Carol Bove @ Gagosian, Beverly Hills - "Nights of Cabiria" Exhibition of new sculptures

Carol Bove

Nights of Cabiria

Gagosian, Beverly Hills

September 25 – November 1, 2025 

Carol Bove

Nights of Cabiria, 2025, installation view

© Carol Bove Studio LLC

Photo: Maris Hutchinson

Courtesy Gagosian

Carol Bove

Idiopathic Abstraction, 2020-25

Found steel, stainless steel and urethane paint

84 13/16 x 100 1/2 x 89 5/8 inches (215.4 x 255.2 x 227.6 cm)

© Carol Bove Studio LLC

Photo: Maris Hutchinson

Courtesy Gagosian

Carol Bove

Nights of Cabiria, 2025, installation view

© Carol Bove Studio LLC

Photo: Maris Hutchinson

Courtesy Gagosian

Gagosian presents Nights of Cabiria, an exhibition of new sculptures by Carol Bove. This is the artist’s first exhibition at the gallery in Beverly Hills.

In Nights of Cabiria, Carol Bove reflects on the industrial heritage of Los Angeles as a Cold War–era center for precision aerospace and weapons manufacturing, along with subcultural expressions of that focus such as surfboard production, with its devotion to perfect surface finish. The exhibition design responds to the unique architectural features of the Beverly Hills gallery and makes use of reclaimed structural scaffolding components called “soldier beams.” This scaffolding, intended for applications in civil engineering, provides the components for an architectural folly that supports two of the sculptures and partially reconfigures the gallery space.

Also dividing the gallery’s interior are a fence-like suspended metal lattice and two fabric scrims. One of these, made from diaphanous chiffon, has been screenprinted with an image of the lattice at the same scale. The other is made from the silkier material known as charmeuse, and is printed with a still from Italian silent film Cabiria (1914). Directed by Giovanni Pastrone, shot in Turin, and set during the Second Punic War of 218 to 202 BCE, the classical epic is credited with various innovations including the first extensive use of a moving camera.

Carol Bove

Similar Salamander, 2025

Nickel-plated steel structural scaffolding and stainless steel

76 3/4 x 44 1/4 x 38 3/4 inches (194.9 x 112.4 x 98.4 cm)

© Carol Bove Studio LLC

Photo: Maris Hutchinson

Courtesy Gagosian

Carol Bove

Tied Light, 2025

Steel structural scaffolding, stainless steel and fluoropolymer coating

102 1/8 x 28 1/8 x 27 1/8 inches (259.4 x 71.4 x 68.9 cm)

© Carol Bove Studio LLC

Photo: Maris Hutchinson

Courtesy Gagosian

Carol Bove

Priestcraft, 2025

Steel structural scaffolding, stainless steel and urethane paint

100 3/4 x 24 1/2 x 20 1/4 inches (255.9 x 62.2 x 51.4 cm)

© Carol Bove Studio LLC

Photo: Maris Hutchinson

Courtesy Gagosian

Several of Bove’s new works also integrate scaffolding into their formal designs, some retaining the beams’ raw surfaces. Priestcraft (2025), for example, incorporates a crumpled steel tube that has been bent into a loop, painted a vibrant orange, and perched atop a stand made from the weathered girders. Other works combine square tubing with mirror-polished steel disks, recalling Hardware Romance (2021), Bove’s sculpture that was on view in 2023–24 at Gagosian’s Park & 75 gallery in New York, their varied surface treatments prompting viewers to question assumptions about the “inherent” qualities of the material world.

GAGOSIAN, BERVERLY HILLS

456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90210 

gagosian.com

Akinsanya Kambon @ Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills

Akinsanya Kambon

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills 

April 17 – May 31, 2025

Marc Selwyn Fine Art presents Akinsanya Kambon, the gallery’s first exhibition of work by the artist.

Akinsanya Kambon, born Mark Teemer in Sacramento, California, is a former Marine, Black Panther, and art professor who lives and works in Long Beach. Kambon served in Vietnam as a Marine infantryman and combat illustrator. Upon returning to the U.S., he joined the Sacramento Chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and served as its Lieutenant of Culture. Kambon’s lifetime of service and artistic practice document suppressed histories and express the beauty of African heritage through drawing, painting, and sculpture. In 2023, Kambon won the prestigious Mohn Award given by the Hammer Museum for his participation in “Made in LA 2023: Acts of Living”. His life, work, and mission are also the subject of a documentary film “The Hero Avenges” to be released this year. Akinsanya Kambon will be the subject of an upcoming one-person exhibition at the Sculpture Center, New York, in May of 2026.

Akinsanya Kambon’s rich body of work is influenced by his Pan-Africanist beliefs, developed through his extensive travels through Africa beginning in 1974. Kambon explains, “I’ve looked at African spirituality and I like to incorporate what I’ve learned into my own work. My biggest influences have been my travels to Africa.” The show will include ceramic vessels, figures, and wall plaques that combine American historical narratives with African sculptural traditions.

To create his ceramics, Akinsanya Kambon uses a Western version of the Japanese Raku firing technique which adds a metallic luster to his glazed surfaces. This method of firing, which traps smoke in an enclosed space to interact with the glaze, produces an uncontrollable transformation which Kambon considers a spiritually guided aspect of this practice. He conducts kiln firings with a ceremonial approach, infusing life into figures that often embody African deities, spirits, or figures from American or religious history. His work, deeply rooted in narrative tradition and shaped by his personal experiences, celebrates themes of resilience through adversity, cultural pride, and his talent as a storyteller.

In ‘Black Butterfly,’ 2024, for example, Akinsanya Kambon depicts the figure of the Queen Mother butterfly of the Bobo people, who was sent by God to bring rain. In 'The Edler' Kambon portrays a strong warrior with a turtle on his head, a symbol of longevity and wisdom. Other figures are incorporated into vases and vessels, as in ‘Kemetic Gate Keepers’, 2015, where protectors of the spirit world are represented in the vessel’s handles and base.  ‘The Ancestors,’ 2015, tells the story of the first humans on earth alongside the ‘primordial animals’ that preceded us. 

Solo exhibitions include: Jack Shainman Gallery, New York (2022); Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, (2020); Pan African Art Gallery & Studio, Long Beach, California (1991); and the Oak Park School of Afro-American Thought, Sacramento City College (1969). Recent group exhibitions include those at Rowan University Art Gallery and Museum, Glassboro, NJ, (2025); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Oakland Museum of California (2016) and Joyce Gordon Gallery, Oakland (2016). He is the recipient of awards from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (2022); City of Long Beach (1996, 1994); County of Los Angeles (1994); and California Wellness Foundation, Violence Prevention Initiative (1993).

MARC SELWYN FINE ART

9953 South Santa Monica Boulevard, Beverly Hills, CA 90212

www.marcselwynfineart.com

Vaginal Davis Exhibition @ Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Berverly Hills - Macha Family Romance

Vaginal Davis 

Macha Family Romance 

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Berverly Hills 

April 16 – May 27, 2023 

VAGINAL DAVIS

The Test of Christy Himmelfart, April Fool's Day, 2019

© Viginal Davis, courtesy of Marc Selwyn Fine Art

“I was always too gay for the punks and too punk for the gays.” 

Marc Selwyn Fine Art presents Macha Family Romance, an exhibition of paintings on paper by VAGINAL DAVIS executed between 2017-2019.  

 

Vaginal Davis got her start in the late 1970s in the Los Angeles queer and punk club scenes with “multiracial, maxi-gendered” performances. Davis’ often humorous yet socially critical work is considered groundbreaking in the history of queer culture in nearly every medium: music, performance, video, installation, and visual art. 

The works on paper in Macha Family Romance are a concoction of beauty creams, tonics, oils, and varnishes, materials conventionally reserved for the body. Davis refers to them as ‘make-up paintings’ tying them to a ritual of transformation. Language related to witchcraft (elixirs, potions, magic) has often been used to describe the work, referencing histories of women outside the margins. Appropriately for an artist well-versed in performance, her choice of materials underscores the physical and theatrical aspects of creating the object. Davis layers her media in expressive marks over various found substrates—magazine pages, exhibition invitations, university stationery. The resulting painterly language of turbulent strokes, gestural lines, and smudgy wisps form complex portraits of oft-overlooked historical figures, always with an eye to feminist and queer narratives. As her godson artist Channing Hansen commented, “With her trusty make-up bag of tricks and her mystical medicinal potions, Ms. Davis performs acts of pure alchemy. Her auratic portraits cast a spell on the beholder.”  

 

Vaginal Davis' work is profoundly influenced by the architectural environments of her formative years, including the Watts Towers and the utopian Ramona Gardens public housing project, as she pays homage to the lives and histories of the underrepresented and underrecognized. Drawing upon a similar impulse to make visible the work of forgotten actors, performers, artists, and writers of the past, Vaginal Davis’ tender portraits revive their names in our consciousness. Titled in reference to dancers, sapphic love scenes, and films of the 1920s and 30s, these paintings evidence her interest in and extensive knowledge of film, literature, and image making histories. 

 

VAGINAL DAVIS (born in Los Angeles) lives and works in Berlin. Davis’ work has been included in exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago (2020), IL; the New Museum (2017), 80WSE (2016), Cooper Union (2015), Participant Inc. (2012, 2010), all in New York; National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest, Romania (2009); Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka, Croatia (2009); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2008); and Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2006), among many others. She has performed at the New Museum, New York, NY (2017); documenta 14, Kassel, Germany (2017); Lafayette Anticipations, Archives nationales, Paris (2017); Arsenal Institut für Film und Videokunst, Berlin (2017); GenderFest Athens, Greece (2017); Creative Time Summit, Washington, D.C. (2016); Kunstverein Hannover, Germany (2016); Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario (2015); Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, Scotland (2015); New York University, NY (2014); School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois (2013, 2020); Participant Inc., New York,  NY (2012); Southbank Centre, London, UK (2012); The Getty Center as part of Pacific Standard Time, Los Angeles, CA (2012); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2011); and Tate Modern, London (2011), among others. 

MARC SELWYN FINE ART

9953 South Santa Monica Boulevard, Beverly Hills, CA 90212

www.marcselwynfineart.com

Hannah Wilke @ Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Berverly Hills - Flowers 1973 - 1991

Hannah Wilke

Flowers 1973 - 1991

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Berverly Hills

January 28 – March 25, 2023

HANNAH WILKE

Untitled, n.d.

Watercolor on paper, 12 x 9 inches

© The Estate of Hannah Wilke, courtesy of Marc Selwyn Fine Art

Marc Selwyn Fine Art presents Flowers 1973-1991, an exhibition of drawings by the late American artist Hannah Wilke (1940–1993). This exhibition will focus on the flower image and includes works in watercolor and sepia ink on paper. It will also include a grouping of three of Wilke’s abstract vaginal forms in ceramic from the 1970’s, highlighting the relationship between her works on paper and her threedimensional sculpture. A pioneering figure in feminist art, Hannah Wilke explored issues of beauty, gender, and Western cultural convention with a diverse approach that included photography, performance, video, sculpture, and drawing. The first woman of her generation to make vaginal art, Hannah Wilke asserted ownership over her own body and was a key figure in the feminist art movement of the 1960’s and 70’s.

Hannah Wilke’s multi-disciplinary practice melded Post-Minimalism, second wave feminism and Abstract Expressionism, making her one of the most influential yet under recognized artists of the late 20th century. Wilke’s works on paper are often in dialogue with her sculpture. Rarely exhibited before her death in 1993, drawings were an integral part of her practice beginning in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. While Wilke’s undulating lines often generate highly abstracted compositions that relate to her sculpture, this exhibition will focus on a series of recognizable floral images which are closely linked to her threedimensional organic forms.

Hannah Wilke’s sketches of flowers embody a delicate and ambiguous beauty and come from the same energy exemplified in her performances. As Nancy Princenthal wrote in the artist’s monograph (Hannah Wilke, 2010, Prestel) “Her observations were acute, bringing to life every particularity of texture and form, blooming health and decay without sacrifice to the delicacy for which flowers are treasured.” Wilke continued to produce flower drawings until her death, with some of the final examples done on hospital pillowcases.

HANNAH WILKE (b. New York, NY, 1940; d. Houston, TX, 1993) trained at Stella Elkins Tyler School of Fine Art, Temple University, Philadelphia. Key solo museum exhibitions during her life included Hannah Wilke: Scarification Photographs and Videotapes, Fine Arts Gallery, University of California, Irvine, (1976); and Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective, University of Missouri (1989). Recent solo presentations of her work include Hannah Wilke: Art for Life’s Sake, Pulitzer Arts Foundation (2022), Hannah Wilke: Gestures, Neuberger Museum of Art, New York (2008) and a solo gallery at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011). Hannah Wilke has also been included in significant group exhibitions, including: Eva Hesse and Hannah Wilke: Erotic Abstraction, Acquavella Galleries, New York (2021), Performing for the Camera, Tate Modern, London (2016); Human Nature, LACMA, Los Angeles, CA (2012); Naked Before the Camera, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2012); The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today, MoMA, New York, NY (2010); elles@centrepompidou, Centre Pompidou, Paris, (2009-10): WACK!, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007); and Sexual Politics, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 1996. Her work is featured in major museum and foundation collections including Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; LA County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Princeton University Art Museum; and Coleccion Jumex, Mexico City.

MARC SELWYN FINE ART

9953 South Santa Monica Boulevard, Beverly Hills, CA 90212

www.marcselwynfineart.com

Mel Bochner @ Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills

Mel Bochner 

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills 

March 30 - May 18, 2019

Marc Selwyn Fine Art presents an exhibition of new works by MEL BOCHNER featuring his iconic Blah Blah Blah paintings and a series of large scale works on paper with the phrase Ha Ha Ha. This exhibition marks the first show of both series by the artist in Los Angeles.

One of the preeminent figures in the history of conceptual art, Mel Bochner has manipulated verbal, mathematical and geometric systems as the content of his work since the mid-1960’s. In his “Thesaurus Paintings,” which debuted at the Whitney Biennial in 2004, Mel Bochner began to focus his conceptual experiments on the use and abuse of language. The repeating Blah Blah Blah text has been described by the artist as “an expulsion of breath which can mean anything, everything or nothing.” It could also be thought of as a digital “zero” in a binary system. On a broader level, Mel Bochner’s choice of text is a reflection of the current state of communication and political discourse in contemporary America.

The six richly painted oil on velvet works in the exhibition vibrate with bright, exuberant hues as the viewer’s mind goes back and forth between reading the text and experiencing formal compositions of color and shape. The use of velvet in these conceptual works is ironic, defying our preconceived notions about a medium often considered kitsch or commercial.

In the small gallery, Mel Bochner’s Ha Ha Ha paintings on paper are similarly devoid of content yet embody the dark side of humor. The white repeating Ha text is set against midnight blues and blacks, the result of layers upon layers of UV screenprint. It is unclear whether the viewer is laughing or an unknown person is laughing at the viewer.

MEL BOCHNER (born 1940) received his BFA from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1962 and received an honorary doctor of fine arts in 2005. He has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe and his work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. He currently lives in New York City and is a professor at Yale University.

MARC SELWYN FINE ART

9953 South Santa Monica Boulevard, Beverly Hills, CA 902012

www.marcselwynfineart.com

Urs Fischer: Images @ Gagosian, Beverly Hills

Urs Fischer: Images
Gagosian, Beverly Hills
January 11 – February 9, 2019

Urs Fischer, 2 Socks, 2018

Aluminium composite panel, aluminium honeycomb, two-component adhesive, primer, gesso, and solvent-based screen printing ink, 227.3 x 171.5 cm

© Urs Fischer, Courtesy Gagosian

Art is an after-reflection.
—Urs Fischer

Gagosian presents Images, an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Urs Fischer.

In Urs Fischer’s work, images emerge from an odd liminal space between the real and the imagined, between what does, and could, exist. Over the past year, he has been creating paintings digitally, inventing things, rooms, and spaces using color and light. On a screen, as opposed to paper or canvas, Fischer is able to paint with light itself—moving illuminated pixels around, juxtaposing clean lines and gradients, and reflecting on the subtle atmospheric changes across day and night, summer and winter, Los Angeles and New York.

Silkscreened onto aluminum panels, the paintings in this exhibition—vertical compositions broken up into multiple rectangular passages—take on the scale of modern abstraction, yet they all describe imaginary interior and exterior worlds. Windows appear often: one glows behind a gauzy white curtain, looking onto swaying palm trees; another reflects a sunrise or sunset, with a still life on a table barely visible through fingerprints on the glass; and another frames a building across the street, where nine more windows reveal smeared and fragmented California views. In other paintings, Urs Fischer imagines canvases hanging on walls, hit with swathes and squares of light pouring in from an unseen source. The fictional paintings and sculptures depict animals, food, city streets, or messy brushstrokes, but they—like the light—only exist within Urs Fischer’s constructed environments; they need not adhere to any history, law, or logic.

Urs Fischer presents characters and drawings that seem capable of disappearing at any moment. In one painting, a small orange bird sits on a branch, floating in a dark gray sky. Though its legs are in sharp focus, its body becomes a vaporous orb, glowing within the surrounding clouds. And in an uncanny sculptural ecosystem below, two motorized snails slowly wander through the gallery, leaving trails of slime in their wake. These gleaming lines, which evaporate over time, wind across the floor, uniting the other sculptures—a smoking volcano, a snowman, a palm tree—within a swirling, ephemeral landscape. Looming over the scene, the surrounding paintings form vivid, even cinematic, backdrops: a montage of disparate settings for a small, peculiar world.

URS FISCHER was born in Zurich in 1973 and lives and works in New York. Collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels; FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Marseille, France; Fondation Carmignac, Paris; Kunstmuseum Basel; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; and Museo d’arte della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano, Switzerland. Recent exhibitions include Marguerite de Ponty, New Museum, New York (2009–2010); 54th Biennale di Venezia (2011); Skinny Sunrise, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2012); Madame Fisscher, Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2012); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2013); YES, DESTE Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra, Greece (2013); Small Axe, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2013); Mon cher..., Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, Arles, France (2016); and The Public & the Private, Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (2017).

GAGOSIAN
456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90210
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