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.

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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

Imaginations are a collective of ideas, mood, inclination. Interpretation is at the core of imagination. It's a light where there was none, a universe within a microcosm, or a portrait of someone/somewhere that exists or not. Through the language of value, texture, color, contrast, composition, representational content and/or abstraction, show us what you imagine.

California Art League: Imaginations

The Artists' Gallery (TAG)

Tom Fruin: Beacon | Andee Collard: The Machine Garden

Lowell Ryan Projects 

A group project with the artists who have been a part of FOYER-LA, plus one friend-fellow artist they have selected to participate.

MUDROOM

FOYER-LA

Tardes Taurinas is inspired from growing up in Mexico and being the daughter of a true aficionado, someone that lived and breathed bullfighting and delighted in transferring all the knowledge and passion to his only child. Always present, however, was an internal conflict between the love for a father and the sorrow felt for the inhumane and needless killing of a majestic and beautiful beast.

In this collection, Lopez Iglesias explores contradictory feelings and inherent paradoxes within most relationships and situations with a form of desperation palpable in every piece.

Lopez Iglesias writes about the works, “They register a collapse and integration between man, beast, memory, and place. In some cases the beast is channeling a majestic and powerful bull, and in others, the beast is an unstoppable, all consuming fire that leaves us no choice but to surrender and watch”

Tardes Taurinas are works on cotton paper and ceramic sculptures, some of which are mounted on the wall with meathooks. “I choose materials in my art practice that hold memory, such as paper and clay whose nicks, markings and imperfections can never be fully erased”, says Lopez Iglesias of her choice in materials.

Alexandra Lopez Iglesias: Tardes Taurinas

Keystone Gallery

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 19th, 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

- LAUNCH LA is honored to present David Otis Johnson’s Body Heat, a new collection of neon sculptures and text-based works that explore our desire for human interaction. Presented at the LAUNCH Gallery, Johnson’s latest body of work presents an introspective view of culture through the lens of both form and the classic neon “open” sign, ultimately challenging viewers to question the pervasive impact of consumer culture on our identities. 

David Otis Johnson’s sculptures intertwine luminous lines and dynamic forms, evoking a harmonious interplay between light and space. With each piece, he aims to provoke contemplation and spark dialogue, inviting viewers to explore the boundaries of reality and the ethereal beauty that lies within the intangible realm of illuminated vibrance. Drawing inspiration from our physiological relation to light and the language of commerce, his art practice can be seen as a reflection on the power of iconic symbols and their influence on contemporary society. Johnson illuminates the relationship between the physical sculpture and the light that it casts on its surroundings including the viewers, as well as the sculpture's relationship to the illuminated gas tubes used for commerce, and their relationship to the art world. 

With Body Heat Johnson delves further into familiar iconography, like the classic neon “open” sign, pulling the primary colors and well-known framing to reflect on their own path and decisions.  By employing familiar visual cues, color schemes, iconic shapes and typography, Johnson creates space for a dialogue about not just the individual pieces but the line between advertisement and art. 

The pieces range from a figure in movement to a neon gate, to a sign that takes inspiration from shibari and reads “Practice Restraint.” Among these varied pieces, the throughline is the desire to interact with one another and human relationships to the medium itself. With the electric current, the flow of the plasma, the neon itself is alive, lending life to each sculpture. 

“There is purity in neon light; a quality that defies explanation. It is thought that when a pure noble gas, while under vacuum, is excited by high voltage electricity, the atoms that make up that gas lose electrons. The process of electrons floating away and reattaching to other atoms generates light. We, as biological creatures, have light emitting qualities that are equally as magical. From processing sunlight like a plant to cells producing a flash of light in the womb, we’re quite literally in the infancy of understanding our relationship to this source.”

Body Heat opens on March 15th and will remain on view until March 29th at LAUNCH Gallery. 


David Otis Johnson: Body Heat

LAUNCH LA

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 | 616 N Western

Night Gallery is thrilled to present Moonlight Shadow, an exhibition of new paintings by Claire Tabouret. This marks the artist’s third solo show with the gallery, following Eclipse (2017) and The Pull of the Sun (2020). The exhibition coincides with the announcement that Tabouret has been commissioned by French President Emmanuel Macron and Paris Archbishop Laurent Ulrich to design six new stained glass windows for the iconic Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Tabouret will collaborate with Atelier Simon-Marq on this historic project, which is slated for completion and installation by late 2026.

Sleep and its absence inspire Claire Tabouret’s newest body of work. The exhibition title is drawn from Mike Oldfield’s 1983 song Moonlight Shadow, in which the musician sings: “The trees that whisper in the evening / Carried away by a moonlight shadow / Sing the song of sorrow and grieving / Carried away by a moonlight shadow.” With a similar sense of repetition and theme, Tabouret also reflects on loss, nocturnal mysteries, and the progression of time.

Drawing from personal and found photographs, Tabouret creates wistful compositions through her signature layering of paint. Some works are marked by drips and thinned-out washes. Day-glo underpaintings and timeworn finishes imbue the paintings with both contemporary energy and a sense of nostalgia. These elements find a complement in Tabouret’s new palette, which privileges blues, purples, and earth tones. Self-portraits are a recurring theme throughout the show, playing on subtle changes. As Tabouret explains, “I’m burying and uncovering.”

Tabouret revisits an old motif, the group portrait, in a new large-scale work. She sprays the painting, derived from an historical image of costumed children, with grey-blue liquid paint. The technique further suggests the instability and accretion of memory. Tabouret views this final layer as a blanket both protective and evocative of ash, simultaneously signaling safety and erasure in response to the wildfires sweeping through Los Angeles.

Tabouret continues to draw inspiration from art history. She looks to paintings by Mary Cassatt and Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck to inform her own depictions of herself and the others in this liminal space. Portrait of Liona Sleeping features Tabouret’s daughter peacefully asleep in bed under her mother’s loving gaze. Self-Portrait on the Couch at Night, in contrast, depicts the artist sleepless and sprawled atop a blue couch, anxious and hyper-vigilant. In these compositions, dreams and fears coalesce, as in the hallucinatory worlds of Edvard Munch and Léon Spilliaert.

In an almost life-size painting, Tabouret portrays herself holding a sleeping child, as if stepping out of her own painting and onto the studio floor. The artist expertly intertwines creation and care. Within the dreamlike realm of the painting, the boundaries between artist and subject, mother and child, life and art dissolve.

Claire Tabouret: Moonlight Shadow

Night Gallery North

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.

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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.  

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

Julian Stanczak: Early Masterworks | Terran Last Gun

Diane Rosenstein Gallery

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. ”1

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.”2

- Ryan Holmberg

1. Extract from Mr.’s 2018 exhibition, People misunderstand me and the contents of my paintings... [Press
release]. link
2. Ascari, A. (March 2015). Mr. Interview by Alessio Ascari.


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

Window shopping, mediated by glass, was always a virtual pastime. In French, the word for it is lèche-vitrine—literally, window licking. Born out of the revolution in large pane glass manufacturing in the mid-19th century, coinciding with the birth of modern-day mass consumption, shop windows structured our relationship with desirable products as first existing behind glass—visible, yes, but beyond reach. Concurrent with the emerging technology of the escalator, which further elided the distance between previously inaccessible spaces and retail areas, shop windows anticipated the computer and the smartphone as glass-clad shopping interfaces, where the desirable product is first encountered as an image, which we are invited to inspect and covet before or without ever completing the sale.

Madeleine Hines’ works in “Residuals,” her first West Coast solo exhibition and debut with Cheremoya, carry product-gawking’s fundamental virtuality into the realm of painting. Her subjects—found images of shoe soles pulled from luxury resale sites—are functional in their origins, used by resellers to demarcate brand authenticity and indicate wear. Cropped and enlarged, these decontextualized photographs take on a pictorial dimension, which the artist studies, emulates, and accentuates, mining commercial minutiae with a kind of clinical wonder. There are half-torn barcode stickers, embossed size indications, areas of deteriorated lacquer. Emerging from backgrounds painted silver blue, jet black, carmine, there are moments of lightness, slow erosion, speed, even violence. Soles, in other words, are registers of residual imprints, be they accidental or quite purposeful—such as when savvy wearers key their soles for better traction. Hines’ interest in these images is of the window-shopper’s kind: forever suspending the actual purchase, she consumes them as virtual images, indeed, as paintings in their own right. Framed within the language of figurative rendering, they begin to take on a grotesque purposefulness, a ghostly intentionality. They are readymade painterly marks.

Hines is aware of the irony here: paintings, like shoes, have come to live increasingly as virtual commodities on the internet—lingering in the flattened ether of gallery sales PDFs, social media posts, illustrations in online reviews. Many lament this fate, stubbornly arguing for all that is lost when painting is virtualized: painting’s ephemeral sense of presence as a concrete object, its magical ability to record and retain the presence of its maker. Some would call this commodity fetishism; others, like Hines, might draw a comparison to the melancholic aura of the second-hand fashion item. Not-new luxury shoes may have lost some of their sheen of novelty and, thus, their initial market value, yet there remains a quiet magic in the worn commodity, a fetish object marked by a body. Heels destabilize their wearer; they point and delay her through a negotiation of balance, comfort, and elegance. Still, it is the trace of vitality itself that is fetishized—the imagined clatter of a woman climbing up stairs, the precise clasp of an artist handling a brush.

—Jeppe Ugelvig
‍
Madeleine Hines (b. 1988, Chicago) lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from Boston College in 2010 and her MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2014. Solo exhibitions include: “Residuals,” Cheremoya, Los Angeles (2025); “The Loved Object,” Situations, Catskill, NY, (2023). Group exhibitions include: “Manic Pixie Nightmare Drawings” (curated by Sedrick Chisom), Adler Beatty, New York (2024); “The Same Room” (curated by Brunette Coleman), Shoot the Lobster, New York (2023); “Summer Exhibition,” Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York (2023); “Family Style,” Situations, New York (2023); “Friends with Benefits, Estrella Gallery,” New York (2022); “The Last Day of Disco,” Restaurant Projects, New York (2022); “Onder,” Diez Gallery, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2022).

Image: Madeleine Hines, Moderate Wear and Marking Throughout, 2024. Oil on linen, 72 x 108 in / 182,9 x 274,3 cm

Madeleine Hines: Residuals

Cheremoya

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

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

A solo exhibition of woven works by Los Angeles-based artist Kayla Mattes, who brings a modern sensibility and wit to the traditional art of weaving. Her handwoven tapestries investigate digital forms of expression, drawing from internet memes, symbols, and texts to convey the pervasive anxieties of contemporary life. She tackles themes of environmental crisis, unchecked capitalism, and political upheaval with a humor that allows space for processing and acknowledgement

Kayla Mattes: Memesis 

Charlie James Gallery

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.

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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

Vielmetter Los Angeles


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

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

Moskowitz Bayse

NOON Projects is thrilled to present Cream Sand, Maija Luutonen’s first solo exhibition in the United States, opening February 15, 2025.

Luutonen is known for her innovative approach to painting on paper, often working on large-scale surfaces that blur the boundaries between image, object, and space. Her practice embraces impermanence, layering hand-painted elements with digital processes, printmaking, and sculptural interventions to explore perception, materiality, and abstraction. While her past works often incorporated folded paper and modular compositions, Cream Sand marks a significant shift—returning to canvas and linen for the first time in two decades. This new series deepens her engagement with the body, exploring sensory experience and ephemeral textures, creating a poetic visual space where the physical and imagined converge.

Luutonen (b. 1978, Finland) has exhibited widely across Europe, with solo exhibitions at Kunsthaus Pasquart (Switzerland), Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki), and Titanik (Turku, Finland). A founding member of SIC, an artist-run space in Helsinki, her work is held in major collections, including Kiasma and the Helsinki Art Museum.

Cream Sand opens Saturday, February 15, 2025, from 6–8 PM at NOON Projects, 951 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, and will be on view through March 29, 2025.
Join us in welcoming Maija Luutonen to Los Angeles!

⁠
For more information email: info@noon-projects.com

Maija Luutonen: Cream Sand

NOON Projects

An Te Liu and Jemima Murphy: "Tracing" is presented by Victoria Miro Projects and Anat Ebgi. The exhibition includes sculptures by Taiwanese-born, Canadian artist An Te Liu and paintings by London-based artist Jemima Murphy. Rooted in a lineage of modernist sculpture and abstract painting, Liu and Murphy explore themes of belonging, nostalgia, and memory. Distinct in form, each artist follows a process led by their search for something to be revealed, uncovering histories, pulling back the curtain of subconsciousness. Tracing finds a sublime clarity and spaciousness through suspension, gravity, and repetition. United by performative and gestural underpinnings, their sustained fascinations, constant retellings, and transformations fuse the present with the past.

Tracing: An Te Liu and Jemima Murphy

Anat Ebgi | Fountain

Night Gallery is thrilled to present Even Odd, an exhibition of new sculptures by Anne Libby. This marks the artist’s fourth solo show with the gallery, following See Me So (2021), Earthflash (2018) and Marrow into Moxie (2015-6).

Vision is a slippery conjurer. It oozes across surfaces, clinging like a translucent skin to all that enters its line of sight. It spills over, leaks out, seeps beyond the body’s confines, and stretches hungrily outward. Turn inward and the strangeness deepens. Irises form gateways leading to somewhere. What lies beyond their razor-thin threshold of perception? The soul, so they say, mediated in the shimmering membrane of the mirrored self or in the bottomless pit of another’s pupil. And then there’s the gap. That place where things vanish. The smoothed-over void, designed to be forgotten. A blind spot. Missing information fused seamlessly into cohesive illusion. 

Suspended throughout Anne Libby’s Even Odd, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with Night Gallery, patinated frames arch to rim the perimeter of great cosmic eyes. Wide-open they hover, bifurcated and intersecting. Eyes doubled, staggered, conjoined. Split and flipped at their core, the otherworldly hues foretell an estranged new vision with the site of sight now bent and bizarre. Unified from the center out, a third omnipresent eye manifests and scans panoptically from an omnidirectional view. 

Libby’s Organelles (all works 2024) evoke the fundamental liminality of life itself. Like their sub-cellular biological counterparts, these half-autonomous, half-dependent demi-organs recall mitosis: the quiet yet radical act of division and regeneration where rupture is not an end but a means of mutation and replication. Dualities of seen and unseen, open and closed, whole and part, singular and multiple, move beyond rigid contrasts. Rather, they function as thresholds, points of transition where distinctions blur and a synthesis comes into focus. Here, opposition is not an endpoint but a prelude to transformation.

Through a glass-paned mobile, reflections of stained-glass irises fold into transparency. Flipping between observer and object, the shifting aperture collapses, confusing what’s seen and what’s seeing back. To view is to confront. To see is to be seen, implicated in their unblinking scrutiny.

Vision, after all, is never innocent. Split and mirrored, Libby’s orbs hover in this transitory space, spinning out from a centrifugal force that binds inside and outside, like an organ perched at the edge of biology and dream logic where phenomenology distorts into a kind of haunting.

Beyond the mechanics of ocular registration, the ancient talisman of the evil eye unwaveringly awaits. More warning or shield than weapon, its wrath only ever reflects the jagged envy of another when a cursed gaze folds back on itself. To look is never passive but always a negotiation of power as it surveils, penetrates, judges. The scrutinizing gaze—whether belonging to a state or corporation, envy or erotics—holds power over its subjects.

A selection of contorted window blinds cast in polished aluminum are positioned alongside Libby’s mobiles. Their surfaces invert their function, refracting light instead of blocking; beyond separating to reflect divisions of public and private. Rough glass peepholes puncture the metallic facades of these sculptures. As transparency corrodes the gleaming slats, erosions become intrusions looking through the mirrored partition.

—Marie Heilich

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Night Gallery is delighted to present Supernatural, an exhibition of new oil paintings on canvas by New York-based artist Jane Swavely, marking her inaugural exhibition with the gallery and her Los Angeles debut.

Jane Swavely has worked on the Bowery for over forty years, and her views of the New York City sky and Lower Manhattan life permeate her paintings. She’s witnessed gray winters, hazy summers, a fading punk scene, and drunk poets staggering home. These experiences manifest across her canvases as abstract color fields punctuated by jagged, disruptive lines and fragmented borders. The work evokes the tensions and layered histories of the Bowery itself.

Swavely translates the city’s energy into luminous paintings, layering dynamic strokes of paint while allowing moments of stillness and light to fracture and recede. In the large-scale painting Supernatural, which gives the show its title, sections of silver, lavender, and pearl jut against each other, creating a force field that is both explosive and contained. The artist credits the quieter elements in her paintings to her time in the Hudson Valley, where she regularly retreats from city life. Across her canvases, reflections of urban and natural concerns collide.

Before arriving at her mature style, Swavely made landscape-inspired work. Over the past decade, she’s transitioned to a process grounded in memory, intuition, and precision. Her involvement with A.I.R. Gallery, a women’s artists' collective in New York, played a crucial role during this evolution, supporting her shift from landscape paintings to the more ethereal style she now embraces.

The artist describes her practice as “supernatural,” shaped by personal rules and a distinct philosophy. She draws inspiration from American painting histories, bending the concerns of her predecessors to suit her own alchemical approach. She paints directly on canvas atop her studio floor, navigating the work from all angles. Her movements coalesce with the piece's evolving form, influencing its final structure.

Swavely’s work is a space of deliberate reduction, where every mark is essential. The artist insists that her paintings are objects, allowing her stretcher bars to push up against the canvas. These skeletal structures remind us that her work is as much about form and material as it is about color and composition. The paintings feel backlit, illuminated from within, like glowing portals—to a specific, memory-laden site, and to a supernatural place far beyond.

–Paige Greco

Anne Libby: Even Odd | Jane Swavely: Supernatural

Night Gallery South

In this solo show, Ana Bagayan presents a new body of work centered around Chaos Theory. Known for her dream-like figurative work, Bagayan's usual genre of fantasy and surrealism is extrapolated here, into scientific territory, as she posits on Chaos Theory and  it’s relation to The Golden Ratio.  Come see these meticulous paintings! 

The artist will host a talk on her discovery and theory, later in the month. 

Ana Bagayan: Chaos Theory

The LMF Gallery & Darkroom

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

Holly Lowen: Entanglement

Simchowitz Hill House

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

La Luz De Jesus Gallery

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

40th Anniversary Exhibition

Kohn Gallery

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


Shana Hoehn: Sleepless | Camilla Engström: Wondrous Place

Make Room

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

Rim Dongsik: Never Ending Naturalism

Gana Art Los Angeles

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

Kristopher Raos: Can I Live

Charlie James Gallery (2nd location)

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Francesca Gabbiani and Eddie Rushca: The Messengers

Wilding Cran Gallery

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

Tschabalala Self: Dream Girl

Jeffrey Deitch | Santa Monica

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

Nina Chanel Abney: Winging It

Jeffrey Deitch | Orange

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

Enrique Martínez Celaya: El Trineo

The Wende Museum

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

Christine Burgon: Spandau Césarienne

Sebastian Gladstone

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

Yvers Scherer  Another Day in Paradise 

The Journal Gallery

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

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

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

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

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

Vivian Maier: Unscripted

KP Projects

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

The loss that shapes the image 

Babst Gallery 

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

Lisa Yuskavage

David Zwirner | 612 N Western

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

Jon Rafman: Proof of Concept

Sprüth Magers

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

De Boer Gallery

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

Xiao He: A Whole Night

Reisig and Taylor Contemporary

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

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

____

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

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

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

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

Alexandra Grant: Ceremony | Group Exhibition: Cavalcade

John Wolf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Open Arms Art Show: Historical/Contemporary

Mar Doré Gallery

Again & Again

Overduin & Co.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 - Genie Davis, curator

Artist Information:

Susan Ossman

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

Dani Dodge

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

Scott Meskill

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

Nancy Kay Turner

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

Jason Jenn

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

​Beth Elliott

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

Diane Cockerill

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

Bruce Cockerill

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

Angelica Sotiriou

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

Linda Sue Price

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

Snezana Saraswati Petrovic

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

Eileen Oda

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

David Isakson

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

Nancy Voegli-Curran

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

Genie Davis

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

Windswept Curated by Genie Davis

Wonzimer

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


Patrick Donovan: Seen From Behind 

LAST Projects Gallery

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

Back At Cha: A Celebration of Alonzo Davis

parrasch heijnen

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elijah Ford: Repatriate

Xela Institute of Art

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

Press Play: A Group Show

Lucky Cat Labs

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

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

Through beauty, we feast on hope.

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

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

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

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

For Inanna, to hell and back,
Friday Gallery

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


_________

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

About FRIDAY

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

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

Friday Gallery

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

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

David Kordansky Gallery

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

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

MODEST common

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


Colt Seager: Thin Places 

Rhett Baruch Gallery 

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

Common Thread

Baldwin Avenue Gallery

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


Dorothy Rice: To Los Angeles With Love

7811 Gallery

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

Chenhng Chen: By the Company They Keep

DON’T LOOK Projects

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

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

Sean Kelly Los Angeles

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

József Csató: Siren Hospitality | Tonia Calderon: Unlearning

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

Alice Coltrane: Monument Eternal 

Hammer Museum

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

Aimee Mandala: Blue Is Where the Heart Is

Shockboxx Gallery

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


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

Roberts Projects

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

Dinh Q. Lê: The Never Ending Journey

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

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

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

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

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

Gary Brewer: Everything is Radiant

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