Check" unify multiple visual languages and source materials. Drawing from personal photographs to newspapers, several works also incorporate intricately embedded video elements, to explore politics of climate change and disaster. Bellamy’s observations are rooted in her experiences of the sprawling urban landscape of Los Angeles—a meeting of nature and civilization at the edge of a precarious paradise, formed by fire, drought, flood, and wind.

____

Anat Ebgi presents The Wave, a benefit exhibition featuring 15 LA artists to artists affected by the wildfires which devastated Los Angeles in January. 10% of the gallery’s proceeds will be donated to the LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund.

Participating artists:
Alec Egan
Anabel Juárez
Cosmo Whyte
Erin Wright
Jaime Muñoz
Jane Margarette
Jibade-Khalil Huffman
John Brooks
Joshua Petker
Kate Pincus-Whitney
Meeson Pae
Olive Diamond
Robert Russell
Samantha Thomas
Sarah Ann Weber

Jessica Taylor Bellamy: Temperature Check | The Wave: A Benefit for LA Wildfires

Anat Ebgi | Mid-Wilshire

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is excited to announce Jeanne Silverthorne’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. 

They Will Be Like Shadows delves into her enduring preoccupation with the corporeal and the elusive self—a fragmented presence that navigates the studio as much as the wider world. Her sculptures embody a spectrum of existence, from the purity of infancy to the shadows of old age, intertwining traces of the grotesque and the tender. This tension finds resonance in the exhibition’s literary epigraphs: Clarice Lispector’s ethereal “And the unfathomable night of dreams began, vast, levitating,” and Angela Carter’s haunting “She herself is a haunted house. Her ancestors... come and peer out of the windows of her eyes.” While alluding to her own family history, Silverthorne’s works remain rooted in her decades-long inquiry into the studio as a site of labor, creation, and existential reckoning. Familiar objects—bubble wrap, packing tape, two-by-fours, crates, hammers, and dollies—become uncanny relics, meticulously cast in rubber, the material central to her practice since the mid-1980s. These familiar objects, transformed into uncanny relics, invite a meditation on the boundaries between the material and the metaphysical, where labor, creation, and memory intertwine.

The exhibition unfolds as a fragmented narrative that resists resolution. A sleeping infant rests atop a vast white cloud (And the Unfathomable Night of Dreams Began); a diminutive portrait of Silverthorne’s mother stands on a book (Mom on Book) or beneath an overhanging cloud (Mom Under a Cloud II); a miniature figure of a studio worker, hammer in hand, pauses in mid-motion (End of Day); and a deflated, life-sized likeness of the artist herself stretches across the floor (Banshee). These sculptures evoke a sense of intimate vulnerability while gesturing toward broader existential themes. Silverthorne’s sparse literary allusions and three-dimensional punctuation marks underscore the enigmatic quality of her work,weaving together memory, labor, and selfhood.

Rendered in a muted palette of gray, black, cream, and titanium buff, the works shift tonally from brooding meditations on mortality, to moments of absurdity, doubling, and shifts in scale, to serene depictions of unguarded innocence. The subdued colors act as a unifying thread, while their emotional
resonance oscillates between humor and melancholy, evoking a world where contradictions coexist in delicate equilibrium.

Jeanne Silverthorne holds a BA and MA from Temple University. Her one-person museum exhibitions include the Phillips Collection, Whitney Museum of Art, P.S.1, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and the University of Kentucky Museum, as well as galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Seoul, Verona, and Ireland. Her work is in collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, Denver Art Museum, SFMoMA, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Tang Museum, among others. Silverthorne has been featured in publications like the New York Times, Artforum, and Sculpture Magazine. She has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work is currently on view at the Norton Museum's Strike Fast, Dance Lightly (October 2024–March 2025) and will be featured in Anonymous Was a Woman: The First Twenty-Five Years at the Grey Art Museum (April–July 2025).

Jeanne Silverthorne: They Will Be Like Shadows

Shoshana Wayne Gallery

Held at Ambience Doré, celebrating 25 years in business, Open Arms is a retrospective show featuring two artists whose symbiotic lives have been dedicated to art and creative exploration.

Foremost, this powerful exhibition showcases the life and fascinating career of Native American Latino SoCal playwright, producer, and artist Josef Rodriguez White Cloud, who goes by “Doc,” and contemporary visual artist Mar Doré, known as M3.

Doc's "When Quasars Suck and Black Holes Blow,” “Songs of the Singing Glyphs” and “Wormholes Rock in Dead Tattoos” depict alternative realities of ethnic life: lucha libre figures, mythic cultural symbols, a mother earth figure, and skulls moving through the multiple wormholes of alternate parallel worlds.

During the show, guests will take a step back in history to see grassroots theater and hear songs with lyrics and scripts still pertinent to today’s time. You’ll find a fascinating story of how Doc emerged from the farming community in Fowler, California. In high school, he won the National Forensics’ Original Oratory Championship in 1962, which led to more opportunities.

Six years later, Doc produced one of the first minority-written plays, “El Manco,” in American Theater at the Los Angeles Inner City Cultural Center in 1968. From there, Doc worked with Luiz Valdez in the early ‘70s in San Juan Bautista with his Native America version of “La Virgen de Tepeyac.” In the San Francisco Bay Area, Doc performed and created theater, including work at the Hatley Martin Gallery.

Doc carried on the tradition of the theater through his 1992 production of “The Get Lost Again Columbus Opera,” premiering for the National Indigenous People’s Days Protest in Berkeley. Written in history as the first Native American Opera, you can discover the full history in person, including his new Sci-Fi Opera script, at the Open Arms Exhibit.

Doc and Mar traveled to Indigenous communities. Doc was instrumental in connecting Engineers Without Borders to the Indigenous community of Nueva Catalina De Ixtahuacan, Guatemala. The community was relocated after mudslides from Hurricane Mitch.

The combined art of the two is charged with an unspoken energy. Doc’s theatrical performances, scripts, drawings, paintings, and photos are juxtaposed with M3’s abstract contemporary sculptural wall art in metal, rock, and mixed media—from large pieces to small handheld wearable art.

M3, an MFA graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, is premiering her original Metal Giest series of 3D paintings and contemporary explorations. This art has been intentionally kept off the internet and out of public exposure. For M3, it represents a lifetime of development and discovery.

Recently, Doc has experienced some medical issues that inspired M3 to celebrate his life through the Open Arms exhibit.



Open Arms Art Show: Historical/Contemporary

Ambience Doré 

Tom Fruin: Beacon | Andee Collard: The Machine Garden

Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature will prominently highlight the artist’s “multiples.” Arranged thematically throughout the first-floor galleries, the multiples are editioned objects made to be sold or given away, more accessible than singular, large-scale pieces. Iconic works such as Sled (1969) and Felt Suit (1970) join lesser-known multiples such as Rhine Water Polluted (1981), a bottle of river water that exemplifies the artist’s approach to artmaking, using humble materials to draw attention to social conditions and environmental issues, such as the contamination of the Rhine River. This expansive array of historical works will show how Beuys transformed the medium of sculpture, with his political concerns at the forefront. 

This fall, in a multifaceted effort, The Broad will present a free collection exhibition, offsite public reforestation project, and series of programs connected with the legacy of Joseph Beuys’s art and environmental advocacy. The exhibition Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature is organized by The Broad’s curator Sarah Loyer with Beuys scholar Andrea Gyorody, director of the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University. It will coincide with a major reforestation initiative, Social Forest: Oaks of Tovaangar, as part of Getty’s landmark arts event PST ART: Art & Science Collide. These dual projects present Beuys’s work and practice as more urgent than ever before, as the planet’s climate continues to warm. 

The exhibition will present over 400 artworks that illuminate Beuys’s practice as a model for direct environmental action, drawing from the Broad’s extensive holdings of the artist’s work. The corresponding Social Forest initiative will echo the appeals for change seen within the exhibition, with an emphasis on the unique social and environmental context of current day Los Angeles. Undertaken in partnership with North East Trees and Tongva (Gabrielino) archaeologist Desireé Reneé Martinez and artist Lazaro Arvizu Jr., the project encompasses the planting of 100 native trees, primarily coast live oaks, in Elysian Park in Los Angeles and additional plantings at Kuruvungna Village Springs in West L.A. 


Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature

The Broad 

Nonaka-Hill is proud to announce the representation of Sawako Goda (b. 1940 - d. 2016), a complex artist celebrated by the Japanese avant-garde during her remarkable 50 year career, yet virtually unknown in the United States.

Born in 1940 in Kōchi Prefecture, Japan, the artist Sawako Goda traversed, in the first half of her life, many aspects of Japan’s inventive postwar avant-gardes. Precocious, she gained early attention in the mid-1960s for junk assemblages of materials collected on still-war-damaged streets.

Decadent, faded, surreal, seedy glamor became her central preoccupation over the course of the 1970s. She painted prolifically, made illustrations for magazines and advertisements, and designed stage sets and posters for underground theater troupes, including Jūrō Kara’s Jokyo Gekijo (Situation Theater), and Tenjō Sajiki (Top Floor Gallery), a troupe led by the avant-garde poet and dramatist Shūji Terayama.

If her work stood out for its Western preoccupations—surrealist portraits of film icons Marlene Dietrich and Veronica Lake, tributes to Reed and Marcel Duchamp’s femme alter-ego Rrose Sélavy—she was nevertheless throughout this period woven tightly into a rich community of forward-thinking [Japanese] artists and was showing her work regularly. In the mid-1980s, however, this weave began, slowly then suddenly, to fray. She became increasingly obsessed with a different fantasia, that of ancient Egypt.


SAWAKO GODA

Nonaka-Hill | Highland

Join us and artist Till Nowak on Thursday, February 13th, 2025 from 7-9:30 PM for the opening reception for the exhibition ON THE EDGE.

Till Nowak is known for his interdisciplinary work in fine arts, architectural installations, short films, and contributions to Academy Award-winning feature films. In his work, Nowak critically observes themes of civilization and social polarization. For more than 20 years, he has been experimenting with dimensionality as a metaphor for the relative nature of viewpoints. We share spaces, like the city of Los Angeles, but reality appears different from every person’s perspective.

In this exhibition, the spectator’s standpoint becomes part of the concept: From afar, the large-format prints display calm, floating geometric forms, while up close, the images reveal thousands of individual figures existing in interwoven systems of paths, stairs, or razor-thin planes. These figures are engaged in dreamlike struggles on the edge of stability and imbalance, connection and isolation.

Admission is free.
All ages are welcome.
Light refreshments provided
 
PROGRAM:
6:30 PM Doors open.
7:00 PM Welcoming + Introduction
8:15 PM Artist Talk
9:30 PM End of Event

ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Till Nowak was born in Bonn, Germany in 1980 and has lived in Los Angeles/USA since 2015, he works with perspective as a visual metaphor. Using computer-generated images and films, he creates ironic portraits of society and civilization. He exaggerates his observations of human behavior in sometimes bizarre dream worlds that open new perspectives and ways of thinking for the viewer. As a "world builder," Nowak is also a sought-after designer for feature films. He recently worked as a concept artist with Francis Ford Coppola on his new film “Megalopolis” (2024). Previously, he was instrumental in designing the fictional state of “Wakanda” for the film “Black Panther” (2017) and the underwater world in its sequel, as well as the set design for the upcoming film “TRON Ares” (2025), “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” (2017), “Midnight Special” (2015), “The Lion King” (2019) and many more.

He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). In 2006, the viral success of Nowak's digital artwork "Salad" led to a friendship with the legendary surrealist HR Giger and his agent Leslie Barany, which led to various collaborations. For his short films, Nowak has received numerous awards, including the Golden Lola for the German Short Film Award in 2012 for "The Centrifuge Brain Project," the Young Artists Award of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia in 2007, the "Cinema of Art 2013" award presented by jury president Cindy Sherman, the Grand Prix of the Anima Mundi festival in Brazil in 2015, the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Short Film Award 2006, and over 70 film awards from around the world.

ON THE EDGE is on view at the Goethe-Institut from February 13th - March 27th, 2025

During Office Hours: February 13th - March 27th, 2025
                                  Tuesday–Thursdays: 10:00 am – 5:00 pm
                                  Fridays: 10:00 am – 3:00 pm 

Secure, free Parking is available at Metro/Retail parking structure with rear entrance to the Goethe-Institut located at
674 S. Westlake Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90057

Public transport is possible with the red line to MacArthur Park/Westlake stop. Using carpool or ride-share options are appreciated.

ON THE EDGE is presented in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut and with the support of FOUNDATION ERICA SAUTER and Claus Friede * Contemporary Arts


Till Nowak: ON THE EDGE

Goethe-Institut LA Project Space

Unveil Gallery is pleased to present Daydream, an exhibition featuring seven contemporary artists, Ann Liu, Christopher Cosnowski, Li Nianxin, Hou Jianan, Mary Henderson, Tian Yuanyuan, and Wang Weijue. Inspired by the timeless Chinese literary work 牡丹亭 (The Peony Pavilion), Daydream presents an exhibition that delves into the intersection of personal and collective illusions, societal pressures, and consumerism in today’s world. The exhibition draws on themes of escapism and the ways in which dreams and daydreams offer temporary relief from the stresses of modern life. Through a multidisciplinary approach, Daydream explores the complex emotional landscapes of longing, identity, and the profound impact of societal constructs on the individual.

The core of this exhibition revolves around the tension between illusion and reality—how the dreamlike or fantastical provides a temporary escape from the overwhelming forces of the real world. In the context of contemporary pressures, these illusions often manifest through consumerism, the commodification of beauty, and identity struggles. Artists featured in Daydream challenge these illusions, questioning their foundations and critiquing how society constructs and glorifies false ideals. Through their art, they expose the often hidden violence beneath the surface of these cultural myths.

Ann Liu engages with themes of cultural hybridity, femininity, and self-exploration in her vivid figurative paintings. Liu’s work reflects on the tensions between Chinese traditional values and the American Dream, questioning the effects of cultural homogenization in the digital age. In Daydream, Liu's exploration of ancient Chinese culture through a contemporary lens offers a vision of resistance against the erosion of cultural identity. Her work romanticizes the complexity of living as a woman navigating both personal and societal expectations, offering a visual meditation on femininity, pleasure, and healing.

Mary Henderson’s paintings offer a nuanced portrayal of contemporary social dynamics, exploring themes of class, privilege, and the desire for escape. Her practice is rooted in found images from the internet, which she transforms into hyper-realistic depictions of everyday life. Her works capture unguarded moments of connection and disconnection in public spaces, revealing the complex undercurrents of personal and collective identity. In Daydream, Henderson’s art serves as a mirror to how people navigate the tensions between public personas and private desires, reflecting on the search for fulfillment in an increasingly fragmented society.

Li Nianxin explores themes of familial and societal roles through her colorful abstract works. Influenced by her upbringing and personal reflections on gender and societal expectations, Li’s art uses bold shapes and vibrant hues to represent the emotional disconnections and attachments within family structures. Her practice is grounded in the continuous exploration of boundaries, seeking to interpret intimate moments through the lens of color. Li’s works ask the viewer to reconsider the emotional landscapes formed by cultural and familial norms, providing a space for reflection on personal identity and relationships.

Hou Jianan is an artist whose work interrogates the intersection of digital culture, consumerism, and human experience. Known for his innovative use of layered acrylics, Hou creates fluid, immersive landscapes that blur the lines between the physical and the virtual. His practice reflects a deep exploration of identity, alienation, and the impact of media and social networks on contemporary life. Through his dynamic and often surreal compositions, Hou invites viewers to reflect on the pervasive nature of image culture and its role in shaping perception and reality.

Tian Yuanyuan’s new series (A Stroll Through the Garden) directly engages with the themes of Daydream. Through her vibrant and experimental oil paintings, Tian creates a space for viewers to reflect on the ephemeral nature of beauty, desire, and fleeting moments of personal fulfillment. Her works merge the fantastical and the real, exploring how the garden—a traditional symbol of beauty and tranquility—becomes a site of both longing and disillusionment. Tian’s paintings invite the viewer to consider the delicate balance between reality and illusion, offering a poignant commentary on the complexities of human experience

Christopher Cosnowski is a master of hyper-realism, using his still-life paintings to comment on consumerism, materialism, and the icons of modern society. His works elevate everyday objects—plastic toys, trophies, and other mass-produced items—transforming them into symbols of societal values, achievement, and the pursuit of perfection. In doing so, Cosnowski’s art critiques the glorification of consumer goods and the hollow nature of modern success, prompting us to reflect on the illusions we construct around material wealth and social status.

Wang Weijue’s works offer strikingly realistic depictions of everyday objects, made from needle-felted wool, that delve into the complexity of sleep, dreams, and the human body’s relationship to societal beauty standards. While her earlier works may have been perceived as exploring themes of cosmetic surgery, her latest creations focus more deeply on the commodification of the body and the tension between internal and external perceptions of beauty. Through these works, Wang invites viewers to reflect on the pressures placed on individuals to conform to societal ideals, particularly the unattainable standards of beauty often imposed upon women.

Daydream challenges viewers to reconsider how illusions shape our lives and the way we present ourselves to the world. Through the lens of contemporary art, the exhibition provides a critical commentary on the forces of consumerism, identity, and societal expectation, urging us to reflect on how we navigate these complexities in our daily lives.

Daydream will be on view at Unveil Gallery from February 15th through March 28th and is open to the public.


Daydream

Unveil Gallery

CONTROL Gallery presents Jasmine Monsegue’s first Los Angeles solo exhibition, a contemporary history of Southern African-American life told with softness and delicacy. Through surreal airbrushed imagery on unconventional surfaces like synthetic hair and recycled furniture, Monsegue elevates regional subcultures, intertwining memory, seduction, and spirituality. Her works, featuring pop stars and strippers in otherworldly settings, explore Black spiritual life, sexuality, and femininity with haunting allure and divine power.

_____

Presented by CONTROL Gallery, Paul Flores’s first LA solo exhibition shifts the narrative from love letters to the city to an exploration of its constant transformation. Through layered, sculptural paintings, Flores captures the beauty and melancholy of moments that define Los Angeles—its nostalgia, community, and the lasting imprints of change.

Jasmine Monsegue: Everything That Glitters | Paul Flores: Good Morning Los Angeles, How Are You?

CONTROL Gallery

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

_____

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

Julian Stanczak: Early Masterworks | Terran Last Gun

Perrotin announces Mr.’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, a decade since his debut institutional show in the west coast of the United States. This presentation, his ninth exhibition with the gallery, opens the week of Frieze Los Angeles, and highlights his practice in recent years in painting, sculpture, and work on paper. New paintings are the focal feature in the north gallery, and in the south gallery, an installation based on the artist’s studio in Saitama, Japan.

If you’ve ever walked into a Japanese convenience store—Family Mart, Lawson, 7-Eleven, et cetera—you know that there is impeccable order and refreshingly high quality in the overwhelming array and density of even the most pedestrian of Japanese retail commerce. At the multi-floor, everything-and-anything from canned beverages to rice cookers to lacy underwear and of-the-moment rubber novelties, mega-discount retail chain Don Quijote, however, things are not so Zen. Amidst the labyrinthine din of overflowing shelves and in-your-face, bubbly, neon-painted signage, you may not find what you are looking for. Nonetheless, you will probably end up buying something you didn’t know you wanted and which you definitely do not need. Mr.’s work reminds one of that–not the young women’s shopping paradise of Harajuku, not the youth hangout district of Shibuya, but rather the overgrown jungle of mass-produced treasures, Don Quijote.

In the late 1990s began a movement called Superflat, founded by an artist named Takashi Murakami, who elevated the aesthetics of anime cels and “otaku” nerd subculture with references to Japanese art history and enlargement to mural-sized scale to create an indelible body of work that still today, years later, defines many people’s image of contemporary Japanese art. Mr.’s inspiration from manga (comics), anime, and cute “moe” characters and goods make him a key part of Superflat. “At face value, Mr.’s seeming anime-style depicts prepubescent boys and girls, however, the deeper meaning is the product of escapism from the artist’s own dislocated family structure. His father, at the bottom of the social hierarchy as a common laborer, worked with chemicals in a plastic moulding factory, and his mother was a devout follower of a fanatic religious cult. While a high school student at the age of 17, Mr.’s brother was placed in a protection facility by police for over a decade after violently escalating a domestic quarrel. In this unstable family environment, Mr. often disappeared into the world of solitary play in order to escape from his reality.

In the development of Murakami’s aesthetic toward something ever cleaner and ever more deferent to museum-defined “fine art,” something was forgotten about the urban soil from which it grew and which Mr.’s oftentimes cacophonous work reminds us of. That is, during the explosion of mass consumer culture in Tokyo in the ‘80s and ‘90s around cutesy “kawaii” accouterments for young women and manga, anime, and video game spinoffs for men, there was an undeniable decadence that ran through the majority of products and the subcultures they supported. There was the garish campiness of Shibuya “ganguro” girls with their brown-purple tans and bleached and/or re-dyed hair. There was the oftentimes overt masturbatory relationship of otaku nerds’ relationship to their purchases. There were the young female protagonists—assertive, spunky, intelligent, and witty, yet hamstrung by identities overly defined by consumerism—of manga by Okazaki Kyoko like Pink and Helter Skelter. Japanese pop culture was maximally messy, some might even say junky and frivolous. But in that anarchic array, young Japanese found solace and a home in an age in which the middle class dreams of
upward mobility, job security, and suburban family comfort were beginning to fracture under the pressures of the recession and social malaise that followed in the wake of the collapse of Japan’s postwar bubble economy. These problems have since been compounded by the disaster wrought by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and the nuclear meltdowns in Fukushima that followed–events which left a lasting impression on Mr. and his work. 

Mr.’s work often exists at the juncture between those two divergent but complementary vectors: the elevated pop culture of Superflat and the decadent cacophony of urban consumer culture and subcultures. This is especially evident in his paintings that incorporate graffiti and the ordered chaos of Japanese pop culture magazine cover design, as well as in his installations made of consumerist and studio junk. The characters of his paintings—rendered with clean lines
and bright colors yet riddled with cheap trinkets—wear this contradiction. On first pass, they resemble the cute girls of “moe” fame. But taken as a whole and in the context of their painted backgrounds, they remind one instead of the frequent story on Japanese television shows of young women who live in small apartments or still at home with their parents, their rooms crammed with stuff and their kitchenettes unpassable due to bags of undisposed trash and dirty dishes—but who yet still look impeccable in whatever kawaii or baroque style they are going for the minute they step outside, as if they possess some alchemical power to render the pigpens of their private lives into magical mandalas of irresistible femininity. It is, therefore, more than a footnote that Mr. was influenced by Rauschenberg and Arte Povera when he was starting out. Rauschenberg’s flatbed and junk assemblage practices in particular, but also Arte Povera’s interest in neglected and cast-off materials, seem to have served Mr. as effective strategies for capturing the disorder of contemporary consumer identity in a state of suspended jumble.

For Mr., these aesthetic practices also have personal meaning. As he said in an interview, "In my life, I've encountered my share of unreasonableness and conflict in interactions with my blood relatives. The world of otaku culture was a place where I could soothe these wounds. For me, images of cute young girls carry the same sort of healing beauty and love that many people find in religion.

- Ryan Holmberg

Mr.: It Was on a Brilliant Day.

Perrotin

Join us Saturday, February 15th from 2pm–4pm in the Angels Gate Cultural Center Gallery for the Opening Reception of Seven Visions X Seven Artists.

Seven Visions X Seven Artists features the 2024 cohort of the MRH Fund for Artists. The MRH Fund works with Southern California arts organizations who nominate artists from their communities for participation. The Fund brings the selected artists together as a cohort to support them in their creative work, giving them the opportunity to think, refine and expand their artistic practice. This exhibition highlights the artwork created during the 2024 cohort year. The MRH Fund for Artists is dedicated to fostering the growth of Southern California artists.

Artists were nominated by the following organizations:

Jonah Elijah nominated by Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA)

Juan Gomez nominated by Angels Gate Cultural Center

Guerra nominated by Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA)

Daniela García Hamilton nominated by Museum of Ventura County

Flora Kao nominated by Angels Gate Cultural Center

Dalila Paola Méndez nominated by LA Commons

Jesse Small nominated by Angels Gate Cultural Center


About Angels Gate Cultural Center
Angels Gate Cultural Center (AGCC) emerged from a group of San Pedro artists in the 1970s that created art studios and exhibition space within the WWII era army barracks of Angels Gate Park near the Port of Los Angeles. Today, AGCC hosts over 50 artist studios in addition to a variety of programs to engage the diverse communities of the Los Angeles Harbor region, including arts education in local schools, community classes, cultural events, and exhibitions of contemporary art. 

More information about AGCC is available at angelsgateart.org.

IMAGE: Guerra, Our Forgotten Children, 2024 (detail). Relief print on Washi, sisal. 5x5 feet.

Seven Visions X Seven Artists

Angels Gate Cultural Center

Black in Place is a holding space for invocation, re-memory, and unbridled Black expression. Remedying erasure that historically fueled what esteemed African-American collectors Bernard and Shirley Kinsey refer to as the “myth of absence,” artworks in this exhibition dispel the notion that what is unseen does not exist. The paradox of existing while being rendered invisible is an ongoing reality for the Black Diaspora, particularly in the West. This exhibition interrogates the living contradictions of existing while Black, invocates ancestral and indigenous wisdom, and explores how Black artists cultivate dreaming through making.

The artists presented are Leslie Adkins, Adeola Davies-Aiyeloja, Denise ‘deLaSNP’ Coke, Dea Jenkins, Steven A. Johnson II, Kandy G. Lopez, Rosalyn Myles, Cheyann Washington, and Fallon Williams. Their art practices reflect journeys of cultural enunciation and recontextualization of Black expression, particularly in white-dominated spaces. Through audio, portraiture, painting, digital/Augmented Reality, fiber art, poetry, drawing, and installation, the artworks engage hidden narratives, ancestral wisdom and unbridled expression to both sow and assert Black existence.

The opening reception for Black in Place will be held on Saturday, January 25th from 2pm - 4pm. This free, public event will include a performance of Ancestral Libation by Adeola Davies-Aiyeloja.

Black in Place will be on view in the gallery through March 29, 2025, with free public visiting hours Thursdays through Saturdays, from 10am to 5pm.


This exhibition is supported by the California Natural Resources Agency for the Museum Grant Program under the California Cultural and Historical Endowment, the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture.

Please note that pets are not allowed inside our buildings. For questions, please email gallery@angelsgateart.org.

More information about AGCC is available at angelsgateart.org

Image: Denise ‘deLaSNP’ Coke, Bodega (Just Another Day), 2022. Digital print with augmented reality capabilities.

Black in Place

Glendale Library, Arts & Culture and Brand Library & Art Center present “PERSEVERANCE: 20 Years of Thinkspace” in collaboration with Thinkspace Projects, a Los Angeles-based gallery. Featuring over 70 artists, “PERSERVERANCE” celebrates the 20th anniversary of the gallery with a presentation of new works by local artists as well as site-specific murals.  

“PERSEVERANCE” serves to pay tribute to all the creatives Thinkspace has worked with over the last two decades and features a diverse mix of artists on the gallery’s current roster alongside some longtime gallery favorites and a look forward with fresh new talent that will be inspiring us for years to come. Thinkspace is more driven than ever to keep forging its path forward to honor the legacy of Thinkspace’s co-owner, dear Shawn Mery Vezinaw Hosner, and to keep building on all the gallery has accomplished thus far.  

The exhibition, which is the fifth collaboration between Brand Library & Art Center and Thinkspace Projects, will be on view February 1 – March 29, 2025. Artists featured in “PERSEVERANCE” will be present at the opening reception on Saturday, February 1, 2025 from 5:00 PM – 9:00 PM. The evening will include DJs, live painting, a cash bar and a food truck.  

For more information and to view the list of featured artists, visit BrandLibrary.org/Gallery.  

Image: Giorgiko, “At The End” (detail), 2024. Oil on canvas, custom framed, 144×84 inches. 

PERSEVERANCE: 20 Years of Thinkspace

Brand Library & Art Center

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present Tuning the Signals, New York-based artist Nate Lewis’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from February 8 to March 29, 2025.

Tuning the Signals marks the debut of Lewis’s latest body of work, featuring twelve sculpted pieces on paper alongside a new video that showcases the artist’s focus on systems, patterns, and their intersections within the natural and cultural landscapes we inhabit. Lewis is renowned for his intricate figurative works on paper, which combine elements of photography, drawing, painting, printmaking, and paper sculpting to create textures reminiscent of cellular tissue and topography. His techniques are shaped by his background as a critical care nurse and his interest in the diagnostic aspects of medicine, as well as his understanding of the body on both macro and microscopic levels.

Primarily utilizing black and white, Lewis subtly integrates color into his otherwise monochromatic studies. The monochrome theme relates to the aesthetics of X-ray imagery; Lewis further elaborates on this connection by comparing X-ray imaging to various printing methods. For him, using black and white also conveys the distinct moods of each piece, which he contextualizes as movements within a symphony or musical score. The figures are depicted mid-movement, with limbs intertwined against backgrounds of embossed textures, fabric rubs, colored inks, and curvilinear shapes. Their motion introduces a human element, enhancing the choreography present in nature–movement patterns resembling those of bird migration or the flow of the wind. Each composition uniquely captures the sensation of the motion it represents through the patterns etched into the paper’s surface.

Lewis’s works portray dancers and capoeiristas in motion. After years of studying and practicing capoeira–an Afro-Brazilian martial art that blends acrobatics, music, ritual, and self-defense—Lewis is attuned to the intricate physicality of the art as well as its political and cultural history. Likewise, in Lewis’s predominantly black works, the frottaged musical score embeds a historical act of cultural resistance. This score originates from William Still Grant, who composed Symphony No. 1 Afro-American Symphony, the first symphony created by an African American and performed by a major orchestra in 1931. Lewis’s figures vibrantly ebb and flow with the notes of the symphony’s arrangement.

In Lewis’s newest video, A Clandestine Exchange, Ben Lamar Gay’s song Any Train We Can Catch reverberates, setting the tone as the soundtrack for miniature figure paper doll capoeiristas playing together, manipulated by his friend and training partner, Professor Peixe Boi, who has nearly two decades of training in capoeira. The dolls translate the movements of capoeira on a small scale, contorting their limbs to demonstrate Peixe Boi’s skillful mastery and understanding of bodily kinetics at a micro-scale. The paper dolls ‘playing’ are juxtaposed with a shadow of Peixe imitating the movements using only his hands. Additionally, blurred imagery of photos showing Peixe and a fellow capoeirista playing together is presented in the video, encouraging the viewer to consider clarity and obfuscation in language. The paper dolls materially connect to Lewis’s work and relate to his project of interpreting dance through the medium of paper, as well as translating movement through different disciplines and lenses.

Throughout the exhibition, Lewis’s project draws connections among the arts and science, organic and man-made materials, medicine, and movement; his unique perspective on the shared threads between these disparate disciplines provides an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the systems of embodiment.

____

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to present Devil in the Daytime, the gallery’s first solo exhibition featuring new works by New York-based painter Kyle Dunn. This marks Dunn’s debut solo exhibition in Los Angeles and will be on view from February 8 through March 29, 2025.

Kyle Dunn’s paintings of detailed interiors explore intimacy and estrangement, often portraying male figures in scenes of quiet contemplation or languid eroticism. Constructed around a cinematic interplay of light and shadow, Dunn’s art carries a touch of melodrama.

Dunn’s work blends modernist, surreal, and classical styles in figurative painting, featuring elements of still life and trompe l’œil. Inspired by the visual logic of cinema, his paintings explore the tension between psychic space and reality, merging imagination with real relationships, and blurring the lines between home and studio, as well as art and life, embodying the concept of simulacrum.

The title “Devil in the Daytime,” which is also known as the Noonday Demon, stems from Biblical times, and is a monastic term that blames workday restlessness on the supernatural. Dunn saw parallels between this idea and the experience of painting in his studio, of working in isolation while also resisting the pressure to always be productive. The term “daytime” refers to the seemingly endless routine activities—such as running errands, chores, grocery shopping—that occupy our lives. By day’s end, we often seek an escape from further obligations or the monotony of daily life, humorously depicted by the disappeared protagonist and his dropped shopping bags in the exhibition’s eponymous work, Devil in the Daytime.

The exhibition highlights themes related to the concept of “daytime,” including Summer, Midday, Siesta, and Begonias. The paintings on view elicit the feelings and qualities of light associated with late afternoon when the sun can be particularly oppressive. In Begonias, the ennui of this time of day is vividly palpable. Elsewhere in Midday, a nude figure stretches like a cat in the sun atop a table, surrounded by scattered books and papers.

Dunn’s emotionally nuanced paintings carefully balance diligent focus with the sensuality of daydreaming. They reveal the constantly shifting line between imagination and reality. However, these compositions are ultimately intended to be open-ended, enabling viewers to interpret them in their own myriad ways.

Nate Lewis  Tuning The Signals | Kyle Dunn  Devil in the Daytime


Lisson Gallery’s inaugural exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist Kelly Akashi was set to open on January 31 in L.A., featuring an entirely new body of work that both Lisson and Akashi were eager to share with her hometown. Akashi is an artist whose work and practice are imbued with the shared ethos and identity of her city. The beginning of 2025 brought heartbreaking devastation to many Angelenos. Akashi’s cherished home and studio were among the countless losses as the destructive fires tore through communities across Los Angeles in early January.
 
With an incredible amount of perseverance and support from her community, Akashi immediately went back to work, rebuilding and recontextualizing her exhibition. For her first exhibition with Lisson Gallery, Akashi triumphantly presents a number of new bodies of work featuring glass, earth, stone, lace, and bronze elements, incorporating both found and uniquely processed materials. Akashi personally recovered several bronze cast and borosilicate glass forms from the wreckage of her studio. She includes these objects in the exhibition, now with the somber patina created by the fire, acting as a record and acknowledgment of the event. These, along with other works, are hung on the gallery walls and installed among a landscape of stone and marble sculptures mounted on Corten steel pedestals, creating a singular and associative environment with its own circular ecosystem, rich with the possibilities of making, displacing, and reclaiming. 

Intimate groupings of objects are dispersed across several oxidized plinths and tables, some splayed and disarranged, others forming concatenating configurations between carved and rough-hewn pillars and wedges of marble, as well as cast body parts and delicately hand-blown glass flowers. This mode of display mimics natural occurrences, perhaps of hands enclosing like caverns or plants growing out of cracks in the ground. Nearly every other object, however, has undergone a meticulous and labor-intensive transformation, shaped both by the artist and the forces of nature. This may involve the cutting and sculpting of multiple layers of materials such as alabaster, basalt, onyx, and limestone, or a remarkable alteration of substances—transforming skin into crystal or stems into glass. Other works present intriguing juxtapositions, such as an organic form emerging from a bronze cast of the artist’s lower face, or a delicate glass chain, damaged by the Eaton Fire, that adorns a basalt structure. A cornerstone of the exhibition, Akashi presents an exceptionally elaborate glass sphere made from finely latticed borosilicate glasswork, its detailed and delicate structure seemingly impossible in its complexity and ethereal nature. 

Draped over the weathering steel surfaces are a number of lace doilies that belonged to the artist’s grandmother and recently came into her possession. While these might suggest traces of the personal, domestic and emotional narratives attached to such heirlooms, something the artist is known to do, they also contain the universal truth of familial lineage, of the passing down of knowledge and the unavoidable, constant inheritance of history. 

From recent exhibitions centering on the fragility and complexity of the figure and especially her own body, Akashi now turns to the resilient and regenerative properties of nature, through a series of scanned, sculpted, and drawn seed pods. Initial CT scans of Devil’s Claw, Sweet Gum and Datura seedpods, among other species, are blown up to triffid-like proportions, 3D-printed and cast in bronze. Whether hanging like ornamental, ceremonial lights or scored into surfaces with silverpoint like cave paintings, these pods offer up their secrets to life more or less readily, some seeds lying dormant but still filled with potential while others have long ago scattered and sprouted new growths – all have the potential to change the world. Akashi’s alchemical transformation of matter enacts the continuous life cycle begun by the seed, revealing how all of existence is already in front of us, even if what was once made of one substance may now appear in a different form and might yet soon become something else anew. 

About the artist

Executed with deft manual skill and astute material knowledge, Kelly Akashi's visual language emphasizes the impermanence of the natural world, recording and indexing fragmented moments in time. Her singular practice is characterized by a rigorous conceptual approach, yet the work is distinguished by a deep reverence for process. Always a student, Akashi is perpetually studying new practices and physical techniques such as glass-blowing, casting, candle-making and stone carving. The repeated use of the hand as motif serves as a symbol for Akashi’s ongoing investigation into the temporality of the human experience. Often cast in bronze or crystal, her hands bear the mark of time on her body, her growing fingernails, and aging flesh. Towering sculpted weeds, delicately glass-blown flowers, a to-scale depiction of her body in polished travertine, enlarged casts of extinct species of shells; Akashi poetically and objectively encapsulates the notion of mortality in a ritualistic gathering of objects. However, her take on her own practice is not a morbid one. Akashi references the phrase mono no aware. “It refers to a wistful awareness of impermanence—the ‘pathos of things’. It’s central to hanami, the Japanese custom of venturing out to enjoy the brief season of cherry blossoms.”

Kelly Akashi was born in 1983 in Los Angeles. She received a BFA from Otis College of Art & Design in 2006 and an MFA from the University of Southern California in 2014. She also studied at the prestigious Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany in 2010. Akashi has been chosen as the Artist in Residence at Pilchuck Glass School for 2025. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Kelly Akashi – Converging Figures’ Fondazione Furla Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan, Italy (13 September – December 8 2024) and ‘Kelly Akashi: Encounters’ at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, USA (September 30, 2023 – June 15, 2024) and her 10-year survey, ‘Formations’, which began at the San José Museum of Art in 2022, travelled to the Frye Art Museum in Seattle and then to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, through 2024. Recent group exhibitions include ‘A Garden of Promise and Dissent’, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT, USA (17 November 2024 – November 2025); ‘Spirit House’, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, CA, USA (September 4 2024 – 26 January 2025); ‘Ecstatic: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection’, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA (2023); ‘Ground/work’ at Clark Institute, Williamstown, MA, USA (2020); ‘Possessed’, MO.CO Panacée, Montpellier, France; ‘Take Me (I’m Yours)’, The Jewish Museum, New York, NY, USA (2016); and ‘Made in LA: a, the, though, only’, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA (2016).

About Lisson Gallery

Lisson Gallery is one of the most influential and longest-running international contemporary art galleries in the world. Today the gallery supports and promotes the work of more than 70 international artists across spaces in London, New York, Los Angeles, Shanghai and Beijing. Established in 1967 by Nicholas Logsdail, Lisson Gallery pioneered the early careers of important Minimal and Conceptual artists such as Art & Language, Carl Andre, Daniel Buren, Donald Judd, John Latham, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long and Robert Ryman among many others. It still works with many of these artists and others of that generation, from Carmen Herrera and Olga de Amaral to Hélio Oiticica and Lee Ufan. In its second decade the gallery introduced significant British sculptors to the public for the first time, including Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor, Shirazeh Houshiary and Julian Opie. Since 2000, the gallery has gone on to represent many more leading international artists such as Marina Abramović, Ai Weiwei, John Akomfrah, Liu Xiaodong, Otobong Nkanga, Pedro Reyes, Sean Scully, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Wael Shawky. It is also responsible for raising the international profile of a younger generation of artists including Dana Awartani, Cory Arcangel, Garrett Bradley, Ryan Gander, Josh Kline, Hugh Hayden, Haroon Mirza, Laure Prouvost and Cheyney Thompson.


Kelly Akashi

Lisson Gallery

David Zwirner is pleased to announce Spirit Level, a solo exhibition of work by Tau Lewis (b. 1993) that will be shown at the gallery’s Los Angeles location. Employing various sculptural techniques, Lewis creates colorful, totemic forms that suggest mythical territories beyond our own. This presentation will focus on five monumental sculptures and a circular quilt, all created from salvaged textiles and other found materials, that were first realized for Lewis’s 2024–2025 solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, curated by Jeffrey De Blois.

In 2024, The Polygon Gallery, Vancouver, unveiled the artist’s new outdoor installation Coloratura, which will be on view through March 30, 2025. Lewis was awarded the fourth Ezratti Family Prize for Sculpture by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, in November 2023, which was accompanied by a solo exhibition at the museum.

Tau Lewis: Spirit Level

David Zwirner | Los Angeles

Claire Tabouret: Moonlight Shadow | Anne Libby: Even Odd | Jane Swavely: Supernatural

Night Gallery South

Anthony Lepore’s new work traffics in the simultaneity of past and present, which plays through his work as fabricated seamlessness between the real and the photographic. As such, his photo-objects and object-photos typically utilize illusions and camera “tricks.” He runs his ideas through photography and processing techniques such as multiple or lengthy exposures, rephotography, and montage. The illusions he generates are sometimes witty (cloud-printed fabric wadded to mimic clouds, paper airplanes, brick/ed windows with views of brick walls), sometimes symbolic (favorite handmade ceramic dishes, ladders), and most often both (magic boxes, pennant streamer shadow play). The artist's studio-specific set-ups draw near to audience-of-one performances, sculpture making, process documentation, and stagecraft.

--

Eamon Monaghan’s wall sculptures belong in a lineage of underground artwork from the end of the last century. Underground cartoonists like R. Crumb’s heavily stippled environments are predecessors to Eamon’s clay mark-making.  Underground animators like Bruce Bickford’s undulating and melting claymation scenes are predecessors to the movement and malleability of Eamon’s knotted vignettes. This wall work might be what underground theorist Manny Farber referred to as termite art, methodically chipping away at the composition in darkness, eating its own boundaries, nothing in its path other than signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.



Anthony Lepore: No Condition is Permanent | Eamon Monaghan: Under the Floorboards

Live Kawaii Die Sugoi will be showcasing artwork from 6 local artists ranging from the super cute to the super cool

Gina Cannella | Diana Nugit-Lauger | Renée Tay | Frank Forte | Alexa Simpson: Live Kawaii Die Sugoi

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

Tschabalala Self: Dream Girl

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

Nina Chanel Abney: Winging It

Jeffrey Deitch | Orange

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

Enrique Martínez Celaya: El Trineo

The Wende Museum

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

Lisa Yuskavage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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