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

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

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

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

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

Gary Brewer: Everything is Radiant

Wonzimer

What is an artist supposed to do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is what an artist is supposed to do.

Caroline Absher: The Silver Cord 

The Journal Gallery

Cloud 3601 presents thirty-five artists who make at Angels Gate Cultural Center (AGCC). Part of the AGCC community, these artists are vital to the creative vibrancy of San Pedro. Featuring ceramics, photography, woodworking, painting, metalwork, poetry, sculpture, and digital media, Cloud 3601 presents a selection of diverse works showcasing the multifaceted art practices of the AGCC Studio Artist Program.

The exhibition will close Saturday, May 24th with our fundraiser party, Awake in the Clouds. The final public viewing day will be Friday, May 23rd.

Cloud 3601

Angels Gate Cultural Center

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

Katherine Bernhardt: Sidewalk Chalk

David Zwirner | 616 N Western

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

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

Make Room

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

Nancy Baker Cahill: SEISMIC

Charlie James Gallery

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

Young-Il Ahn: Selected Works 1986–2019

Perrotin

headspace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(All of my poems are written in sand)



_____________

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

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

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

_____________________________________ 

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



Maccabee Shelley: the middle of the end

Reisig and Taylor Contemporary

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


Carolee Schneemann

Lisson Gallery

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

Denzil Hurley & Brian Sharp, Organzied by Jonas Wood

Sebastian Gladstone

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

Charles Gaines

Hauser & Wirth | WEHO

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gene A'Hern: Charged Memory

Simchowitz Hill House

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

Skip Victor: No Words

Westwood Contemporary

"Is a fragment a whole? Or is a whole made  of fragments?
A singularity explodes
Into countless, tiny fragments
Time and space
Try to make sense of it
Chaotic clouds of endless dust
Gravity
Heating, grinding and smoothing down those heavenly bodies
So is a fragment a whole?
Or is a whole made of fragments?

Kyle Ranson  (b 1969, New York City, New York) is a painter,  sculptor and musician, He lives and works in Oakland, CA.

Kyle Ranson began to draw and paint in early childhood. He attended the Maryland Institute College of Art  and In 1994 he moved to San Francisco and immersed himself in the art and music scene in the Mission.. Ranson has exhibited since 1998  He has shown in New York,  MIlwaukee,  London,  Barcelona, San Francisco,. and Los Angeles. The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive acquired his series "Morphtraits" made in collaboration with Daniel Higgs.He has created several album covers for O'Sees, and a tarot deck, and put out a tarot deck with Castle Face Records.

Kyle Ranson: Fragments

LAST Projects Gallery

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

Jean Lowe: Spoiler Alert

Unveil Gallery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five Painters

Diane Rosenstein Gallery

In Speaking in Translation, Michael Henry Hayden examines systems of meaning and their limits, underscoring the permeability between legibility and perception. Across the six works on view, patterns emerge, natural formations echo human codes, languages dissolve into abstraction, and surfaces conceal as much as they reveal. By disrupting scale, material, and interpretation, works challenge the instinct to impose meaning, asking whether the act of reading is akin to projection rather than discovery.

Michael Henry Hayden: Speaking in Translation

Moskowitz Bayse

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

Jay Lynn Gomez: Butterfly Dream

Charlie James Gallery (2nd location)

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

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

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

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

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

Special thanks to DAMU Arts.

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

Mining In The Age Of

AMPHI gallery

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

CJ Heyliger: Minding Time

Gallery Luisotti

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

Key Hiraga: The Elegant Life of Mr. H

Nonaka-Hill | Highland

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

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

De Boer Gallery

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

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

Hauser & Wirth DTLA

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

[—] a Group Exhibition

Cevera Yoon Gallery

The Doors of The House Rust Hopelessly is a solo exhibition by Natasha Rudenko that explores the emotional scars of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Through a blend of documentary photography and installation, Rudenko explores the themes of destruction, memory, and resilience. The exhibition captures the impact of conflict on both the land and the people, offering a poignant reflection on survival and recovery in the face of war.

Natasha Rudenko is a fine art photographer and multi-media visual artist whose work engages with themes of identity, personhood, and the human condition. With an MFA in Photography from the New York Film Academy, Rudenko has exhibited internationally, and their practice blends personal self-reflection with a deep commitment to social issues. They are also an educator, teaching photography at the New York Film Academy and UCLA Extension.

Natasha Rudenko: The Doors of The House Rust Hopelessly

Keystone Gallery

Laurie DeVault’s work lives in the liminality of contemporary midcentury and abstract expressionism. Her mark-making employs dreamy biomorphic shapes in unabashed color.  The artist translates a sense of, movement, spontaneity, and energy through her non-representational forms and vibrant colors. More than occasionally, dancing lines intercede as if to encourage our continued exploration into her dreamy translations.

Laurie DeVault: Unbound

The LMF Gallery & Darkroom

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

Heidi Hahn: Not Your Woman

Kohn Gallery

A bird tenderly hovers over a woman’s lips, its wings spread out in flight, resembling a speech bubble. The artist Seline Burn speaks through her paintings, the messages of which are at the heart of Kairos, her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles at Baert Gallery. Of the ten paintings in the show, five are evident as self-portraits. By bringing viewers into her world, Burn’s paintings offer intimacy; they are pure and confiding. These sentiments are accentuated through her tender depictions of birds, for example, in various contexts: nestled against human skin, cradled in arms, resting among trees or quietly taking flight. They are always portrayed peacefully, alluding to trust and surrender: the weight of a creature’s faith, the human willingness to let go.

Kairos is an ancient Greek meaning a critical opening in time, a crisis that is also an opportunity. As opposed to Chronos, which marks linear, measurable time, Kairos is time moving vertically. C. G. Jung associated it with synchronicity, a special moment when a person is particularly open to experiencing two random events as being connected. Because of their inner state, the person perceives a meaningfully link between these events. This seemingly random coincidence gains deeper significance for them. Burn is discovering that for her the essence of painting is an escape of Chronos, to being more open, not holding back, and working from the unconscious. While a painting may feel random when it’s first started, meaning often emerges in hindsight, like an epiphany.

In Burn’s exhibition Kairos, she has captured this moment of vertical time. Her paintings illustrate those instances when an individual wavers between collapse and flight, between holding on and letting go. Susan Sontag’s poignant confession resonates: “Strength is what I want. Strength not to endure—I have that, and it has made me weak—but strength to act.” Endurance alone, these paintings suggest, can become its own burden, but there comes a moment when one must act, choose, and transform.

Held by the Sun perfectly encapsulates this concept. Here, Burn contemplates her next move on a chessboard, populated with gargoyles inspired by those of Notre Dame, recalling her time living in Paris. The ambivalence between knowing and not knowing, as she uses her instincts and knowledge to guide her, is palpable. For Seline Burn, a Swiss artist from Basel, this exhibition marks a personal threshold. Recent upheavals and new beginnings in her life have left echoes across these works. Her search for balance—between inner turmoil and calm, past identities and new selves, here and elsewhere—unfolds in layers of paint. In Ariadne’s Thread, three women carefully step along a fallen tree suspended over water, guided by a delicate thread—they could be an allegory of Burn’s own self, of her past, future, and present (with a baseball cap as the time stamp).

Burn’s palette, dominated by soft yellows and deep blues—colors of dawn and twilight—enhances the mood of liminality. Yellow radiates hope in works like Intertwined or At the Edge of the Light, while shades of deep blue introduce undertones of uncertainty and contemplation. Each painting maintains a careful tension between tranquility and unrest, holding viewers in the quiet suspension of unresolved narratives.

In the end, Kairos offers a space that is poetic and profound—a pause in which fragility becomes strength, and in which every small bird, partially-eaten pretzel, or watchful gargoyle might carry the promise of a new beginning.

— Simmy Swinder Voellmy

Seline Burn: Kairos

Baert Gallery

In an enchanting showcase titled "ABSTRACT(ION)” two abstract artists, Michael Todd Serr and Gorman Bentley, come together to celebrate their shared emotional landscapes while embracing their unique stylistic choices. Despite their differences, both artists convey a profound connection to the human spirit, inviting viewers to explore the delicate balance between calm and chaos. This exhibition promises to be a captivating journey through the depths of emotion, leaving audiences inspired and contemplative.

Michael Todd Serr and Gorman Bentley: ABSTRACT(ION)

Baldwin Avenue Gallery

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

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

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

Details: beyondthestreets.com


GREY (Jonas Melvin) & Friends: PINK CLOUD

Beyond The Streets

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

Alexandre Arrechea: Caribbean Stages

Simard Bilodeau Contemporary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spring Collection

Gana Art Los Angeles

Babst Gallery is pleased to present Leo Krikorian, an exhibition of hard-edge acrylic paintings by Leo Krikorian (1922-2005). Krikorian enrolled at ArtCenter School of Los Angeles where he studied photography under Ansel Adams. From 1946 to1948, he studied painting with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College alongside artists Ruth Asawa and Kenneth Noland, writer James Leo Herlihy, and filmmaker Arthur Penn.
 
In 1953, Krikorian and Knute Stiles opened The Place, a venue that functioned as a bar, jazz club, and exhibition space.  It was an important meeting place and venue for Beat Movement in San Francisco. It was at The Place that Allen Ginsberg practiced “Howl” and Jay DeFeo and Deborah Remington had their first exhibition sand where Krikorian put on shows of his own paintings. Kerouac anointed The Place as “the favorite bar of the hepcats around the Beach” where, as Knute Stiles recalled, “lesbians and queers and revolutionaries and so forth were interested in poetry, revolution, what have you—pacifism.”
 
During the 1950’s the San Francisco Police Department initiated the “Beatnik patrol” to aggressively police the artists and poets associated with the Movement. Krikorian closed The Place in 1958 because “the scene had changed. Everything in The Beach changed and I didn't dig the scene anymore.”
 
In 1976, Krikorian moved to Paris, where his studio was housed in a 15th century building on Rue des Blancs-Manteaux, around the corner from the Pompidou. In Paris, Krikorian exhibited widely, as well as in museums all over Europe, where he started experimenting with fluctuating space, enhancing it with vibrant colors and the use of reverse symmetry.  Krikorian once remarked about his process: “When you paint, you think of a scale. If the weight is in a corner, you need more and less active space, shapes surrounding it to get a balance.”
 
Knute Stiles, friend, fellow bar owner, and Artforum & Art in America  critic, wrote about Krikorian’s paintings in his 1984 essay, “Implied Space”: “The works are saturated with charged and juiced-up color that Krikorian encapsulates through shape and background, forcing the viewer’s eye in and out of the picture plane with reversals of positive and negative positions…the compositions echo the shape of the canvas support, and interplay of illusion and surface, hinging on the relation of the center to the edges.
 
“The center is generally present in Krikorian’s paintings, but it is approached obliquely, a light shift in the drawing displaces the symmetry that usually begins at the end of the canvas and sidesteps a direct relation to the composition at its center. The result is an open system in which the illusion of depth and completeness are interrupted. This ambiguity is compounded by Krikorian’s frequent inversion of the symmetry from left to right sides or top to bottom of the painting. Krikorian calls this ‘Implied Space.’’’
 
Leo Krikorian (1923-2005) was born in Fowler, California. Krikorian had solo museum exhibitions at Sears Art Museum, St. George, UT (2018-2019); Central Utah Art Center (2010); Black Mountain College Museum, Asheville, NC (2004); Institute of Modern Structural Art & Research Center, Kansas City, MO (1993); Fordham University at Lincoln Center, New York (1991); Musée Victor Duhamel, Mantes-la-Jolie, France (1990); Musée de Cholet, Cholet, France (1988), International Center, Hammsermith, London (1988), Giis Centre Wems, Paris (1987), Abbaye Royale du Moncel, Maxence, France (1987). 
 
Krikorian's work is in the permanent collections of the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center, Asheville, NC; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA; Musée de Cholet, Cholet, France; the Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, PA; Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, NC; Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Ligonier, PA; Brigham Young University Museum, Provo, UT; Greenville Museum of Art, Greenville, NC; Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY; Hickory Museum of Art, Hickory, NC.
 

Leo Krikorian 

Babst Gallery 

An Installation by Giovanni Jance

FOYER-LA

Shadows cast
by dusk-led creatures
lose form in the
lineless light,
limb upon limb
live, uprooted
echolocating in their
protected playground.

Led away by heat,
that arrow of time, they arise -
bodies of light unbounded
from fragile bulbs of glass,
spill forth from the slipstream
in wax and paint
for us and for our salvation
unfurling onto canvas.

Umwelt, Juliana Keyser, April 2025


parrasch heijnen is pleased to present Rosy Keyser: ultraUMWELT, the gallery’s second solo exhibition with New York-based artist Rosy Keyser (b.1974, Baltimore, MD). 

The works of ultraUMWELT explore the synthesis of time and form as Keyser asks how we can propagate new beauty, new language, new structures, and new tools using the elastic language of painting. She negotiates the shifting relationships of creation and destruction simultaneous to the attendant sensuality and brutality that characterize nature.

Keyser engages Umwelt - the phenomenon in which the experience of reality is shaped by the differences in sensory and perceptual systems between organisms—within her material and conceptual process. As writer Mary Blair Taylor wrote about the work in this show, “Keyser imagined [and created] a machine that would act upon her works-in-progress, like an in-house contractor of sorts. Keyser designed [and developed in her studio] this contraption to sit on the floor like a giant printing cartridge or press, through which she could push the paintings. The machine both heats and applies pressure to the support surface, like a rotating doorway whose threshold imprints (or mono-prints) on everything that passes through. Despite inventing and building this mechanism herself, Keyser cannot control the manipulation, but over time she has come to understand certain likely operations.”

As Keyser describes, "In the context of [Italian physicist and writer] Carlo Rovelli, 'heat is the arrow of time'. I dreamt up the machine because I wanted to work into a ‘live surface.’ There is an ‘all-at-onceness’, an embrace of chance image-making, and a fostering of conditions that are unpredictably beautiful and impossible to fully control. The intentions that I bring to the process are very much embodied as there is no time to overdetermine. Additionally, the materials (oils, wax, resins) respond with their own wills. The canvas is rendered more transparent, more responsive, more synthesized and its edges or Umwelt more diffuse.”

Rosy Keyser earned her BFA at Cornell University in 1997 and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. Keyser has shown extensively throughout the United States and internationally, with the solo exhibitions: Arp 273, parrasch heijnen (Los Angeles, CA); I’ll Fly Away, Nunu Fine Art (Taipei, Taiwan); The OtherOther, Maccarone (New York and Los Angeles); Medusa Pie Country, Peter Blum Gallery (New York); and We Sing Sin, Contemporary Fine Arts (Berlin, Germany). Group exhibitions include: Rosy Keyser & Eleanor Mikus, Parts & Labor, Beacon, NY; Painter Painter at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, and Pink Caviar at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark. Keyser’s work is held in the permanent collections of: the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK. Rosy Keyser was a Fall 2017 artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation (Marfa, TX) and a 2022 artist in residence at the Læsø AiR, Denmark. Rosy Keyser is represented by parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles; Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, Germany; Nunu Fine Art, Taipei, Taiwan; and Sevil Dolmaci, Dubai, UAE.

Rosy Keyser: ultraUMWELT will be on view at parrasch heijnen, 1326 S. Boyle Avenue, Los Angeles from April 26 - June 7, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, April 26, 4-7p.  The gallery has secure, private parking onsite. Gallery staff are available to guide you through our exhibitions virtually via Zoom upon request. For more information, please contact the gallery at +1 (323) 943-9373 or info@parraschheijnen.com.

Image: ROSY KEYSER, Pink Deer, 2024, oil, wax and spray paint on silk cotton with custom steel frame, 59-1/4 in x 41-1/4 in. 

Rosy Keyser: ultraUMWELT

parrasch heijnen

Come experience the colorful intricacies from the latest burst of creativity of legendary artist Ric Heitzman. Heitzman is known for his wild kinetic designs and ecstatic playfulness on Pee Wee's Playhouse. 

Heitzman brings the same playful intricacy and psychedelic charm to a series of over 40 vibrant new ballpoint pen drawings and paintings covering the walls of Face Guts. 

“Squiggly Dee” is a collaboration between WhiteBox.LA and Face Guts, and is accompanied by a full color catalog featuring writings by @gary.panter, Doug Harvey (@dghrvy), and Aaron Curry (@baddimension)  available as a collectible zine at the opening reception and throughout the run of the show and online at WhiteBox.LA

@whitebox.la
@face.guts
@HeitzmanRic 
@dghrvy
@gary.panter
@baddimension

www.WhiteBox.LA
www.faceguts.com
www.RicHeitzman.com

Ric Heitzman: Squiggly Dee

WhiteBox X Face Guts

A collection from the one and only artist, RETNA. This collection will feature 10 never-before-seen RETNA pieces that are gorgeous and truly a magnificent body of work. The opening is scheduled for May 16th, 4-8 pm, at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood. 

The gallery is located in the blue building on the 3rd floor.

RETNA: Silence Decoded

Mash Gallery at PDC

Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present Sour Orange, Sam Michell’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, and her debut with the gallery. Based in Mérida, Mexico, Michell presents a series of horizontally oriented paintings on paper alongside a single, larger-scale canvas. This work is a deeply personal yet formally disciplined investigation into corporeal memory and emotional proximity. Rooted in the traditions of figurative painting yet persistently in dialogue with abstraction, Michell’s compositions emerge from an intimate engagement with the body—as form, as recollection, as a metaphor—creating space for reflection on gesture, presence, and the subtle tensions between inner experience and visual expression.

The exhibition unfolds through a nuanced chromatic arc, beginning with the sharp acidity of orange and gradually descending into the dense quietude of viridian green, with ochre recurring as a grounding emotional register. The horizontal orientation of the works on paper lend a cinematic rhythm, evoking suspended moments and fragmentary recollections. These paintings possess a raw immediacy that is both gestural and deliberate, hovering between meditation and unfinished narrative. Michell distills vulnerability and movement through fragmentation: a foot curled inward, an elbow extending outward, a pelvis hinted at more by its absence than its contour. The central canvas amplifies this language, presenting a reclining figure stretched across a couch-like form—part domestic furniture, part psychoanalytic symbol. The posture is uneasy yet intimate, a site of both exposure and quiet introspection.

Michell’s work is shaped not by linear narrative but by atmosphere—a sensorial and psychological space constructed through restrained mark-making and a finely attuned relationship to color, line, and space. Her engagement with the history of painting is felt as resonance rather than reference; tradition is not meant to be quoted nor imitated but carried forward as tension, weight, and embodied continuity. These works resist closure, embracing ambiguity and the elusive, tactile nature of memory. They suggest that remembrance is not solely an act of the mind, but one of the body—a process of retrieving what has been physically held, emotionally absorbed, and silently endured. 

Sam Michell (b. 1989) is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Mérida, Mexico. Her practice constructs poetic visual languages that engage both spatial and emotional dimensions, navigating themes of memory, transformation, and perception. Through a range of media, Michell explores the fluid interplay between internal experience and external environments. She received her formal training at the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY, and the Escuela Superior de Artes Visuales, Mérida, Mexico. Michell’s work has been exhibited in galleries and institutions across Mexico, the United States, and abroad including Maison Céleste, Mexico City, Mexico; Miguel Carrera, Mexico City, Mexico; Lux Perpetua Art Centre, Mérida, Mexico; The Collective at Highline Galleries, New York, NY; Museo de la Ciudad, Mérida, Mexico; Galería Shelf, Mexico City, Mexico; Centro Cultural La Cúpula, Mérida, Mexico; and the VI Bienal de Artes Visuales de Yucatán, Mérida, Mexico. Additionally, she has participated in residencies including Almost Perfect in Tokyo, Japan, and Universos Inexplorados in San Gimignano, Italy.

____

Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present Unspoken Pleasures of the New Frontier, the first solo exhibition by New Jersey-based, self-taught artist Marisa Regante (1980). In this suite of nine small-scale intricate oil paintings, Regante interlaces surrealism, personal symbolism, and retro Americana into rich, cinematic tableaux. Sourcing imagery from vintage magazines such as National Geographic, Playboy, and Arizona Highways, she reconfigures fragments of the past into dreamlike scenes that examine rituals of domesticity, desire, and escapism. Equal parts reverie and social mirror, these works traverse a world both intimate and uncanny.

Regante develops her compositions through analog collage—cutting and reassembling visual ephemera until a composition intuitively takes shape. From these paper fragments, she builds each oil painting layer by layer, rendering her subjects with a quiet precision that balances the surreal with the sincere. In Tupperwave Abode, a 1950s Tupperware party unfolds in a floral-drenched living room, overseen by a giant cuttlefish, transforming a scene of domestic ritual into something mythic and absurd. In Once Twice Three Times a Lady, Regante reimagines imagery from a 1970s porn film, creating a layered portrayal of pleasure, detachment, and repetition. A moment of sexual intimacy becomes fragmented—arms elongate, bodies echo, slipping into abstraction. Through her “fragmenting” technique, she evokes motion, time distortion, and the glitch-like duplicity of pornographic fantasy.

The title Unspoken Pleasures of the New Frontier suggests a psychological and symbolic terrain: a place where the past is not merely remembered but reimagined. Nature appears throughout the exhibition not as a passive backdrop but as a living, transformative presence. Mountain ranges, fields of flowers, and forest interiors hint at spaces of personal renewal, echoing the artist’s relationship to the natural world. Though Regante’s compositions are filled with depictions of the past, her treatment of them is neither ironic nor sentimental. Instead, she positions these elements within new, layered mythologies—ones that speak to longing and the strange beauty of reinvention.

What makes Regante’s work especially compelling is her ability to create resonance through contrast—between the meticulous and the intuitive, the fantastical and the mundane. With no formal training, she approaches painting as both a craft and a form of visual poetics, allowing instinct and emotion to lead. Her debut exhibition introduces a singular voice: one that transforms the residue of another era into a quietly radical, self-authored world.   

Sam Michell: Sour Orange | Marisa Regante: Unspoken Pleasures of the New Frontier

Lowell Ryan Projects 

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

Forward

TAPPAN

A two-person show of LA-based painter Rebecca Shippee and Seattle-based artist Carly Sheehan.

Carly Sheehan & Rebecca Shippee: Obsessed With Forgetting What It Is

North Loop West

Archipelago of Earthen Bones, which is part of Szlam's larger research project Towards a Counter-Cartography of Volcanic Time, traces cartographies of time rooted in the geologic formations of our planet. Examining volcanic lifespans to comprehend geology, the three-channel video and sound installation recognizes the divergent nature of the timescales around us. From split-second catastrophic ruptures to the slow-moving formation of mountains, Archipelago of Earthen Bones invites viewers to lean into time. 
 
Using the Earth’s tectonic plates as imaginary maps, Szlam filmed a constellation of geological phenomena, including the afterglow of the Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai eruption, the eroded vestiges of volcanic activity in Australia’s Gondwana Rainforest, the topography of the central eastern mountain ranges in Australia, and lava fields where new flora shapes the surroundings of active volcanoes in the Chilean Andes. Szlam is joined by the Australian artist Lawrence English, whose accompanying soundscapes were composed using the Earth’s vibrations, murmurings, and signals. 

Towards a Counter-Cartography of Volcanic Time
 
In 2022 and 2023, Szlam undertook fieldwork in northeastern Australia to explore the Gondwana Rainforest and the continent’s ancient volcanoes sites, tracing a path along the central eastern ranges and coastline, from Mount Wollumbin (Mount Warning) in New South Wales to Mount Beerwah and the Bunya Mountains in Queensland. 

The eruption of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai, in December 2021, released a sonic boom that encapsulated the planet and blasted an enormous plume of water vapor and ash into the upper atmosphere, creating intensely colored twilight “afterglows,” that were visible from Australia to Antarctica. These vibrant sunsets and sunrises lasted for several months and were captured by Szlam on 16 mm color reversal film stock during the making of Archipelago of Earthen Bones. 

Connecting antipodal cultures of tectonic plates in the Southern Hemisphere, Szlam also traveled to southern Chile to film new earth and forest formations at seemingly inert lava fields, thus linking geographical and geological extremes on the Ring of Fire. 

Lawrence English developed a soundscape using microphonic imagination, vibrations from the underground, and biophonic sounds of birds and insects recorded originally from these sites. Each video channel of the installation has a unique sound environment designed to interweave with the others. 

Curators, geoscientists, biologists, and knowledge keepers were the guiding force of this project including Gwynne Fulton, John Edmond, Clive Oppenheimer, Joali Paredes, Jorge Romero, Andrew Rozefelds, Francisca Vergara, BJ Murphy, Kyle Slabb, and Jarulah Slabb.

About the Artist

Malena Szlam is a Chilean artist and filmmaker based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. Her films, installations, and photographs explore embodied perception and the material and affective dimensions of analogue film process. Szlam’s work gives form to lyrical approximations of the natural world. Attentive to the geopolitics of natural phenomena, her recent work focuses on geology, earth science, and volcanology.
 
Szlam’s work has been exhibited widely at festivals and museums, including Toronto International Film Festival, MoMA, New Directors/New Films, Media City Film Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival, FICValdivia, Jeonju IFF, Cinéma du Réel, Edinburgh International Festival, and International Film Festival Rotterdam. 
 
Recent group exhibitions include Energy Fields: Vibrations of the Pacific, PST ART: Art & Science Collide (Los Angeles), femmes volcans forêts torrents, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Expanded Plus: Utopian Phantom, Factory of Contemporary Arts Palbok (South Korea); The Moon: From Inner Worlds to Outer Space, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark). Solo presentations include Inexistent Time presented by Los Angeles Filmforum and Infra— at SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art. Szlam’s work is included in the MoMA’s permanent collection.


Malena Szlam: Archipelago of Earthen Bones

Fulcrum Arts

 Slipping Glimpser

 Munro Galloway
 Iva Gueorguieva
 Cameron Harvey
 Aaron Maier-Carretero
 Patrick McElnea


 “When I’m falling, I’m doing alright. And when I’m slipping, I say, ‘Hey, this is very

 interesting.’… That is a wonderful sensation … to slip into this glimpse.”

 –Willem de Kooning to David Sylvester, 1960

 Wönzimer is pleased to present Slipping Glimpser , an exhibition of five painters working in Los Angeles, connected through a shared commitment to process, improvisation, and dialogue. Through a series of informal studio visits over the past two years, these artists exchanged ideas, shared works in progress, and explored the slipperiness of looking, making, and understanding.

 It began when Iva texted Pat and Munro for a studio visit. They went to her studio on North Spring Street, near the LA River, where Cameron was already waiting. Aaron showed up a little later. Together they moved the giant paintings around, shifting them to see from different angles.They talked about habitats, craters, tornadoes, ghostly transparencies, and dotted lines. Iva gave everyone a drawing, and afterward they went to the bar.

 The next time they gathered was at Aaron’s studio. Dapples, his Great Dane, greeted them at thedoor before sprawling in the middle of the room. Aaron’s paintings of cats, birds, sardines, and sandwiches covered the walls. They sat on the floor leafing through drawings, and talked about grids, repetition, and containment.

 At Cameron’s studio her unstretched paintings were piled on the floor like rugs. The canvases were massive, spilling loosely from the walls onto the ground. In the middle of the space was a large cocoon-like mass of colorful plastic painting detritus. Cameron was trying to make it stand on its own. They talked about hides, moths, leaves, midlines, and dancing. 

In Pat’s studio, they looked at oil paintings on panels, made through blotting and wiping. The paintings evoked soot, fog, shadows and sidewalks, and the color of pollution. They talked about mixing color, and how certain combinations evoked a mood. Towards the end, Pat pulled out his collages, with titles, like Eye-eye-foam and Fidelity Futures .

 When they visited Munro’s studio, the walls were covered with hundreds of black ink drawings on newsprint, alongside large oil paintings. Small hand-painted wooden sculptures sat on shelves beneath the drawings. Aaron noticed one painting was upside down, so they turned it around. They looked at the paintings and saw masts, eyes, apertures, doorways and horizon lines. Then they went back to Munro’s house for soup.

 Slipping Glimpser

David Zwirner and Fraenkel Gallery are pleased to announce Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited, on view at David Zwirner’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. Organized by both galleries, the exhibition debuted at David Zwirner New York in September 2022 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s momentous 1972 posthumous retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Cataclysm re-creates that iconic exhibition’s checklist of 113 photographs, underscoring the subversive poignancy of Arbus’s work even today while highlighting the popular and critical upheaval the original exhibition precipitated. This will be the first major survey of the artist’s work in Los Angeles since Diane Arbus: Revelations, which was presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art over twenty years ago.

Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited

David Zwirner | 606 N Western

LAUNCH Gallery and The National Tourism Board of Xicanoland proudly present new drawings by celebrated Mexican-American artist Abel Alejandre. In this new series, The Age of Heroes, Abel honors twelve pivotal figures whose brilliance forged modern Xicanoland.  Themes of masculinity, valor, patriarchy, and the capacity to look to the future with purpose and assurance are addressed through twelve ink portraits on paper, each capturing a statesperson, scientist, or cultural luminary whose vision reshaped Xicanoland.  

Inseparable from Xicanoland’s belief in cyclical life, every human portrait in The Age of Heroes is accompanied by a painting of a Xoloitzcuintle—the sacred dog that, by tradition, escorts the soul into the next realm. These twelve canine guardians transform the gallery into a spiritual corridor, guiding visitors through a meditation on legacy, mortality, and endurance.

Image: President Meztli “La Primera”, a ground-breaking champion of universal suffrage.


Abel Alejandre

LAUNCH LA

Rhett Baruch Gallery is pleased to announce Mysterious Bodies, a two-person exhibition featuring new works by Samantha McCurdy (Los Angeles) and Bonnie Morano (New York). The exhibition opens with a public reception on Thursday, May 15th from 5:00–8:00 PM at Rhett Baruch Gallery, located at 6057 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90038, and will be on view through June 21, 2025. Both artists will be present at the opening reception.

Through materially distinct yet thematically resonant practices, both artists interrogate the surface of the painting as a site of revelation, concealment, and transformation. Their works propose the body not merely as form, but as space—a vessel through which energy, symbolism, and spiritual resonance emerge.

Samantha McCurdy approaches the painted surface as both skin and container. Her sculptural paintings begin with expertly crafted wooden substrates, custom armatures constructed through over a decade of refined carpentry. These structures are tightly wrapped in stretchable fabric, which clings to the geometric and organic forms hidden beneath, subtly revealing the contours of an internal presence. Over this base, McCurdy applies multiple layers of paint, sanding each coat with precision. The result is an exceptionally smooth, plastic-like finish that both heightens the illusion of manufactured perfection and reinforces the tension between objecthood and intimacy. These taut, luminous surfaces evoke the aesthetics of industrial design while maintaining the quiet presence of the handmade. Her forms, restrained yet suggestive, animate the threshold between revelation and secrecy, exterior and interior.

Bonnie Morano, by contrast, navigates abstraction through a language of symmetry, repetition, and symbolic construction. Her compositions are built from a personal vocabulary of geometric and organic forms, elements she arranges with architectural precision and meditative intent. These formal strategies create visual rhythms that echo ritual, reflection, and the metaphysical. Morano’s color palette, drawn from the material culture of precious metals, gemstones, and textiles, imbues the work with a heightened sense of value and reverence. Her paintings are simultaneously structured and ecstatic, inviting viewers into symbolic worlds that pulse with hidden meaning. Beneath their hard edges and calculated balance lies a deep connection to the spiritual, a quiet assertion of painting as a space of order, mystery, and transformation.

Though their processes diverge, with McCurdy working through physical tension and concealment and Morano through visual codes and compositional structure, both artists treat the surface as a site of energetic resonance. They investigate the thresholds between body and spirit, visibility and opacity, control and emotion. Together in Mysterious Bodies, McCurdy and Morano establish a dynamic conversation. Their works insist that the body is not merely a form to be seen, but a field in which energy, devotion, and meaning are shaped, and where the material world meets something just beyond our grasp.

Photo by Ruben Diaz

Samantha McCurdy x Bonnie Morano: Mysterious Bodies

Rhett Baruch Gallery 

Immersed in screenglow chiaroscuro and off-hours hues, Vanessa Gully Santiago’s paintings reconnoiter the framework of labor and its psychosexual residue under the imperative of RTO: Return to Office. Against this renewed mandate, her works stage the entrapments of corporate life through a vespertine procession of postures, devices, and disarticulated limbs caught in loops of self-fashioning, submission, and self-surveillance.

Her subjects, women entangled with air purifiers, collapsed in boardrooms, wrapped around inert peripherals, borrow from Alex Bag’s passive-aggressive agency and Alina Szapocznikow’s procedural eroticism, but with the added dystopian veneer of deep digital fatigue; you can nearly feel the blue light pooling under their eyelids. If Edward Hopper radiates as an anticipatory reference, so too do the twilit hermeticism of Honoré Desmond Sharrer, the surrealist nocturnes of Miriam Tindall Smith, and the institutional reverie of Bernard Perlin’s hospital paintings. Gully Santiago locates her figures in a similarly heterotopic and suspended realm; dispersed across offices, bedrooms, and the continuous glow of graphics, they inhabit what might be labeled an eroticization of la perruque: a tactical, libidinal meandering through institutional constructs that perforate work and leisure.

Where Michel de Certeau once mapped the poetics of pedestrian errancy, Gully Santiago’s figures navigate corridors where one’s body is both asset and relic. As Laurent de Sutter theorizes, “in contemporary capitalism, the ideal citizen is no longer the obedient subject but the joyful accomplice.”[1] Gully Santiago takes this a step farther. In Overtime, supine in a corral of desk space, a woman liaises with a printer. It’s telling that here, as in Dyson Purifier Humidity + Cool PH03 and Dyson Purifier Cool Gen 1 TP10, the machine becomes the site of embrace—understandably preferred to the men who occasionally surface in her compositions as stand-ins for the system itself.
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While implicitly staged as feminist rejoinder to the relocalization of labor, the paintings complicate any easy parsing of libidinal displacement; blurring function and intimacy, they are equally ambiguous in their distinctions between a corporatized Stockholm syndrome and a wet opposition to the gutless connectivity of ‘smart’ objects shrouded in ergonomic plastics. Gully Santiago’s paintings suggest a critique of technologization that retains a tenderness toward its failures. Rather than resist their entanglement with these interfaces, some of her women linger inside it (and, vice versa); whatever they’re feeling, it’s irreducible to an exhibtion text.

In 5:10 am, a woman sits at her desk beneath an aquarium of documents and open tabs, surrounded by screens that, definitively, watch her back. Each velvety scene is a gloaming recursion of an ambient constant distributed across LinkedIn feeds, seated in the fiber of Herman Miller chairs as meshy as WiFi. The specific times in Gully Santiago’s titles—12:45 am, 3:22 pm, 6:07 am—index the always-on world of urban anomie, where pause does not promise rest so much as the fugue state of embodied buffering. For all this techno-eldritch disassociation and cubicle hauntology, for anyone who has worked long hours and wondered why the copier’s printing a novella of lorem ipsums, her images lie on the uncanny edge of familiarity.

Although these paintings arrive in the long shadow of the return-to-office mandate, they resist the didactic certitudes of social critique. One could parse that the works channel what Mark Alizart has named “an aesthetics of submission,”[2] subsuming appearances into the slow, sensorial coercions of affective labor under the disciplinary glow of a screen’s governing. Yet Daisy Lafarge would complicate this reading: “Desire...resides not in acquisition or climax but in ambient accumulation, in the careful reconstitution of attention after it has been spent.”[3] Seemingly registering this auto-oppositionality, several images—Efficiency, FaceTime, and Workplace Flexibility—feature women in states of literal disassembly, echoing the physically flattened and atomized figures of Dana Schutz, Ambera Wellmann, and Dorothea Tanning, as if riven by the phantom vibrations of their work phones.

There may be no outside to the corporate imaginary, but there are still sources of pleasure, not least in the delicacy of the painterly hand and depictions of task-untethered object intimacy. While the works register that “flexibility,” once marketed as the emancipatory promise of telecommuting, is just a gentler kind of handcuff, they do make space for implied sites of exception. In 12:45 am, a woman on a phone call gestures towards a third space, a possible exit from her Slack thread. A seam loosens; we have the hint of escape. Typing ...
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Vanessa Gully Santiago (b. 1984 in Boston, MA) lives and works in Queens, NY. The artist gained her BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2006 and her MFA from The Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University in 2013. Solo and two-person exhibitions: Cheremoya, Los Angeles (2025); James Fuentes, New York (2022); James Fuentes, Online (2020); Jack Barrett Gallery, Brooklyn (2018); Thierry Goldberg, New York (2017); and American Medium, Brooklyn (2016). Selected group exhibitions: Turley Gallery, Hudson (2025); Andrea Festa, Rome (2024), Collaborations, Copenhagen (2023); Europa, New York (2023); The Green Gallery, Milwaukee (2021); Rachel Uffner, New York (2021); Mrs. Gallery, Queens (2021); In Lieu, Los Angeles (2020); Embajada, San Juan (2020); Assembly Room, New York (2019); Sibling, Toronto (2019); Helena Anrather, New York (2018); JTT, New York (2018); Marinaro, New York (2018); Charles Moffett, New York (2018); Foxy Production, New York (2017); Deli Gallery, Queens (2017); C. Grimaldis, Baltimore (2017); Smart Objects, Los Angeles (2017); 247365, New York (2016); Situation Room, Los Angeles (2015); and Bruce High Quality Foundation, New York (2014). Her work has been the subject of review in Artforum, ArtNews, Forbes, The Observer, The New Yorker, and Nylon, among other publications.
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[1] Laurent de Sutter, After Law (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), p. 47.
[2] Mark Alizart, The Climate Coup (Cambridge: Polity, 2021), p. 63.
[3] Daisy Lafarge, Life Without Air (London: Granta, 2020), p. 112.

Vanessa Gully Santiago: RTO

Cheremoya

la BEAST gallery is thrilled to exhibit sculptural works by artist Lorenzo Lorenzetti. Deeply rooted in the architectural motifs of Detroit, Lorenzetti’s sculptures invite contemplation on the enduring power of tradition amid the disconnection and impermanence of the digital age. 

Opening reception, Saturday May 17, 6-9p. 

Please email info@labeastgallery.com for more information about this artist. 
 

Lorenzo Lorenzetti: Silent Piazza

la BEAST Gallery

In Greg ‘CRAOLA’ Simkins' seventh solo exhibition with the gallery spanning 12 years, the artist opens the door to a world suspended between memory and invention. The Middle is a dream terrain where the surreal logic of childhood imagination meets the fragmented architecture of lived experience. This new collection of paintings and drawings continues to follow a cast of recurring characters and themes perched upon crumbling fragments of a world in motion.

Simkins’ creatures — many of whom have appeared in previous works as trickster guides or avatars of transformation, appear once again, embarking on new adventures. Pandas materialize as jokesters or soothsayers alongside cunning invertebrates, mischievous rodents, and porcelain deer. Fish float impossibly out of water and into space. Birds perch on slabs of broken concrete walls etched with faded tags or vintage cartoon characters. In Simkin’s world, animals become hybrid knights, flora grows from flesh, and narrative logic warps in favor of something more magical, more subconscious. This is not mere fantasy, it is mythology built from asphalt and imagination, from cartoons, comics, black book sketches and bedtime stories.

Greg 'CRAOLA' Simkins: The Middle

KP Projects

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

Opulent Mobility: Re-Imagine Disability and Mobility

Brand Library & Art Center

Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to announce Whitney Bedford’s solo exhibition, Sunsetting, opening May 17th through June 28th, 2025.

In Sunsetting, Bedford’s paintings continue her Veduta series–interpretations of historical landscape paintings–shifting her focus to turn-of-the-century sunset and moonlight paintings. Primarily referencing paintings by Edvard Munch and Félix Vallotton, Bedford’s works situate the historic landscape within an architectural stage-like space alongside contemporary flora and fauna, looking outward as if observing landscapes past. Approaching these scenes of nature through a temporal lens, Bedford’s works tap into the emotional potential of the sunset genre, drawing on the symbolism of endings, beginnings, rebirth, and renewal.

Painted in vivid and vibrant hues, each sunset offers a meditation on the passage of time and its cyclical nature. For Bedford, the sunsets are particularly poignant at this moment–politically and environmentally–as signifiers of the end of an era or harbingers of change. For Munch and Vallotton, the emotional charge of the sunsets symbolized the anxiety of their time and the drastic societal changes spurred by the Industrial Revolution at the turn of the century, leading up to the First World War. Bedford’s return to these themes draws comparisons a century later to our current moment, offering a visual allegory for the inevitability of change.

In several paintings, Bedford includes palm trees–quintessentially Californian trees–some of which were damaged by fire. These trees were drawn from images Bedford took of the devastation in her neighborhood in the Palisades after the recent wildfires. The wildfires, which took place midway through the production for her exhibition, dramatically underscore the symbolism of the sunsets. Her Veduta paintings, already expressing the despair of witnessing climate change, are now permeated by the trauma of the recent devastation.

Bedford’s works are both cautionary and hopeful. The transformative beauty of the sunsets is eclipsed by the anxiety of a new era approaching. With every end, there is a beginning, and with every beginning, there is grief for what once was. Bedford’s works occupy this space of in-betweenness and revel in the sublime power and ultimate hope of nature.

About the artist

Whitney Bedford received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2003. She won the 2001 UCLA Hammer Museum Drawing Biennale and received a Fulbright Graduate Fellowship from Hochschule der Kuenste, Berlin in 1999. Bedford recently had a solo exhibition last year at The San Luis Obispo Museum of Art titled “The Window,” curated by Emma Saperstein. She has been included in group exhibitions at the Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; the Jewish Museum, New York; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver. Bedford’s work is included in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA; the Jumex Collection, Mexico City, Mexico; the De La Cruz Collection, Miami, Florida, USA; The Saatchi Collection, London, England; the Francois Pinault Collection, Paris, France; the Eric Decelle Collection, Brussels, Belgium; and the Collection Ginette Moulin/Guillaume Houze, Paris, France.

The gallery is located at 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, south of the 10 freeway. Parking is available on the south parking lot adjacent to the building. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 6 pm and by appointment. For further information and press inquiries, please contact Olivia Gauthier at Olivia@vielmetter.com.

Image: Whitney Bedford, “Veduta (Vallotton Yellow Green Sunset),” 2025, Ink and oil on nylinen on panel, 36" x 48" x 2" [HxWxD], Photo credit: Evan Bedford

____

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce Miami-based artist Jared McGriff’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, The Stakes Are Myself, on view from May 17th through June 28th, 2025.

The exhibition’s title alludes to the late Beat poet Diane di Prima’s poems from the “Revolutionary Letters” series. Written between 1968 and 1971, these letters were produced during a time of political and cultural upheaval in America, emphasizing the necessity of taking risks as a means of survival in an oppressive world. Honoring di Prima’s work and using it as a guide to respond to today’s political turmoil, McGriff draws inspiration from “Revolutionary Letter #1,” which opens with this powerful statement: “I have just realized that the stakes are myself, I have no other ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life.” 

Each of McGriff’s new paintings in the exhibition illustrates a scene of “risk-taking” in everyday life–gambling, horse racing, fishing–activities that are woven into our social fabric and serve as a potent metaphor for chance, probability, and luck throughout the show. For McGriff, these scenes represent a microcosm of the existential risks of existence, shedding light on how we navigate uncertainty in life and how we harness or mitigate it. In the painting The Inherent Risk of Surviving Infancy, in Trio (2025), three men engaged in a game of dice are captured mid-play. The moment is frozen in drama, creating a nearly Renaissance-like composition, though the actual dice remain just out of sight. By concentrating on the figures and their expressions and gestures, McGriff emphasizes the emotional and psychological dynamics of the players instead of the game's outcome. Consequently, the game itself transforms into a theatrical stage for catharsis and serves as a powerful metaphor for chance, probability, and luck.

In the paintings A Conduit of Trust (2025) and An Engine of Instinct and Intuition (2025), McGriff depicts dramatically cropped portraits of a croupier and a gambler against pitch-black backgrounds. The gambler, with eyes cast down and a cigarette in his mouth, coolly contemplates his next move, the darkness of the background enhancing the melodrama of the moment before he plays his next card. The croupier is caught mid-move, shifting the chips either toward or away from the unseen figure at the other end of the table – a card turned face down contrasts with her palm facing up, signaling the potential for action and opportunity.

About the artist

Jared McGriff (Los Angeles, 1977) received his BA in architecture from the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley in 1999 and his MBA from New York University in 2008.
   
Solo exhibitions include Alone, Together (2019) and Only Touching the Ground to Jump (2020) at Spinello Projects, and a solo exhibition at Vielmetter Los Angeles, On Being a Wild Dream (2023). His work has been featured in solo booth presentations at NADA Miami (2020), Expo Chicago (2022), The Armory Show (2022), 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair - New York (2023, 2024). In 2021, McGriff had his debut museum solo exhibition, Where We Are You, at NSU Art Museum, curated by Bonnie Clearwater. He has been featured in museum group exhibitions at ICA Miami, Orlando Museum of Art, The Norton Museum of Art, and El Espacio 23.


Whitney Bedford: Sunsetting | Jared McGriff: The Stakes are Myself

Vielmetter Los Angeles

When your identity and purpose are rooted in making objects, what happens when all of those objects are reduced to ash? What becomes of the artist when not just the studio, but the home, the archives, the tools, the detritus of life—everything—is gone?

My House Burned Down brings together artists who have experienced the destruction of their home by fire. The exhibition includes those affected by the recent Los Angeles fires of 2025, as well as others who have endured individual, isolated blazes. It asks: how does fire shape artmaking in the days that follow catastrophe? And how does it continue to burn years—or decades—later?

After the fire, many people tried to comfort me with the image of the phoenix rising from the ashes—rebirth, transformation, triumph. But I don’t feel reborn. I don’t feel triumphant. I feel exhausted. I feel the literal loss of everything I’ve ever owned, and it is, frankly, incredibly inconvenient.

This exhibition is not about inspiration or silver linings. It’s about the complex emotional, practical, and artistic aftermath of disaster. I eschewed any subtext in titling the show, and trusted the artists to find meaning in disaster rather than ascribing it to them. What’s left behind when everything burns?

My House Burned Down

Track 16 | Downtown LA

Musichead Gallery is proud to present Simply the Best: The Power and Perseverance of Tina Turner, a photography exhibition celebrating the undeniable spirit and legacy of the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Featuring 20 unforgettable images captured by 11 acclaimed photographers, this exhibition traces Tina Turner's extraordinary journey, from her explosive rise as the dynamic frontwoman of Ike & Tina Turner to her rebirth as a solo powerhouse. 

From her explosive beginnings with Ike & Tina Turner to her historic solo comeback, the exhibition showcases intimate portraits, electrifying live shots, and candid photographs that reflect her resilience and artistry. Featured photographers include Bob Gruen, Norman Seeff, Deborah Feingold, Baron Wolman, Brian Aris, and more.

Visitors will also get a look at original Rolling Stone magazine covers featuring Tina Turner, the magazine’s first Black artist and woman cover star.

Tina Turner’s story is more than music—it’s about reclaiming your voice and rising stronger than ever, says gallery founder and curator Sam Milgrom. This exhibition is both a celebration and a reflection, and we’re proud to honor her journey at Musichead Gallery.

Simply the Best: The Power and Perseverance of Tina Turner will be on view May 8 – June 28, 2025. For more information, visit: Musichead.com

Opening Reception: Thursday, May 10, 2025, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
 Free with RSVP | https://musichead.com/blogs/events/simply-the-best-the-power-and-perseverance-of-tina-turner

Metered parking is available on Sunset Boulevard. Ridesharing is encouraged due to limited space. The gallery entrance is wheelchair accessible. For accessibility accommodations, please contact Musichead Gallery in advance.

For additional information, please contact Musichead Gallery at (323) 876-0042 or email us at info@musichead.com.

Simply the Best: The Power and Perseverance of Tina Turner

Musichead Gallery

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce Why Are You Sitting In The Dark, an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and a sculpture by Jason Fox. The exhibition will be on view in Los Angeles at 5130 W. Edgewood Pl., from May 16 through June 28, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Friday, May 16 from 6 to 8 PM.

Fox makes paintings that are, first and foremost, about painting but inevitably end up being about everything else. The style he has developed over four decades is responsive to many levels of cultural production, indulging in disparate interests such as modernism, minimalism, comic books, and popular music. No two paintings are alike, even or especially those produced as entries in an immediately recognizable series. Joni Mitchell, Alberto Giacometti, a bemused dragon, a melancholic dog, and various skeletons or other “frightening” figures are among the recurring cast of characters who lend their forms to Fox’s inventive, intuitively elaborated process. The artist continually eludes expectations and gently demands that viewers consider each iteration of his obsessions anew, not just because they are his, but because the avenues he takes to realize his images are the same avenues any of us take when we try to figure out what matters, what moves, and what amazes.

Why Are You Sitting In The Dark is all about the intimacy of this demand. Because it includes paintings of various sizes, the exhibition evokes the emotionally close environs of the salons in which the early modernists showed, debated about, and came to understand their work. Like the early paintings of these important predecessors, Fox’s avant-gardism is not reliant on the spectacle-based effects or serialized predictability that have come to infuse much contemporary art. It is, rather, focused on what it means to take chances, painting by painting and even brushstroke by brushstroke. By remaining off-kilter, the paintings leave open the possibility of some future-oriented, organically rendered harmony. These are pictures of the intersections between hope and despair. They arise out of a hard-won faith in formalism, as well as sanguine acceptance of the fact that formalism on its own is never enough.

To this end, Fox has made a kind of aesthetic science out of the convergence of forms, colors, gestures, and moods. In the eponymous painting that gives the show its title, images of Joni Mitchell, a Goya-inspired goat, and a disaffected gargoyle hover on, in, and through each other, occupying one another’s hearts and minds in visual as well as narrative terms. Any attempt to tease them apart results in awareness of their inseparability, just as the desire to untangle the closely linked denizens in the depths of our beings often leaves us pondering places where distinctions between creativity and destruction, for instance, fall away. The work’s background is a modulated field of darkly luminous tones that appears to breathe along with its more readily identifiable subjects. The artist’s longstanding interest in monochromatic color is a reminder that, on sculptural terms, there is never truly a “background” or “foreground.” In painting, the action always takes place on the surface.

In some cases, as in a saturated red painting of Bob Marley crossed with a dog, surface is synonymous with the bold graphic image inscribed on it. Each body part—eyes, hand, nose—stands out in discrete definition, until the realization sets in that the depiction is not as clear as it first seems. What is Marley’s and what is the dog’s become questions instead of facts. The blurring of features in The Golden Man (2025), meanwhile, is of the expressionistic variety, with Fox relishing in the moment-to-moment back-and forth that builds textural bridges between the busts of Tom Petty and Giacometti that are the work’s ostensible subjects. The two men become a pile of sensitive, curious, amber-hued attempts to find what unites them. They share a knowing gaze that itself speaks to the complexity of the states the artist conjures, as well as a frankness—of intention, of materiality—that is often obscured in the world at large.

While directness characterizes the entirety of Fox’s project, the sculpture and works on paper on view emphasize the lack of pretense in his approach to his materials as well as the range of his research and references. The sculpture Willie (2022) is a wood cross adorned with a bandana and two lengths of synthetic hair. Its resemblance to country music icon Willie Nelson feels both highly determined (it also matches the musician’s height) and completely accidental, as the visual and tactile qualities of its constituent parts quickly override the obvious associations they generate. Fox balances Dadaist humor against the weight and gravitas of totemic form. And in the works on paper that round out the exhibition, Fox makes plain how he moves from one idea to another, making complete statements even out of fragmented attempts to understand—and once again forget—the driving forces behind his work. The works on paper allow viewers to fully appreciate the role played by the unknown in Fox’s ongoing evolution and how breaking down what has come before is an essential phase in the process of making new things.

Jason Fox (b. 1964, Yonkers, New York) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at David Kordansky Gallery, New York (2023); CANADA, New York (2021); and Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels (2018). Recent group exhibitions include Blossom: The Tenth Anniversary of the Long Museum, Long Museum, Shanghai (2024); The Drawing Centre Show, Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2022); Artists for New York, Hauser & Wirth, New York (2020); Samaritans, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, New York (2019); and Animal Farm, Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut (2017). His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; and Hall Art Foundation, Reading, Vermont. Fox lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York.


Jason Fox: Why Are You Sitting In The Dark | Mary Weatherford: The Surrealist

David Kordansky Gallery

Sean Kelly is delighted to announce Moon, Turn the Flames…Gently Gently Away, Awol Erizku’s inaugural solo exhibition at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles. Continuing his critical investigation of identity politics, resistance, and abstraction, Erizku offers a cosmology of visual language that disrupts conventional narratives of representation. The exhibition presents new photographs, neon installations, and sculptures that underscore Erizku’s distinctive approach to symbolism and cross-cultural dialogue. There will be an opening reception on Friday, May 16, from 5-7pm. The artist will be present.

Through a sophisticated interplay of diverse mediums, Awol Erizku’s unique lexicon recontextualizes historical narratives. A series of neon works further expand Erizku’s investigation of identity and symbolism. These new works reflect the artist’s exploration of beauty within everyday life. One neon reimagines the iconic Los Angeles Dodgers logo in vibrant, Pan-African colors, subverting expectations of branding and belonging. While another features the Olympic rings rendered in the five colors that Malcolm X identified as symbolic of the world's skin tones—red, black, brown, white, and yellow—offering a powerful meditation on unity, race, and representation. NO ICE is a striking neon addition to the artist’s enduring lexicon, introducing a multifaceted symbol ripe for interpretation within today’s volatile political climate. Within the broader constellation of works in this exhibition, NO ICE ignites a more urgent dialogue, illuminating the fraught landscape of race relations in America with unflinching intensity.

Erizku’s new photographic works reflect his continued resistance to the commodification of the Black body. Moving beyond direct figurative representation, they weave together Pan-African iconography, botanical symbolism, and profoundly personal narratives to explore themes of race, identity, and systemic injustice. In the Transfixion series recurring imagery from Erizku’s practice is projected onto delicate blooms such as orchids and Asiatic lilies. Drawing on French Martiniquais philosopher, Édouard Glissant’s concept of imagination as a dynamic force within the web of Relation, Erizku harnesses his creative process to envision new possibilities, forging visual narratives that resist oppressive frameworks and construct liberated futures rooted in Black identity and cultural multiplicity.

Another searing new photographic series confronts the enduring wounds of systemic injustice on Black communities. This deeply moving body of work serves as a requiem for individuals whose lives were tragically cut short by police violence, their stories etched into the artist’s consciousness. In these compositions, cowrie shells—potent symbols of African heritage, revered in spiritual rituals, and emblematic of diasporic resilience—replace bullet casings, while yellow evidence markers solemnly tally the gunshots. By transfiguring the cold aesthetics of forensic scenes into sacred spaces of remembrance and defiance, Erizku subverts the dehumanization of Black victims, carving out a visual sanctuary for mourning, reflection, and historical reckoning. This series not only amplifies his ongoing dialogue with Black identity and resistance but also reclaims the cowrie as a beacon of cultural continuity, echoing Malcolm X’s vision of a global Black consciousness.

Expanding on Erizku’s deep engagement with the intersection of music and visual art, the third-floor installation presents a suite of “The Most influential Hip-Hop Albums of all time” according to the artist, inkjet printed on stone. Erizku elevates his selection beyond their original commercial and digital contexts. Presenting them as “paintings” he situates them within art history. The weight and texture of the stone serve as a counterpoint to the ephemeral quality of contemporary music consumption, prompting reflection on how cultural memory is preserved and rewoven into a new tapestry. Creating an immersive experience, the exhibition is accompanied by a curated mixtape for visitors to listen to as they move through the space, serving as an auditory extension of Erizku’s artistic language.

Erizku’s work is currently the subject of, X, a solo exhibition at the California African American Museum on view through September 7, 2025. Bringing together recent and new works, this comprehensive exhibition centers on the impact of pioneering American Muslim human rights activist El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X). Curated by Daniel S. Palmer, X, first premiered at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, GA. His work is also featured in the group exhibition Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics, at LACMA on view through August 3, 2025.

Born in Ethiopia, in 1988, Erizku attended The Cooper Union before receiving his MFA from Yale University. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at institutions including The Momentary, Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, AK; Public Art Fund, New York, and The FLAG Art Foundation, New York. His work has been exhibited at prominent institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY; LACMA, LA; the Studio Museum Harlem, NY; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto; and the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, amongst others. His work is included in the permanent collection of many institutions worldwide including, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, FL; and The FLAG Art Foundation, NY. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Awol Erizku: Moon, Turn the Flames...Gently Gently Away

Sean Kelly Los Angeles

DON’T LOOK Projects is proud to announce “Freeway: Creative Growth Artists in LA”, a collaborative exhibition with Creative Growth Art Center, the pioneering Oakland-based nonprofit that has championed artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities for over 50 years. This exhibition spotlights the work of six Creative Growth artists: Juan Aguilera, Joseph Alef, Maureen Clay, Ying Ge Zhou, Cedric Johnson, and Peter Salsman. 

Opening Reception:
Friday, May 30th, 2025
5pm - 7pm

DON'T LOOK Projects
2680 S La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90034

Freeway: Creative Growth Artists in L.A.

DON’T LOOK Projects

Mother and Child: A Portal

Paintings, Drawings & Tapestries by Lucien Dante Lazar
Sculptural Works by Cybele Rowe, Patrick Nickel, Ann Weber, & Cheyann Washington

Opening Reception: 5-10pm Friday July 11th 2025
Exhibition Dates : July 11th - August 1st, 2025

Wonzimer Gallery, 341 S Avenue 17, Los Angeles 90031

 Wonzimer Gallery presents “Mother and Child: A Portal,” a new exhibition opening July 11th. Inspired by a meditation on Raphael’s Tempi Madonna, artist/curator Lucien Dante Lazar discovered the "portal" in the space between Mary and Jesus – an opening into humanity and divinity.

This exhibition explores the Mother and Child archetype as both tender human connection and exalted spiritual reality, inviting viewers to consider this timeless bond as an entry point into new ways of sensing and perceiving.

“Working with the Mother and Child opens the door to an expansive creative field,” says Lazar. “I’ve discovered an unfolding stream of imagery, understanding, and insight—into myself and into the wider scope of reality.”

“Mother and Child: A Portal” features new paintings, drawings and tapestries by Lucien Dante Lazar, guiding the exhibition’s vision. These are complemented by distinct sculptural works from each of the other distinguished artists: Cybele Rowe, Patrick Nickel, Ann Weber, and Cheyann Washington. Each artist brings their unique material and aesthetic approach to the theme, creating a rich dialogue that deepens the exhibition’s exploration of this enduring relationship.

This exhibition aims to reveal the Mother and Child archetype as a gateway for our times, offering the possibility of reimagining culture itself.




Mother and Child: A Portal

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

The Abstract Future 

Jeffrey Deitch | Orange

Performance on Paper features prints and drawings created at the intersection of music and dance by some twenty artists active from the 1960s to the present, primarily from the Grunwald Center and Hammer Contemporary Collections. It explores how works of art on paper can store sound and movement, becoming lasting visual records of ephemeral sonic and dance experiences.

The exhibition includes works activated by performance, such as graphic notations and choreographers’ scores; drawings and prints that are physical representations or evocations of music and movement; collaborations between visual artists, musicians, and dancers; as well as drawings that are the physical trace or embodiment of performance. Some artists to be presented are Laurie Anderson, Jennie C. Jones, Ann Hamilton, Channa Horwitz, Christian Marclay, Tom Marioni, Jason Moran, Meredith Monk, Julia Phillips, Allen Ruppersberg, and Kandis Williams.

Performance on Paper

Hammer Museum

The Xela Institute of Art is delighted to present New Work, the first solo museum exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Dakota Higgins, on view from May 10 through August 20, 2025. Please join us for the opening on Saturday, May 10th from 3-5pm.
In New Work, Higgins transforms industrial packing materials–foam, bubble wrap, and other protective substrates–into unconventional surfaces for painting. Through this choice, the artist complicates the boundary between utility and aesthetics, drawing out new relationships between labor and visual culture. Higgins’ signature use of irony and conceptual wit invites viewers to reconsider the ordinary and question the assumptions we bring to what is deemed “common sense.”
Alongside this new body of work, the exhibition features selections from Mountains of America, Higgins’ 50-piece collage series. These intimate, small-scale works layer found materials–produce stickers, off-set prints of flora and fauna, fragments of consumer packaging–to critique the politicized construction of the American landscape. Each collage becomes a site of inquiry, evoking the fragility of our relationship to land, nationhood, and ecological presence.
New Work positions Higgins as a sharp observer of the materials and messages that shape daily life, pushing spectators to encounter the overlooked and the discarded with fresh eyes. The exhibition catalog includes full-color reproductions from the Mountains of America series.
Higgins’ museum debut coincides with Dentless Portraits and Other Little Things, a concurrent solo show at Leroy’s Happy Place in Chinatown, Los Angeles, on view through June 2025.
For press inquiries, images, or to schedule a viewing, please contact info@xelainstitute.org. 

About the Artist 
Dakota Higgins is an artist, writer, and musician based in Los Angeles. He is the founder of the experimental music venue, the DMV (aka the Departure from Music Venues). Recent exhibitions include Things Done for Love at the University of California, Los Angeles, CA; Flat Mechanics, Fluid Dynamics at Deli Grocery, New York, NY; Infra-thick at Woodbury University, Burbank, CA; and Optogenetics: Controlled by Light, Room 3557, Los Angeles, CA. Higgins has recently been rejected from the Fine Arts Work Center Artist Residency, Provincetown, MA; the Innovative Art Grant; Headlands Center Artist Residency, Sausalito, CA; and the Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency, Joshua Tree, CA.
About Xela Institute of Art 

Xela Institute of Art is a nonprofit art exhibition space located in Wrigley Village, Long Beach/Los Angeles County, dedicated to providing emerging and mid-career artists.

Dakota Higgins: New Work

Xela Institute of Art

"Weaving is not just an art form, it is an endurance test. It is a way of grappling with time and memory, pulling the threads together even when the past resists. - Anne Carson

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Circumstances Held Me To Threads, an exhibition featuring works by Terri Friedman, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Anina Major, Frances Trombly, and Michelle Yi Martin. On view from May 24th to July 26th, 2025.

Weaving, at its core, is a complex act, demanding not only physical dexterity but also a heightened awareness of the delicate interplay between thought, memory, and material. It is an embodied practice that transcends the mere manipulation of thread; it is a reflection of the artist’s engagement with time, space, and history. As Joan Didion aptly observed, “Weaving is not a simple thing. It’s not just the hand that moves the thread, but the mind that follows it.” Weaving requires a tension between the past and present, where every thread drawn through the loom forms an intricate connection between memory and material, between individual and collective histories.

In Circumstances Held Me To Threads, the artists delve into this profound act of connection, exploring the tactile beauty of fibers as they intertwine to form patterns that mirror the complexity of lived experience. These artists challenge and expand the traditional practice of weaving, drawing upon the metaphorical weight of the process itself. The act of weaving becomes an engagement with both personal and political realms, where materials become vessels of identity, culture, and memory.

Michelle Yi Martin and Frances Trombly push the boundaries of textile and fiber to examine the intricate relationships between the corporeal and the conceptual. Their work emphasizes the physicality of weaving, focusing on the act of binding, pulling, and stretching materials in ways that reveal the fragility and resilience inherent within the fibers themselves. Sabrina Gschwandtner interrogates the historical canon of craft, reframing archival media to explore how weaving and its associated forms have been shaped by gendered perspectives. Her work challenges traditional perceptions, questioning both the aesthetics and politics embedded in the act of making. Terri Friedman considers her fabric works paintings, blurring the line between mediums through vibrant compositions that fuse gesture and texture.

Anina Major’s and Gil Yefman’s works reimagine the act of weaving through the lens of personal and cultural memory, emphasizing hybridity and transformation. These artists draw on diasporic histories, where the very act of weaving becomes a means of negotiating new forms of identity and resilience. Their works underscore weaving as a force that binds not just threads but also histories and individuals, creating new connections between past and present.
In Circumstances Held Me To Threads, weaving is not merely a technical process; it becomes an act of endurance and reflection, of stretching the boundaries between past experiences and contemporary realities. Through this exhibition, the artists invite the viewer to witness how the act of weaving becomes a transformative process, one that is at once fragile and enduring, intimately tied to both the body and the world around us.

Circumstances Held Me To Threads

Shoshana Wayne Gallery

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

Hammer Projects: Colectivo Cherani

The Broad presents Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me, a special exhibition of the artist’s multidimensional work, adapted from its original presentation at the U.S. Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, where Jeffrey Gibson was the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States with a solo exhibition. Gibson’s first single-artist museum exhibition in Southern California, The Broad’s presentation includes over thirty artworks joyously affirming the artist’s radically inclusive vision. The exhibition will highlight Gibson’s distinct use of geometric design and saturated color alongside references to 19th and 20th century foundational American documents and modern music, critiquing systemic injustices and imagining a more equitable future. The show will be on view in the museum’s first-floor galleries from May 10 through September 28, 2025.

Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me

The Broad 

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

Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency

The Wende Museum

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

AR OPEN Augmented Reality Exhibition

AR Open @ Venice Public Art Walls

Los Angeles— The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG) presents Suhn Lee: Memento Mori, an exhibition highlighting the work of Los Angeles-based artist Suhn Lee. Curated by arts associate, Samantha Alexis Manuel, with LAMAG curator, Hugo Cervantes. 

Memento Mori marks the first institutional exhibition by the Los Angeles-based artist Suhn Lee, whose practice synthesizes ceramics and textiles. Lee is drawn to the materials' meditative and process-driven nature; sculptures externalize the psychological experiences of anxiety, perfectionism, and grief. Informed by her Korean American heritage, the artist presents a series of sculptures she describes as “creatures”: small to medium-sized ceramics armored objects with beadwork, sequins, and fabric. The abstracted geometric forms are inspired by ten symbols such as turtles, clouds, and mushrooms, to name a few, that signify longevity and prosperity derived from various Asian cultures.

Lee’s repetition-driven practice of stitching and adhering or shaping and firing clay becomes akin to a physical mantra of transmuting pain whose effects cultivate reverence for the mundane. “Remember you must die,” the dialectical expression behind the Latin phrase and exhibition title, mirrors Lee’s artistic practice of indexing life’s challenges as relics or tokens akin to evidence of a life well lived. 



About the Artist
Suhn Lee (b. 1983) is a Los Angeles-based artist who focuses on ceramics and textiles. Her work is heavily influenced by her Korean American upbringing and explores her culture’s obsession with image and overachievement. At the core of her practice is a psychological examination of time, anxiety, and self-worth in conjunction with a reverence for the present moment. The slow nature of her work is partly an act of silent rebellion against society’s preoccupation with productivity, efficiency, and status. 

She received a B.A. in Communications from UC San Diego and graduated Cum Laude from Southwestern Law School. She has a legal background in Intellectual Property licensing and experience in Fashion Buying and Merchandising. She has recently exhibited at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles; Space Ten Gallery, Hawthorne; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions’s (LACE) Art Benefit; LH Horton Jr Gallery, Stockton; and completed residencies at the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine. 

Suhn Lee currently teaches ceramics at Otis College of Art and Design.

Suhn Lee: Memento Mori 

 Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery

In “Licorice Memory,” Bijou Karman’s new body of work welcomes us into her scene – a daringly colorful and women-dominated universe consisting of femmes fatales, heavy embellishment, and bold glamour above all else. Building on an enduring practice centered on the foundations of style, these paintings go beyond the standard appeal of record collecting – giving access not only to Karman’s taste in music but more importantly a window on her encyclopedic knowledge of the revolutions, design movements, and cultural touchstones of the 1960s and 1970s. 

As an established professional illustrator and painter based in Los Angeles, this exhibition is both a departure and an opportunity – offering the increasingly rare chance to share analog, hand painted favorites that encourage us to reflect on what was and imagine what could be. And while sophisticated decoration shines across these works, the album covers presented demonstrate the value of developing one’s own extremely personal visual vocabulary.

Bijou Karman (b. 1992) is an artist and illustrator from Los Angeles. Her practice glamorizes and contextualizes vintage style while working to create an equal future for everyone. Karman splits her time between illustration and painting original pieces centered around women, fashion, and culture. Karman has exhibited with the Society of Illustrators in New York City, Hey There Projects in Joshua Tree, Nucleus in Portland, and PCA Gallery in Paris, among other spaces. She is the author of “Style Legends, Rebels, and Visionaries,” (2023, Chronicle Chroma) and her illustrations appear in magazines, books, advertising, and on goods, for clients such as The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Harper’s Bazaar, Penguin, National Geographic, Time, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Apple, Nike, and Lincoln Center.

Bijou Karman: Licorice Memory

Heavy Manners Library

Smiling in Chaos is an exhibition that revolves around the theme of humor and the ability of artists to intertwine in their works, various forms of humor as a means to provoke laughter and fun in the face of the challenges of current times with the contribution of affirmative absurdity and laughter, potentially reducing the stress of life. 

Smiling in Chaos is a collaboration between Si Nos Pagan Boys, a Colombian collective of artists who infuse art with fun and humor, together with Los Angeles based artists who also use humor and levity in their work as a form of resistance. Humor is a territory without passports. In this exhibition, Colombian- and Los Angeles-based artists explore together how laughter—from absurdity to satire, from play to irony—becomes a common language that blurs borders and questions identities. It is not a naive humor, but one that reveals the cracks of everyday life, allowing us to see beyond a circumstance, a challenge, an adversity or even a trauma of some kind.

Humor has an alchemical power. Humor can disrupt preconditioned thought patterns and introduce new possibilities. It can turn difficult moments into brilliant spectacles, transform frowns into smiles and despair into hope. Its value lies in its ability to transcend and elevate the human spirit. Here, laughter is not an end, but a method: a way to dismantle hierarchies, to laugh at power and, above all, to rediscover ourselves in the collective. Between Colombia and Los Angeles, between memory and the present, humor is revealed as an act of freedom. Because, in the end, laughing together is also a way of resisting.

As part of the international exchange exhibitions between Durden and Ray, Los Angeles and Si Nos Pagan Boys, Bogotá, Colombia, Smiling in Chaos is an exhibition that will be presented at Durden and Ray, in Los Angeles and as a new exhibit in Bogotá, Colombia, during the Bogotá Art Fair and the Bogotá Biennial, bringing together artists from Los Angeles and Colombia.


Smiling in Chaos

Durden and Ray

Persons Unknown is delighted to present the wild and playful characters of Alfonse Aletto, in a survey show composed of paintings, drawings and small ceramic masks.  A self-taught artist born in Brooklyn, NY, Al now lives in the canyons of Santa Clarita where he relentlessly pursues painting and drawing in the small windows of time between full-time work, family dinner, drum practice and bed.  Considering how little time is available, Al is a confoundingly prolific artist.  He makes at least one painting per day!  And with that kind of output, that kind of scattershot image-making, come works of inventiveness, unrestrained imagination and high energy.  You can see his energy in the restless way he makes his marks, applies his paints, captures things out of thin air.  He dances with materials. This show, portraits of the bungled and the botched, are only a fractional cross-section in Al’s restless creative output. Without guile or pretense, Al uses his painting time to play games with form, explore novel textures, get weird.  We reap the benefits of his internal mining in images that are often surprising, off-beat, and full of charm.  A giant blue house smoking a cigarette, a pair of puppet-like kids boxing. Unvarnished, unguarded, and full of mischief, these portraits are funhouse versions of the faceless crowds and anonymous yahoos who people our world.

FUMBLED WORLD: The Invented People of Alfonse Aletto

Persons Unknown

"Embracing Diasporic Art: Portraits of Joan Agajanian Quinn" at ReflectSpace presents thirty-five original portraits of Quinn made by diasporic, immigrant, and culturally diverse artists. Selected from Quinn’s personal art collection and archive of over three hundred works, the exhibition highlights a distinct part of each artists’ unique story and how they capture Quinn’s vital and enduring presence.
 
The exhibition extends into the PassageWay, where Quinn’s own snapshots reveal her instinct for documenting intimate moments with legendary figures like Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. These spontaneous photographs unveil another facet of Quinn’s artistic orbit, capturing her ability to be both documentarian and active participant in significant artistic circles.
 
Through these portraits and photographs, viewers witness decades of artistic dialogue across communities and cultures. Quinn’s unwavering commitment to connecting artists, particularly those from immigrant and diasporic backgrounds, continues to echo in contemporary art.
 
"Embracing Diasporic Art" is curated by Ara & Anahid Oshagan and will be on view March 22 - May 23, 2025. For more information about the exhibition, including open hours, visit ReflectSpace.org.

PARKING: 3 Hours of free parking is available with library validation at the Marketplace parking structure across the street from the Harvard Street entrance of Glendale Central Library. Accessible parking is available on the east side of the building. View the ReflectSpace.org/Visit for public transit information.

Image: Huguette Caland, “Untitled” (detail),1991
