Although some Frieze Los Angeles–related events were held on Monday evening, things didn’t really get rolling until Tuesday, when some galleries began to unveil the week’s biggest shows.
The most anticipated preview of the week was held at Hauser & Wirth in downtown LA spaces. Among the offerings there is a solo show for the London-based painter George Rouy, the gallery’s youngest artist. Having joined Hauser & Wirth last May, Rouy is already having his second show with the gallery—which should be enough to raise questions about how an artist so young can sustain a fast-rising career in the long-term. Rouy clearly has talent: I didn’t mind his semi-abstract paintings, in which body parts seem to emerge from blurry backgrounds. But a lot of his work still feels unresolved. Perhaps his jump to a mega-gallery from his first dealer, the much smaller Hannah Barry gallery in London, came too soon, even though Barry continues to represent him.
I was more excited to see a restaged version of David Hammons’s seminal piece Concerto in Black and Blue, which has not been exhibited since its debut in 2002 at the Ace Gallery in New York. Hammons has always been one of the US’s most elusive artists, so it’s something of a coup that Hauser & Wirth even mounted this work.
At its core, the piece is rather simple: an unadorned gallery is left in darkness, and visitors are given small blue flashlights to navigate the space. The work debuted less than a year after 9/11, and the pitch black space was widely seen as a parallel for the darkness of the moment. This time around, a different tragedy, the LA wildfires, offers new resonance. Yet I didn’t think of the fires here, because what I really thought about was Hauser & Wirth’s space, with its airy courtyard, chicken coop, high-end farm-to-table restaurant, and glossy art bookstore. Although I didn’t see the original Ace presentation, a video by Linda Goode Bryant documenting the 2002 show is on view, offering a sense of the claustrophobia and grittiness felt back then. Hauser & Wirth’s space, by contrast, is sterile, cavernous, and not quite dark enough to make clear that this is a work about being ensconced in blackness. I imagine I’d have preferred the piece’s original iteration.
From Hauser & Wirth, I headed to one of the two sections of Hollywood replete with galleries now. As the gallery scene in Los Angeles has boomed, the so-called Melrose Hill neighborhood—a recently redeveloped corridor of galleries and restaurants around Melrose and Western Avenues in Hollywood—has continued to grow since last year’s edition of Frieze. The two new anchors of the neighborhood are the Brick (née LAXART), which has a show of new and ongoing work by Gregg Bordowitz, and David Zwirner, which now has three spaces here, two of which have shows on this week.
Last May, timed to its 30th anniversary, Zwirner opened a massive, Annabelle Selldorf–designed three-story building. On view here is a stellar exhibition of new paintings by Lisa Yuskavage, who hasn’t had an LA solo show in nearly 30 years. For this new body of work, Yuskavage has mined her archive in a way, placing figures from across her oeuvre in various imagined artist studios. During a press tour, Yuskavage noted that she’s fond of Easter eggs in film, and so past works (in various forms of completion) also show up here. There’s, of course, a long history of artists painting themselves in their studio, from Judith Leyster to Gustave Courbet to Philip Guston; Yuskavage’s starting point, interestingly enough, is Cubist painter Georges Braque. She wanted to reference all of these artists, then take it one step further—to “keep pushing it open,” as she put it.
In these paintings, there are models and their representations, canvases leaning against walls, reference images and artistic detritus strewn about. The pink-toned paintings are the most visually striking ones here, but the best piece here unsettles: Morning Classes in New Haven: In the Department of Color Theory (2024), in which two mostly nude women pose near a pile of canvases. One of those canvases is a cadmium monochrome, and it turns out that Yuskavage used this color as her work’s first layer. She thus had to paint her way out of this sickly cadmium. The challenges that Yuskavage sets up for herself are what make her paintings so fascinating.
Tau Lewis‘s David Zwirner show.
Photo Elon Schoenholz/Courtesy David Zwirner
In one of its smaller spaces, Zwirner also has a solo for rising sculptor Tau Lewis, a trial show of sorts as the artist is not officially represented by Zwirner. The five towering humanoid sculptures and the mixed-media installation on the floor have arrived straight from the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, where Lewis last year debuted these same works. At Zwirner, a dimly gallery gives these solemn figures an air of reverence, with the stitched fabric and found objects of The Last Transmission (2024) resembling an offering to someone departed. The works were made after Lewis experience a profound loss, something that is palpable in this moving show.
Work by Charlie Engelman at Chateau Shatto.
Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews
Nearby, at Chateau Shatto, LA-based artist Charlie Engelman is showing curving sculptures, primarily in high-density urethane foam, that ooze tenderness and fragility. This show found an analog in the “Plant Works” of Anders Ruhwald at Morán Morán, in which succulents and other plants and flowers emerge from rough-hewn ceramics, some of which rise six feet into the air. The organic shapes from the clay and the flora serve as charming complements to each other.
Later in the day, at Commonwealth and Council in Koreatown, I’d be reminded of these works when seeing the ear-like sculptures of Anna Sew Hoy, who last year cocurated “Scratching at the Moon” at the ICA LA. The body—what can break it, what it can endure—is a central concern of Sew Hoy’s practice. The gallery’s other solo, for Julian Abraham “Togar,” looks at how sound can be used by both government and religion as a form of propaganda and myth-making. The fascinating pairing of these two very disparate practices is exactly the kind of thing that makes Commonwealth and Council one of the city’s most important galleries.
Back in Melrose Hill, Southern Guild has two exhibitions, one for Manyaku Mashilo’s striking canvases and the other for the sleek designs of Cheick Diallo. Rele Gallery, which opened in LA in 2021 in West Hollywood, has a two-artist show for LA-based Shinique Smith and Lagos-based Marcellina Akpojotor. The gallery’s aim with its LA space is to show artists from the African diaspora in conversation with artists from the continent, a way to show the parallel universes in which these artists are working. Smith and Akpojotor both use fabrics sourced from their communities to different ends.
For its presentations this week, James Fuentes is showing the range of New York–based octogenarian artist Pat Lipsky, whom the gallery just began representing. At Frieze, Fuentes will have a selection of historic abstractions by the artist from the 1970s. And in its gallery on Melrose, the dealer is showing that Lipsky remains active, with a suite of acrylic gouache abstractions all dated to 2024. There’s something familiar about these wavy blocks of colors stacked onto each other, but the new works appear to be more subtler than her earlier work. I’m excited to see the historical pieces on Thursday at Frieze.
Work by Ariel Parkinson at House of Seiko.
Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews
Rounding out Melrose Hill are several pop-up shows by galleries from other cities; some may be looking for greater exposure here, while others may simply be testing out the waters. Across the street from the Yuskavage show, in a shed-like structure in a parking lot, San Francisco’s two-year-old gallery House of Seiko is staging an exhibition of the under-known Bay Area artist Ariel Parkinson. Working in tandem with the Berkeley Bunch and the Beat poets, Parkinson built up an oeuvre that was equal parts surreal and grotesque. Red Foxes (ca. 1994) is a menagerie of vulpine specters in red and purple hues, while George’s Wife (1980) is a semi-abstract landscape of swirling forms in which animalistic faces seem to emerge.
The roving gallery Mariposa has also set up shop on Western Avenue for the next two weeks, staging two exhibitions that seem to bleed into each other. The more high-profile of these is dedicated to the iconic queer artist and actor Peter Berlin and is curated by actor Russell Tovey. Berlin’s paintings and painted photographs, accompanied by clothing from the artist’s archive, depict gay male cruisers; they still pulse with desire 50 years on. Next to it are a suite of photographs by emerging New York–based photographer Ethan James Green, who has candidly shot his friends, including the model Hari Nef and the artist Martine Gutierrez.
New York’s Anton Kern Gallery and Glasgow’s The Modern Institute are also staging a pop-up dedicated to treacly rainbow and unicorn paintings of New York–based artist Andrew Sim. The less said about those works, the better.
Clearly, there’s no shortage of art worth seeing here, but none of it is likely to make anyone forget that Los Angeles is still reeling from the devastating wildfires that burned through acres upon acres earlier this year. Thankfully, there is one response to the blazes: the group exhibition “One Hundred Percent,” for which some 80 artists impacted by the wildfire are showing their work, with all the sales going supporting their rebuilding efforts. Organized by curator Aram Moshayedi, the exhibition shows the range of artistic expression in LA as the focus is on those impacted, from blue-chip artists like Kelly Akashi, Ruby Neri, and Kathryn Andrews to closely watched ones like Beatriz Cortes and Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio. It’s heartbreaking to see how many notable artists are assembled here, and it’s stirring to see them all come together.
