Eight Shows
Worth Your
Time Right Now
LA is in a strange productive stretch. Not the hype energy of Art Week, just steady work on the walls. Galleries are running deep into spring with shows that deserve more than a scroll. Here is what I have been looking at.
Factory Doomscroll
Two artists, one thesis: the internet is making us sick and we keep logging back in anyway. Wang paints memes at a scale that makes you face them differently. The Tiananmen tank image, rendered photorealistic and enormous, lands differently when you are standing in front of it instead of dragging past it on a feed. Youn builds motorized sculptures from repurposed wellness gadgets. Her piece No Pain No Gain puts wooden ducks on a functioning treadmill. The duck does not get anywhere. That is the point.
Go before it closes.
Horizons
JR stays in California for this one. The Kikito portrait along the border wall in Tecate. The wheat paste dropped into the Tehachapi prison yard, photographed from above with inmates posing in the frame. The Wrinkles of the City facades on LA buildings. All of it work that has to exist in the physical world to function. You cannot fully experience it through a screen, which is why it is worth seeing the documentation gathered in one room.
sister dreamer
This one is not in a gallery. LAND placed Halsey's installation at 76th Street and Western Avenue in South Central, where she is from. Hathoric columns, sphinxes, hieroglyphs rebuilt from South Central iconography. A courtyard designed for the neighborhood, not for art visitors. Halsey runs free programming here through her nonprofit Summaeverythang Community Center.
Go see it in context. Open Wednesday through Sunday, sunrise to sunset.
Jonas Wood: Tennis Courts
Wood's tenth show with Gagosian and his first in LA. He has been painting tennis courts since 2011 and this new group goes further. The perspective is locked behind the baseline. No players, no officials. Just the court itself absorbing pattern, light, and the domestic objects Wood folds into the composition. Three canvases pull in Lichtenstein prints directly: Crying Girl, Nude with Blue Hair, Girl.
A quiet obsession made visible. 456 North Camden Drive.
Maison Margiela SS26: Joy
Went to the screening. The brand brought in Max Richter and Orchestre a l'Ecole, a French program that puts professional musicians into public school classrooms. The film they made together is called Joy. It does not feel like an ad. It feels like something Richter would have made anyway.
The collaboration is real and you can hear it.
Hopes and Fears
Unrau paints in every register at once. Renaissance, folk, surrealism, something closer to a dream that does not have a genre yet. He uses diffusion models as a compositional starting point and then paints over that structure by hand. The results are genuinely strange in a way that earns the word. Skazki lands particularly well. There is a canvas here that pulls from Bruegel and arrives somewhere Bruegel could not have imagined.
Worth the time.
Resisting Death: Glitches and Ornaments
Curated by Oriane Durand. All three artists are gone. The show gathers work from Hohn, Mellor, and Pelassy into a conversation about decoration as survival strategy, ornament as resistance, the body as something that glitches. Castle is a smaller space and the intimacy works for this material.
Give it a visit.
Portals
Gray layers formal European gardens and Renaissance interiors against West African landscape and material. The assemblages are not about contrast for contrast's sake. They are about the records colonialism left and what exists alongside them. Paradox of Liberty and Kind of Blue in a Silent Way are the two to stand in front of longest. Past Imperfect closes the loop on the conversation the whole show is having.
He has a LACMA commission opening in April. This show will still be up. Start here.
That is what is on right now. More soon.
Misha