Nicasio Fernandez @ Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco - "Light Whispers" Exhibition

Nicasio Fernandez: Light Whispers

Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco

August 21 – October 16, 2025

Berggruen Gallery presents Light Whispers, an exhibition of new work by New York artist NICASIO FERNANDEZ. This marks the gallery’s first solo presentation with Nicasio Fernandez. 

In Light Whispers, Nicasio Fernandez’s paintings convey a quiet intensity within moody, introspective settings, where his figures are steeped in a spectrum of emotions ranging from uncertainty and tension to concern and doubt. Drawing on film noir motifs—low-key light, deep shadows, and psychological intensity—Nicasio Fernandez places otherworldly figures in eerie, dramatic atmospheres that leave the viewer both unsettled and curious. Though traces of the domestic linger, the paintings deliberately omit any indicators of place, cultivating an enigmatic sense of space.  

Rather than referencing specific film stills, Fernandez’s works are instead constructed around a captivating moment, lingering feeling, or a memory Nicasio Fernandez has held onto and reshaped into his own vision. All but one painting conceal their cinematic references. "Dark Corner", titled after the 1954 film, depicts a forward-leaning figure in motion, the face and long brown overcoat partially backlit by an ambiguous source just outside the frame. The figure moves swiftly through a mysterious nightscape—perhaps in pursuit of something—seems to pause in hesitation, as if aware of a lurking presence.

While Nicasio Fernandez is known for his vibrant chromatic choices, subtle dark humor, and precise handling of materials—demonstrating an ability to be loud and provocative—this body of work marks a decisive shift toward restraint and alteration. His bold palette has been pared down and placed within a uniform tonal temperature. Scratchy brushwork reveals parts of the underpainting, while sharp, crisp edges begin to dissolve. The use of light nods not only to cinema but also to the art historical references such as Rembrandt’s portraiture and the soft glow of Vuillard’s domestic interiors. Fernandez’s purposeful obscuring of elements of the paintings in deeper shadows acts as a framing device to guide the viewer’s eye across the canvas.

Nicasio Fernandez refers to these small paintings as whispers; much like the transfer of sound, these works require close proximity to spark an exchange—inviting the viewer to step into the scene in order to fully dissect and absorb its information. Like considered sequences from cinema, the paintings invite open dialogue and allow space for interpretation. Through this quietness, Fernandez’s paintings offer a light whisper to the viewer, gently luring them into a mysterious, contemplative state.

NICASIO FERNANDEZ (b. 1993, Yonkers, NY) received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2015. Most recently, his work has been exhibited at Harper’s, Los Angeles, New York, and East Hampton (2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2018); Half Gallery, New York (2023, 2022); Alexander Berggruen, New York (2023, 2022); Ross + Kramer, New York and East Hampton (2022, 2021, and 2020); Over the Influence, Hong Kong and Los Angeles (2020, 2019). Fernandez’s work is included in the collections of the Hall Art Foundation, North Adams, MA; and The Bunker, Palm Beach, FL. His work has appeared in Artnet, At Large, and New American Paintings, among other publications. Nicasio Fernandez lives and works in upstate New York.

BERGGRUEN GALLERY

10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

www.berggruen.com

Matt Kleberg @ Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco - "Bless Babel" Exhibition

Matt Kleberg: Bless Babel

Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco

August 21 – October 16, 2025

Berggruen Gallery presents Bless Babel, an exhibition of new work by San Antonio-based artist Matt Kleberg. This exhibition will mark the gallery’s second solo exhibition with Matt Kleberg.

In Bless Babel, each painting builds around a singular central niche, suggesting the absence of a subject. Confronted with this vacancy, the viewer finds themselves at the center of Kleberg’s geometric abstractions. Influenced by architectural and ritualistic spaces, the works in Bless Babel investigate the tropes through which conception is framed by institutional or personal belief. Kleberg’s paintings are not interested in objective truth, but rather in how belief transforms our relationship to space and objects. These paintings are not portals, unless you believe they are. They are not windows, unless you believe they are. 

This exhibition derives its title from Donald Barthelme’s 1987 essay Not Knowing, in which the writer and critic considers uncertainty, improvisation, and discovery as fundamental to the creative act. Barthelme speaks of commentary, elaboration, exegesis, and contradiction as necessary modes of engagement between a piece of art and the earlier works of previous makers that inform it. Babel and the scattering of languages offer an example of how different approaches to the same concept are inherent to human expression. Kleberg’s new paintings embrace the constraints of particular shapes borrowed from Tramp Art frames and Italian Renaissance devotional objects, to explore how different resolutions can come out of multiple iterations of the same motifs.

Matt Kleberg’s paintings contradict themselves, oscillating between ecstasy and oblivion, exuberance and tranquility. Hues of pink, terracotta, and bright blue radiate amongst moody browns, maroon, and sap green. Scumbled surfaces complicate illusionistic shadows; interior space collapses into itself as one moves closer. Shimmering like television static or speckled concrete, colors that appear solid break apart upon inspection. Chromatic undertones shift in their nature–perhaps waiting to coalesce. Some paintings tower, their stripes and bands undulating, monumental and inviting, formal yet playful. Indebted as much to American folk art traditions as to Duccio and the Sienese School, Kleberg’s paintings pay homage—yet with their vacancies and their tensions, the drama is of their own conjuring. A frame within a frame within a frame. The pleasure is in the not-knowing. 

MATT KLEBERG was born in 1985 in Kingsville, Texas. He received his BA from the University of Virginia in 2008 and his MFA from the Pratt Institute in 2015. Coverage of his work can be found in various publications, including The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Artsy, Vice, Maake Magazine, ArtDaily, Juxtapoz Magazine, Square Cylinder, and Hyperallergic. His work is featured in multiple private and public collections, including the Williams College Museum of Art, the AD&A Museum of the University of California Santa Barbara, the Old Jail Art Center, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the National Gallery of Art. Matt Kleberg currently lives and works in San Antonio, TX.  

BERGGRUEN GALLERY

10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

www.berggruen.com

Elmgreen & Dragset @ Pace Gallery, Los Angeles - "The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome" Exhibition

Elmgreen & Dragset

The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome

Pace Gallery, Los Angeles

September 13 – October 25, 2025

Pace presents The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, Elmgreen & Dragset’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles—and their fourth with the gallery. This immersive two-part presentation will occupy the main exhibition space and the adjacent south gallery, exploring themes of scale, perception, and psychological distortion through enactments of doubling and resizing. The show follows Elmgreen & Dragset’s recent solo presentations at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Amorepacific Museum of Art in Seoul, and it coincides with the artists’ thirtieth anniversary of working as a duo and the twentieth anniversary of their famed "Prada Marfa" installation, which was unveiled in Texas in 2005.

Renowned for their subversive sculptural interventions, Berlin-based artists Elmgreen & Dragset often examine questions of identity and belonging in their collaborative practice, and they are particularly interested in radical recontextualizations of objects and new modes of representation in sculpture and large-scale installation.

In The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, the artists explore how scale influences our understanding of reality. For this presentation, the duo plays with the physical features of Pace’s Los Angeles gallery, using the architectural division of the gallery as a framework for doubling and resizing. Each artwork is presented in full scale in the main gallery, while exact half-size versions are shown in the adjoining space, which the artists have rescaled into a half-size replica of the main space. This spatial reduplication and resizing is inspired by the neurological condition called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, or Dysmetropsia, in which shifts in perception, often triggered by fatigue, alter one’s experiences of distance and scale.

The first work that visitors will encounter in the exhibition is a hyper realistic sculpture of a female gallery assistant slumped over the reception desk, seemingly asleep. The surreal presentation that follows in the exhibition spaces, where objects appear out of scale, could be a vision or dream playing out in her mind, in which visitors are the protagonists.

The main gallery space will feature new sculptural works and wall pieces—works from the duo’s Sky Target series—that probe the boundaries of the real and the reflected, the seen and the sensed. In their circular Sky Target paintings, fragments of clouds drifting across blue skies are rendered on mirror polished stainless steel disks. The skies are partially obscured by reflective surfaces, allowing viewers to glimpse themselves within illusory “heavens.” Each Sky Target is named after a specific location that the artists have visited. Two circular wall works, which the artists refer to as “stripe paintings,” will also be on view. In these works, vertical bands revealing airplanes and their contrails in the sky alternate with equally sized bands of mirrored strips, creating a rhythm of image and reflection. The tension between transparency and opacity, and representation and self-awareness, is heightened by the viewer’s shifting position within the space.

Two figurative sculptures carved in marble will be presented on the floor of both the main and adjacent galleries. One of these works depicts two young men, both wearing VR goggles, embracing—physically close but mentally elsewhere. The other shows a young man seated with headphones, absorbed in his own auditory reality. These figures embody the contemporary condition of disconnection, amplified by digital mediation. The immateriality of the digital experiences represented in both works is contrasted with their medium, marble, a historically significant and physically durable material that is deeply rooted in the tradition of sculpture.

The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome invites visitors into a mise en abyme of visual and spatial contradictions. While much of our reality has been compressed into the format of an iPhone screen, Elmgreen & Dragset continue their investigations into how physical environments shape our sense of self and how bodily presence still plays an important role in the way we interact with our surroundings.

ARTIST DUO ELMGREEN & DRAGSET

Elmgreen & Dragset (Michael Elmgreen, b. 1961, Copenhagen, Denmark; Ingar Dragset, b. 1969, Trondheim, Norway) pursue questions of identity and belonging and investigate social, cultural, and political structures in their artistic practice. They are interested in the discourse that can ensue when objects are radically re-contextualized and traditional modes for the representation of art are altered. Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset are based in Berlin and have worked together as an artist duo since 1995. They have presented numerous solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide including Kunsthalle Zürich (2001); Tate Modern, London (2004); Serpentine Gallery, London (2006); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain (2009); ZKM - Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany (2010); Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2011); Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2013–14); Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2016); Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel (2016); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2018–19); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas (2019–2020); Fondazione Prada, Milan (2022); and Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2023–24). In 2009, they represented both the Nordic and the Danish Pavilions at the 53rd Venice Biennale. They are renowned for large-scale public installations including Short Cut (2003), an installation comprising a Fiat Uno and a camper trailer, which appear to emerge from the ground; Prada Marfa (2005), a full-scale replica of a Prada boutique installed along U.S. Route 90 in Valentine, Texas; and Van Gogh’s Ear (2016), a gigantic vertical swimming pool placed in front of Rockefeller Center in New York City.

Their work is held in public collections worldwide, including ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishøj, Denmark; Art Production Fund, New York; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Hamburger Bahnhof, Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin; Kistefos Museet, Jevnaker, Norway; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others.

PACE LOS ANGELES

1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles

www.pacegallery.com

Leonor Antunes @ Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles - "discrepancies with E.S. (extended)" + "discrepancies with E.S. (in company)" @ Neutra VDL Studio and Residences, Los Angeles

Leonor Antunes

discrepancies with E.S. (extended)

Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles

6 September – 18 October 2025

Leonor Antunes 

I stand like a mirror before you (2015) 

Plexiglass, brass plates, brass screws

© Leonor Antunes, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery

Marian Goodman Gallery presents discrepancies with E.S. (extended), an exhibition of new works by LEONOR ANTUNES. This exhibition marks Antunes’s second solo show with the gallery. Notably, discrepancies with E.S. (extended) was developed in conjunction with discrepancies with E.S. (in company), a complementary and off-site exhibition curated by Douglas Fogle at the Neutra VDL Studio and Residences in Los Angeles.

Leonor Antunes takes an immersive approach to her subjects, transposing historical forms and precise measures based on deep archival research on artists and modernist histories—often of female protagonists, in order to create sculptures and site-specific interventions. Her work draws on a wide range of sources, lexicons and materials – whether drawing in space with lines and form, exploring the choreographies of volume and movement, the potential of craft or the grid, or the gravity and torsion of objects in space. In celebration of admired and often marginalized stories of people and of time, Antunes embraces participation—fusing her own work with lost histories as a way to reimagine the present and honor the past.

Here, Antunes’s work explores the legacy of an influential twentieth-century female pioneer whose innovations contributed significantly to modernist art, design, and architecture, but were overlooked because these fields have historically been male-dominated. Leonor Antunes studied Elizabeth (née Scheu) Close (1912-2011), a modern architect who was born in Vienna and raised in a home designed by Adolf Loos, where her family hosted prominent artists, architects and designers, including members of the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop) and family friend Richard Neutra. Close went on to receive her graduate degree in architecture at MIT and spent the majority of her career designing hundreds of homes and public buildings in Minneapolis while serving as head architect to the University of Minnesota. Antunes was drawn to Close’s relationship to Viennese modernism as well as her pragmatic, unadorned approach to design, and found an affinity to her frequent use of locally sourced, natural materials.

Presented throughout the Main Gallery, the works in this exhibition embrace applied arts and traditional craft practices from around the world that highlight natural materials such as rope, leather, and glass. The back wall of the gallery showcases an 80-foot-long span of two separate bodies of work made from brass and beads. These works are based on historical textile and loom-based patterns that the artist sourced from the archives of the Wiener Werkstätte, Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna (MAK), and the Vienna School for Arts and Crafts. Antunes uses these as templates to determine the structure of her works, which at once correspond directly to their original source and yet, when hung vertically with the pull of gravity turning the sculpture into a different shape each time it is installed, become autonomous, fluctuating forms unto themselves.

Creating a dialogue with the architecture of the space, a commanding installation of ropes, coupled with hanging works in leather, adjoin the space between the floor and rafters. The use of rope, initially inspired by a staircase of architect Ernö Goldfinger, becomes an expanded “screen” in this intervention that determines how the viewer navigates and views the space. A surrounding series of floor lamps configured to the various heights of the staff at the gallery, subsequently merging into abstract figures, are extrapolated from a table lamp design originally produced by the Wiener Werkstätte. Through a proposition that reimagines rational, modern design into sculpture, Antunes’s practice embeds the history of a recovered past with radical social and political determinations into objects of both study and poetry in the new century.

The complementary exhibition, discrepancies with E.S. (in company), will open at the Neutra VDL Studio and Residences on Friday, 5 September from 5-7pm and will remain on view through 13 December 2025. A special performance by Franco-American composer and clarinetist Carol Robinson, titled Music for Changing Light, featuring her own music as well as OCCAM III by Éliane Radigue, will be presented on opening night at 6pm. Please note that the Neutra VDL is open to the public on Saturdays from 11 am -3 pm and is located at 2300 Silver Lake Blvd in Los Angeles. 

LEONOR ANTUNES was born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1972, and currently lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Portugal (2025); Fruitmarket, Scotland (2023); Serralves Foundation, Portugal (2022); MUDAM, Luxembourg (2020); MASP, São Paulo Museum of Art, Brazil (2019); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2018); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2018); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2017); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California (2016); CAPC Bordeaux, France (2015); New Museum, New York, NY (2015); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2013); and the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain, (2011). Antunes represented the Portuguese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019 and has participated in the 58th and 57th Venice Biennale (2019 and 2017); the 12th Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2015); and the 8th Berlin Biennale (2014).

MARIAN GOODMAN LOS ANGELES

1120 Seward St, Los Angeles, CA 90038

www.mariangoodman.com

NEUTRA VDL STUDIO & RESIDENCES

2300 Silver Lake Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90039

neutra-vdl.org

"Surface Streets" Group Exhibition Curated by Russell Ferguson @ Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles

Surface Streets

Curated by Russell Ferguson

Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles

6 September – 18 October 2025

Wilhelm Sasnal 

Berkeley Street, 2024 

Oil on canvas

© Wilhelm Sasnal, courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery

Marian Goodman Gallery presents Surface Streets, curated by Russell Ferguson, a group exhibition of recent paintings made in Los Angeles. The title of the exhibition, a term that contextually denotes Los Angeles streets (but not freeways), is intended to evoke both the specificity of the local environment and the tactility that is integral to painting. The intergenerational group of artists chosen by Ferguson for this exhibition traces a variety of aesthetics, strategies, and traditions, yet at the same time pays close attention to the physicality of the painted surface which unites them. While many works in Surface Streets depict familiar scenes of everyday urban life, others reach beyond, to a movie set, to an ancient fossil, or even into spaces of fiction and fantasy. 

Surface Streets includes works by Hye-Shin Chun, Kirsten Everberg, Owen Fu, Anna Glantz, Robert Gunderman, James Iveson, Becky Kolsrud, Tidawhitney Lek, Manuel López, Nihura Montiel, Paige Jiyoung Moon, Paul Sietsema, Wilhelm Sasnal, Henry Taylor, and Tristan Unrau.

Hye-Shin Chun (b. 1983, Libreville, Gabon) graduated with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2015). Her work has been exhibited at numerous group shows, including Elsewhere, Ivory Gate Gallery, Shanghai, China (2025); Now You Don’t, Five Churches, Los Angeles (2025); 12 Hour Day - 12 Hour, Helen J Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); and Smoke The Moon Gallery, Santa Fe, NM (2023, 2024). 

Kirsten Everberg (b. 1965, Los Angeles) received an MFA from UCLA in 2004. That same year, Everberg held her first solo exhibition at 1301PE and was included in Russell Ferguson's group exhibition, The Undiscovered Country at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She has exhibited widely, including at the Scottsdale Museum of Art (2011); Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA (2013); and FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims; Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2009); amongst others.

Owen Fu (b. 1988, Guilin, China) received a bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 2018, completed his MFA at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. Recent solo exhibitions include Balice Hertling, Paris (2021, 2023); and Mine Project, Hong Kong (2020). His work has also been featured in group exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Beijing Biennale, China (2022); Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, China (2022); and Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles (2021).

Anna Glantz (b. 1989, Concord, MA) has exhibited her work in solo shows internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Knowing what you know, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles (2025); Lichens, The Approach, London (2023); Cement Answers, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); and Baby Grand, The Approach, London (2020). Group exhibitions include Untitled (for Jenni), Gordon Robichaux, New York, NY (2025); Trespass sweetly urged, Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2024); A Minor Constellation, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); Therein / Thereof /Thereto, Standard (OSLO), Oslo, Norway (2021); and A Love Letter to a Nightmare, Petzel Gallery, New York, NY (2020).

Robert Gunderman (b. 1963, Los Angeles) attended the Otis Parsons School of Art Los Angeles (1989). Recent solo exhibitions include Place Like You, Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); The Quiet Beliefs, Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); and Never Let Us Go, Desert Center, Los Angeles (2019). Group exhibitions include Ripe, Harper’s, Los Angeles (2023); LA ON FIREcurated by Michael Slenske, Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles (2020); and Between Worlds, Edward Cella, Los Angeles (2021).

James Iveson (b. 1983, England) holds an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles (2016) and a BA from Goldsmiths University of London (2006). Selected solo exhibitions have taken place at South Willard, Los Angeles (2022); Norwich Outpost, Norwich, UK (2012); and Dicksmith Gallery, London (2010). Selected group exhibitions include Taking Care, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles (2025); 4 X 4, Karma, New York, NY (2024); South Willard, Gordon Robichaux, New York, NY (2023); 356 Mission Road, Los Angeles (2014); The Tetley, Leeds, UK (2014); and Kettles Yard, Cambridge, UK (2013).

Becky Kolsrud (b. 1984, Los Angeles) received an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles (2012) and a BA from New York University (2006). Important solo exhibitions include Elegies, JTT, New York, NY (2021); As Above, So Below, Make Room, Los Angeles (2020); and Yackety Yack Girls, Karma, New York, NY (2011). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon (2022); Gavlak Gallery, Los Angeles (2020); Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (2020); Magenta Plains, New York, NY (2018); Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles (2020); and Fredericks & Freiser, New York, NY (2019). Kolsrud’s work is in the permanent collection of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Tidawhitney Lek (b. 1992, Long Beach) completed her BFA at California State University, Long Beach in 2017. Solo exhibitions include Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA (2023); Sow & Tailor, Los Angeles (2022); and Taymour Grahne Projects, London (2021). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA (2024); Cantor Arts Center Stanford University, Stanford, CA (2024); ICA Miami, Miami, FL (2022); Anat Ebgi, New York, NY (2024); and Ben and Brown Fine Arts, London (2022). Institutional collections include the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; and Pérez Art Museum, Miami.

Manuel López (b.1983, East Los Angeles) attended East Los Angeles College and transferred to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) where he earned his BFA in painting and drawing in 2010. He has exhibited in institutions, galleries, and museums internationally and nationwide including Atkinson Gallery at Santa Barbara City College, Santa Barbara, CA (2022); Baik Gallery, Seoul, South Korea (2023); Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA (2018); Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles (2023, 2022); and Self-Help Graphics, Boyle Heights, CA (2017); among others.

Nihura Montiel (b. 1988, Tijuana, Mexico) received her BFA from Roski School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California in Los Angeles (2023). Selected solo exhibitions include A Dog Named Masterpiece, Sebastian Gladstone Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); and The Object of My Object, In Lieu, Los Angeles (2022). She has exhibited at Mrs. Gallery, Maspeth, NY (2022); Carlye Packer, Los Angeles (2023); Ochi Projects, Dallas, TX (2023); Château du Marais, Le Marais, France (2021); and Amor Services, Los Angeles (2020). 

Paige Jiyoung Moon (b. 1984, Seoul, South Korea) received a BFA from ArtCenter College of Design in 2012 and graduated from the Seoul National University of Technology in 2007. Her work has been exhibited in solo presentations at Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2024, 2020, 2019), and Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston (2017). Select group exhibitions include Kiaf Seoul, Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2024); Made in L.A. 2023:Acts of Living, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); and Ogdoad, La Luz de Jesus Gallery, Los Angeles (2018).

Paul Sietsema (b. 1968, Los Angeles) graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles (1999) and the University of California, Berkeley (1992). Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver, CO (2014); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2013); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2012); the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2009); the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2009); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (2009); and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2003). Sietsema’s work has been exhibited extensively in biennials including Carnegie International (2008), Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, Germany (2008), and Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2019).

Wilhelm Sasnal (b. 1972, Tarnów, Poland) studied architecture at the Kraków University of Technology (1992–1994) and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (1994– 1999). His works have been featured in major exhibitions worldwide, including solo presentations at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2024); and Longlati Foundation, Shanghai, China (2023). Institutional collections include The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York, NY, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, among others.

Henry Taylor (b. 1958, Ventura) graduated with a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia (1995). A major survey exhibition dedicated to the artist, Henry Taylor: B Side, his largest to date, was exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and was then on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2024). Other select solo exhibitions include Henry Taylor. no title, Hauser & Wirth, New York, NY (2024); Jill Mulleady & Henry Taylor: You Me, Berlin (2024); and Here and There, Tokyo, Japan (2018). In 2018, Taylor was the recipient of The Robert De Niro, Sr. Prize in 2018 for his outstanding achievements in painting. Taylor’s work was presented at the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2017 and the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019.

Tristan Unrau (b. 1989, Brampton, Canada) holds an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles and a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Sebastian Gladstone, Los Angeles (2023); 56 Henry, New York, NY (2022); Unit 17, Vancouver, Canada (2021, 2018); and Towards, Toronto, Canada (2020), among others. Recent group exhibitions include 50 Paintings, Milwaukee Art Museum, WI (2023); Drawings, Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto, Canada (2018); and Cynthia Daignault: There is nothing I could say that I haven’t thought before, FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2017), among others. 

Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Russell Ferguson has lived and worked in Los Angeles for many years. He joined the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1991, and later became the Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs, and Chief Curator of the Hammer Museum from 2001-2007. Ferguson also served as a professor of the Department of Art at the University of California Los Angeles from 2007-2013. An established scholar and critic of contemporary art, his numerous writings have been published internationally.

MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY LOS ANGELES

1120 Seward Street, Los Angeles, CA 90038

www.mariangoodman.com

Paul Jasmin & Todd Weaver @ Fahey / Klein Gallery, Los Angeles - "Fade to West" Exhibition

Fade to West

Paul Jasmin & Todd Weaver

Fahey / Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Through September 13, 2025

Fade to West is a photographic exhibition that brings together the visionary work of Paul Jasmin and Todd Weaver—two artists who have made tangible the fleetingness of Los Angeles’s beauty and sunsets.

Though neither artist was born in California, both were drawn to a city as radiant and restless as them. Now deeply rooted in its culture, they embody its essence—capturing not only its landscapes and people, but its elusive atmosphere. The exhibition pairs Jasmin’s evocative portraits and cinematic vignettes with Weaver’s ethereal scenes of nature, offering a dual portrait of a place defined by light, youth, and transience.

Paul Jasmin helped define the visual language of Los Angeles, staging moments of youth and intimacy against the soft glow of the city’s ambient warmth. His photographs are imbued with compassion and quiet curiosity, revealing a version of the city that feels personal, suspended, and tenderly observed.

Todd Weaver, meanwhile, explores the edges of California—its windswept dunes, sunlit surf, and shifting horizons. Through analog processes and in-camera experimentation, his work transforms familiar vistas into one-of-a-kind impressions—each frame a meditation on movement, time, and atmosphere.

Together, Paul Jasmin and Todd Weaver render California not as an ideal or illusion, but as a living, breathing place—one that glows brightest in moments that never last.

Fade to West was developed in collaboration with Paul Jasmin prior to his death, and we are honored to present it as intended—celebrating his artistry and his enduring love for the city of Los Angeles.

PAUL JASMIN (1935–2025) was an American photographer, illustrator, and educator whose work distilled a precise and evocative vision of beauty. Born in Helena, Montana, Jasmin began his career as a painter and actor before turning to photography in the 1970s, encouraged by his friend Bruce Weber. Drawn to themes of youth, innocence, and sexuality, Jasmin created dreamlike tableaux that transport viewers into a world of seductive beauty and languid allure. Set largely in and around Los Angeles, his images explored the tension between aspiration and reality, reflecting a lifelong fascination with glamour, the American dream, and fleeting moments of becoming. His editorial and commercial work appeared in Vogue, GQ, W, Interview, V Man, Teen Vogue, Vogue Hommes, and in campaigns for APC, Bergdorf Goodman, Saks, Nordstrom, and others. He published three monographs: Hollywood Cowboy (2002), Lost Angeles (2004), and California Dreaming (2010, Steidl/7L).

Paul Jasmin was also a dedicated teacher at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, where he mentored generations of emerging artists with a quiet rigor and an unshakable belief in the power of imagination. Known affectionately as “Jazz” by his friends and students, he brought the same sensitivity and elegance to his teaching as he did to his images. Paul Jasmin passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles on May 24, 2025, at the age of 90.

TODD WEAVER (b. 1970) is an American photographer recognized for his expressive use of color and intimate portraits of artists and musicians. His work is distinguished by a bold and exploratory approach to color, which brings emotional depth and vibrancy to his images. Todd Weaver began his career under the mentorship of established photographers including William Claxton, Ellen von Unwerth, Herb Ritts, Steven Klein, and Randee St. Nicholas. Developing his own distinctive style, he has created portraits of figures such as André 3000, Lita Albuquerque, Paz Lenchantin, Devendra Banhart, and Father John Misty, and collaborated with brands including Nike, Veuve Clicquot, and Cadillac. His first monograph, 36 (2018), features portraits taken with a vintage half-frame camera, emphasizing spontaneity and intimate moments.

More recently, Todd Weaver has focused on Southern California’s surf culture, creating atmospheric, analog portraits that explore the relationship between surfer and wave. Combining experimental film techniques with a strong compositional sensibility, Todd Weaver has participated in several group exhibitions and has been selected multiple times for the American Photography Annual. His work has also been included in two recent publications by Taschen.

FAHEY / KLEIN GALLERY

148 North La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90036

www.faheykleingallery.com

Upcoming Exhibition @ Fahey/Klein:

Matthew Rolston - Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits

September 25 - November 8, 2025

Fade to West: Paul Jasmin & Todd Weaver

Fahey / Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, July 10 – September 13, 2025

Matthew Rolston - Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits @ Fahey / Klein Gallery, Los Angeles + Other Venues in LA + Special limited-edition monograph on Nazraeli Press

Matthew Rolston

Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits

Fahey / Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

September 25 - November 8, 2025

Photographer and artist MATTHEW ROLSTON, in partnership with Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, ArtCenter College of Design, Daido Moriyama Museum / Daido Star Space, and Leica Gallery, present a multi-venue Los Angeles exhibition of his latest series Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits, alongside the release of a special limited-edition monograph on Nazraeli Press.

Four individual works will be on view in a solo exhibition at Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, which will display the most extensive presentation of the Vanitas series, including the monograph’s cover photograph. 

At ArtCenter College of Design, Rolston will further present a triptych of the Vanitas work as a wall-sized installation at the College’s South Campus, curated by Julie Joyce, Director, ArtCenter Galleries and Vice President, Exhibitions. This presentation will be the only triptych on exhibition; the central panel appears on the clamshell cover of the forthcoming Vanitas monograph, a signature of the series. These three works, hung in ArtCenter’s Mullin Transportation Design Center, comprise two images of mummified children flanking one of an elderly adult, brought together in the style of an altarpiece, where the sacred and mundane, youth and elder age, collide. 

A single work will be shown at a solo exhibition that will open with a book launch and artist signing at Daido Star Space in downtown Los Angeles on September 30, 2025. Organized in collaboration with the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation in Tokyo, the presentation echoes the institution’s interest in cross-cultural approaches to photography. 

Leica Gallery, Los Angeles, will present another solo exhibition of an additional single work from Vanitas, accompanied by a public artist talk and book signing. At a venue rooted in the technical and material traditions of photography, this presentation will highlight the painterly, craft-driven aspects of Rolston’s Vanitas project. 

Together, these four distinct presentations introduce Vanitas as a ‘mostra diffusa’, an exhibition intentionally distributed among multiple venues. This multi-venue presentation across Los Angeles reflects a conscious departure from the contemporary conventions of exhibition production, recalling art historical traditions in which singular works were presented in isolation. 

All works, regardless of exhibition venue, will be available exclusively through Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, which will also offer an artist-signed edition of the exhibition’s accompanying monograph. 

MATTHEW ROLSTON 

Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits

Nazraeli Press, Mid-September 2025

A special edition of 500 copies 

presented in a custom clamshell case

Hardcover: 12.5 x 18 x 1.5 inches, 

118 pages, 50 four-color plates

ISBN: 978-1-59005-588-5 - $225.00

Book Cover Courtesy of Nazraely Press

FAHEY / KLEIN GALLERY

148 North La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90036

www.faheykleingallery.com

Josh Smith @ David Zwirner, Los Angeles - "Destiny" Exhibition of new paintings

Josh Smith: Destiny

David Zwirner, Los Angeles

September 13 – November 1, 2025

Josh Smith

Find Me, 2025

© Josh Smith. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents Destiny, an exhibition of new paintings by JOSH SMITH, on view at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. This is Josh Smith’s first solo presentation in Los Angeles.

For Destiny, Josh Smith has made a series of paintings that continue his long-running dialogue with the grim reaper, a figure that has appeared in his work for years in countless guises. In these new canvases, the reaper is set loose in New York City, riding a bicycle through familiar streets, cutting past landmarks like the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. The once faceless symbol of death now has eyes and stares back at you, tangled in the swirl of the city. It is funny, unsettling, and alive.

Smith’s paintings are built out of seemingly contradictory parts: loose but controlled, casual but deliberate, improvised yet tightly bound. He uses the bikes almost like scaffolding. Wheels, frames, and spokes break up the surface and give him an excuse to push color and shape across the support. The reapers wear cloaks made from bold strokes of black, but also from sharp hits of high-tone green, violet, or electric orange. Each canvas is a balancing act where lines threaten to collapse but never do.

There is a real sense of watching a painter solve problems in real time. Josh Smith allows the work to remain in a state of flux. Marks overlap, collide, and seem to rearrange themselves. It is this willingness to keep things open and unsettled that gives the paintings their energy. Even as they embrace a sense of improvisation, the paintings are held together by a deep understanding of how images work and how paint moves.

In these works, the grim reaper is not just a joke or a dark emblem. He becomes a vehicle for Josh Smith to explore the formal and conceptual terrain that drives him as a painter: tension and release, composition and collapse, figure and ground. The humor of portraying death speeding through Manhattan traffic does not diminish the force of the paintings. It sharpens it. The works are graphic and immediate, but also dense, layered, and full of small surprises—lines veer off and double back; colors press against each other in unexpected ways; forms fracture and then reassemble.

Made with this show in mind, the paintings in Destiny are clear about their own pleasures: color, form, and a bit of absurdity, pushed right up to the surface without fear.

The result is a series that feels both pointed and off-the-cuff, tough but playful. These are paintings that believe in themselves even as they undercut their own seriousness. They channel the spirit of the New York School—not as a style but as a way of working that values conviction, quick thinking, and the thrill of watching it all come together on the canvas.

Artist Josh Smith

Josh Smith was born in 1976 in Okinawa, Japan, and grew up primarily in East Tennessee. His work has been presented in numerous solo exhibitions at museums and arts institutions in the United States and abroad. In 2024, a solo presentation of Smith’s work, Life Drawing, was shown at The Drawing Center, New York. Other recent solo shows include those held at the Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany (2016); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma, Rome (2015); Zabludowicz Collection, London (2013); The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut (2011); Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva (2009); De Hallen Haarlem, The Netherlands (2009–2010); Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2008); and SculptureCenter, New York (2004).

Josh Smith’s work has also been included in important group exhibitions, such as Forever Young – 10 Years Museum Brandhorst, Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2019–2020); Trouble in Paradise: Collection Rattan Chadha, Kunsthal Rotterdam (2019); Publishing as an Artistic Toolbox: 1989–2017, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2017–2018); Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age, Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2015–2016), and Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2016); The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014–2015); The Painting Factory: Abstraction After Warhol, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012); ILLUMInations, 54th Venice Biennale (2011); and The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, New Museum, New York (2009).

The artist has been represented by David Zwirner since 2017, and his first exhibition, Emo Jungle, took place at the gallery’s 519, 525, and 533 West 19th Street locations in New York in 2019. David Zwirner Online presented High As Fuck, the artist’s second solo show with David Zwirner in 2020. Also in 2020, a solo exhibition of new paintings was presented concurrently at the gallery’s locations in London and 69th Street in New York. In 2023, a solo presentation of the artist's work was on view at David Zwirner, Paris.

Josh Smith’s work is held in numerous international public collections including The Broad, Los Angeles; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

DAVID ZWIRNER LOS ANGELES

606 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90004 

www.davidzwirner.com

Gabrielle Graessle @ Simchowitz Gallery, Pasadena - "True Romance" Exhibition

Gabrielle Graessle: True Romance 

Simchowitz Gallery, Pasadena 

July 26 – August 30, 2025 

Gabrielle Graessle

24 hours of daytona ferrari, 2024 

Acrylic glitter and spray on canvas 

50.50h x 140.50w x 1.25d in 

128.27h x 356.87w x 3.18d cm

© Gabrielle Graessle, courtesy of Simchowitz Gallery

Simchowitz presents True Romance, a solo exhibition of new large-scale paintings by Swiss artist Gabrielle Graessle, at Hill House, Pasadena. 

Gabrielle Graessle lives and works in a small village in southern Spain, where her creative practice is deeply entwined with her daily life—her home, her studio, her dogs, and her inner world. Her paintings reflect this porous relationship between self and setting. Her home is not a retreat from the world, but a stage upon which her distinctive visual language comes to life. Often working across multiple larger-scale canvases at once, Gabrielle Graessle constructs her compositions through layers of memory and imagination. She doesn’t aim for literal depiction but seeks instead an emotional truth: a vivid evocation of the energy, glamour, and strangeness that memories can hold.

In True Romance, a series of automobiles takes center stage—sleek, stylized, and brimming with narrative. The works trace back to a childhood memory of her father’s best friend, Hans G., a flamboyant figure who drove a Mini Cooper for everyday use and a Ferrari and Lamborghini for everything else. Though the exact models have faded from memory, the impression remains. The cars are icons—not just of luxury, but of a time, a place, and a masculine mythos that shaped her early understanding of adulthood.

This memory unfolds into another: her father’s annual pilgrimages to the Geneva Auto Salon, returning home with stacks of glossy catalogs and previews of the year’s newest models. Gabrielle Graessle absorbed the visual culture that surrounded these events—the polished chrome, the theatrical presentation, the women in miniskirts with rehearsed smiles. Her painting Salon de Genève sans hôtesse, for example, critically and playfully reimagines these scenes by omitting the ubiquitous “hostess,” calling attention to the spectacle and its gendered constructions. 

Gabrielle Graessle’s interest in pop-cultural iconography—particularly cars like the Ford GT 40 and Ferrari Daytona—places her work in conversation with Pop Art’s fascination with consumer spectacle. But unlike Warhol’s mechanical detachment, Graessle’s paintings retain a hand-drawn urgency and personal resonance. Her use of acrylic, glitter, spray paint, and exaggerated proportions suggests a blend of Pop’s visual vernacular with the raw, instinctive energy of Art Brut and outsider traditions. 

While her subject matter is rooted in both pop culture and personal history, Gabrielle Graessle’s deeper project is an exploration of raw, intuitive expression—unfiltered by academic theory or aesthetic polish. There is a childlike (but never childish) spontaneity in her work: a deliberate return to freedom, where conventional rules dissolve. This spirit is echoed in her materials and occasional text, applied in ways that are both purposeful and instinctive. Vivid colors dominate, not to seduce, but to assert. Her canvases are expansive, immersing the viewer in a world that is at once intimate and strikingly universal. Each work feels less like a standalone image and more like a piece of a larger constellation—a story unfolding in nonlinear fragments. Viewers are encouraged to bring their own memories, projections, and associations into the work. Interpretation becomes a shared act, echoing the layered, open-ended nature of her compositions: ambiguous, playful, and charged with possibility.

True Romance captures the texture of a life filtered through decades of image-making. These are not documents of reality, but of feeling—records of what lingers rather than what occurred. The result is a world both strange and familiar, painted not from observation, but from what refuses to be forgotten.

SIMCHOWITZ HILL HOUSE

Pasadena, CA 91104

Visit by appointment

www.simchowitz.com

Douglas Knesse @ Simchowitz Gallery, Pasadena - "Harvest under the sun" Exhibition

Douglas Knesse 

Harvest under the sun 

Simchowitz Gallery, Pasadena

July 26 – August 30, 2025

Douglas Knesse 

I think I saw a paradise, 2024 

Oil stick and acrylic painting on truck tarp. 

74h x 62w x 1.25d in / 187.96h x 157.48w x 3.18d cm

© Douglas Knesse, courtesy of Simchowitz Gallery 

Simchowitz presents Harvest under the sun, Douglas Knesse’s first solo exhibition at Hill House, Pasadena.

Harvest under the sun is a meditative exploration of discipline, devotion, and transformation. For Douglas Knesse, who lives and works in a coastal city along Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, painting is more than expression—it is a quiet, enduring practice and a form of spiritual communication. “Painting has always been a way for me to communicate what words could not reach,” he says. “It is in this quiet space that I connect with the spiritual field, accessing the divine to give thanks, to lay down my fears, to ask, and to speak new paths into existence.”

Knesse’s layered compositions resist finality. Built through repetition and reflection, they evolve, bearing traces of previous gestures. Working across acrylic, oil stick, spray paint, and pastel, he balances vibrant color and organic forms with generous use of negative space. Many works are painted on truck tarps—surfaces marked by use and history—which bring a grounded, corporeal quality to the paintings and deepen their relationship to labor, weathering, and renewal.

His imagery—leaf forms, rhythmic notations, and transient blooms—draws from the natural world but also points inward, toward an interior field of spiritual attunement. In works like TINHA UMA PALMEIRA NA PAISAGEM I, and the cloud drew my strength, this tension between external landscape and internal transformation becomes palpable.

Knesse’s practice resonates with multiple currents in art history. The gestural immediacy of his mark-making evokes Abstract Expressionism, while his use of modest materials and nontraditional supports—particularly in works like Window to paradise and Eruption and garden flowers—recalls the poetic materiality of Arte Povera. At the same time, his quiet emphasis on presence, perception, and process aligns him with Brazilian Neo-Concrete artists, whose works foregrounded sensorial experience and personal transformation.

Though rooted in a specific ecology, the exhibition speaks broadly to cycles of effort and emergence. Each piece carries the memory of what came before and the potential of what may come next. These works honor unseen labor: the slow accumulation of energy, gesture, and faith that precede visible change. Rather than seeking resolution, Douglas Knesse creates space for uncertainty, stillness, and spiritual inquiry. In this way, Harvest under the sun offers more than paintings—it provides a patient, reverent record of becoming.

SIMCHOWITZ HILL HOUSE

Pasadena, CA 91104

Visit by appointment

www.simchowitz.com

Alejandro Cartagena Retrospective Exhibition @ SFMOMA - San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: "Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules"

Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules

SFMOMA, San Francisco 

November 22, 2025 – April 19, 2026

Alejandro Cartagena

Carpoolers #21, 

from the series Carpoolers, 2011-12 

© Alejandro Cartagena, courtesy the artist

Alejandro Cartagena 

Fragmented Cities, Escobedo, 

from the series Suburbia Mexicana, 2005-10

© Alejandro Cartagena, courtesy the artist

Alejandro Cartagena and Rubén Marcos 

Identidad Nuevo León #41, 

from the series Identidad Nuevo León, 2005-6 

© Alejandro Cartagena, courtesy the artist

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announces Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules, the artist’s first retrospective, on view from November 22, 2025, to April 19, 2026. Over two prolific decades, Alejandro Cartagena has produced an incredibly varied body of work that reflects on contemporary life in Mexico and its changing landscapes, which have been his home since the age of 13. From color documentary photography to collage, the appropriation of found photographs to Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated works, Cartagena’s prodigious output is unified by his commitment to addressing Mexico’s most pressing social, economic and environmental issues.

Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules explores the artist’s practice as a “project photographer,” highlighting work from over 20 series. For each project, Cartagena conducts extensive research, then establishes a set of creative constraints around elements such as format, subject matter or location to guide him, often amassing hundreds of photographs around a topic. No photograph is more important than another; rather, his work allows meaning to emerge through accumulation, juxtaposition and variation. The exhibition traces recurring concerns across his career for the first time, including land use, the U.S.-Mexico border, climate change, increasing wealth disparities and the effects of rapid suburban sprawl, while also examining how Alejandro Cartagena uses archival sources, photobooks, large-scale installations and AI to expand what photography can be. Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules will be accompanied by an illustrated monograph published by Aperture that charts the artist’s full career, featuring newly commissioned texts.

“Photography changed our world two centuries ago; the way we see it, and the way we think about it has never been the same since we started using it,” said Alejandro Cartagena. “I want to be part of that history of how the medium transformed our understanding of social, political and environmental issues through images.”

“While Cartagena’s photographs are rooted in his observations of life in Mexico, part of their great power is their ability to open up broad conversations that transcend geography,” said Christopher Bedford, Helen and Charles Schwab Director of SFMOMA. “Cartagena’s work invites reflection and probing questions that serve to complicate our understanding of important social and environmental topics. I believe this exhibition will resonate deeply with our audiences.”

The exhibition opens with Alejandro Cartagena’s early photographic projects, where many of his central concerns, such as urban life, appropriation, and the U.S.-Mexico border, first come into focus. At the beginning of his career, Alejandro Cartagena trained his camera on himself and his fellow residents of Nuevo León, Mexico. His first large-scale project, Identidad Nuevo León (2005), was created in collaboration with fellow photographer Rubén Marcos. The two set up a mobile studio with a white backdrop and spent a year photographing 800 people in 25 municipalities in Nuevo León. Each sitter offers a distinct sense of style and presence. Around the same time, for his 2004-05 series Espacios Habitables (Living Spaces), Alejandro Cartagena returned to his birthplace, the Dominican Republic, and asked passersby to take his portrait as if he were a tourist in front of places from his youth. Blurry and taken from a low camera angle, these images gesture toward reconnecting with the past.

In 2009, Alejandro Cartagena began a trilogy of projects about the U.S.-Mexico border: Between Borders (2009–10), Americanos (2012–14) and Without Walls (2017). While some photographs portray the physical border itself, the series as a whole explores its broader cultural, economic and psychological impact. Cartagena pushes back against simplistic south-to-north migration narratives and questions the promise of the American dream, depicting the border not only as a territorial divide but as an invisible force shaping lives, perceptions and policies on both sides of this artificial barrier.

As the exhibition progresses, the environment and issues around land use emerge as central concerns for the artist. In his critically acclaimed, multiyear project Suburbia Mexicana (2005–10), the artist developed five subseries: Fragmented Cities, Lost Rivers, The Other Distance, Urban Wastelands and People of the Suburbs, which examine the complex relationship between urban centers and the suburbs haphazardly built around them. From poignant, sun-drenched landscapes of dried-up riverbeds to portraits in front of undulating rows of identical, box-like houses, Cartagena looks at how growth has altered the landscape and deeply impacted the lives of its residents.

For his popular series Carpoolers (2011–12), Alejandro Cartagena asked a deceptively simple question: what happens when suburban expansion outpaces public infrastructure? The answer plays out in his depiction of laborers who, without access to a direct bus line, commute in the flatbeds of pickup trucks from their homes in the suburbs to wealthy Mexican enclaves. Standing on a pedestrian overpass for three mornings a week for a year, Alejandro Cartagena photographed these workers from above. Meanwhile, the series Suburban Bus (2016) addresses similar questions but instead looks at those who do have access to a bus line. Over the course of three days and nights, the artist took the bus nonstop to retrace the route he would take daily between 1993 to 2004 on his way to work at his family’s restaurant in Juárez. Alejandro Cartagena places the viewer amongst the huddled passengers, some trying to rest as others stand and sway with the motion of the bus. At once breathtakingly beautiful and melancholic, the series captures the exhaustion and solitude of long-distance commuting.

In 2016, Alejandro Cartagena began experimenting with collage, starting with his own photographs and then moving to small, black-and-white vernacular photographs he gathered at Mexican flea markets and landfills. For his series Photo Structures (2018–19), he carefully excised figures from found pictures, leaving only the background. The resulting images reveal the formal patterns of photographic composition—the repeated poses, angles and backdrops—while also asking what is lost or gained when the ostensible subject disappears.

Continuing to push the limits of photography, Alejandro Cartagena founded Fellowship in 2021, a platform initially created to share NFT-based photography. The project quickly evolved into a broader space for the distribution, collection and exploration of digital media, including generative art, artificial intelligence and video. The exhibition will include a selection of his NFTs. In his most recent video series, We Are Things (2025), Alejandro Cartagena revisits his interest in archival imagery through a new lens—using an AI image generator trained on a personal archive. This latest work brings his experimentation full circle, blending the digital with the analog and linking his early collages of found photographs with cutting-edge technology.

The final section of the exhibition showcases Cartagena’s photobooks as central components of his practice. A prolific self-publisher, Alejndro Cartagena sees the photobook as the natural progression for a project photographer; the editing and sequencing of the work, for him, fundamentally affix meaning to the imagery.

Photographer Alejandro Cartagena

Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic in 1977, Alejandro Cartagena lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. Over the last two decades, his projects have employed landscape photography and portraiture as a means to examine social, urban and environmental issues. His work has been exhibited at more than 50 group and solo exhibitions, including the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) in Barcelona and the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Coppel collection, the FEMSA Collection, the George Eastman House, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Portland Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and The West Collection.

Alejandro Cartagena has received several awards including the international Photolucida Critical Mass Book Award, the Street Photography Award in London Photo Festival, the Lente Latino Award in Chile, the Premio IILA-FotoGrafia Award in Rome and the Salon de la Fotografia of Fototeca de Nuevo León in Mexico. He was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2021.

Publication : The exhibition will be accompanied by the first comprehensive, fully bilingual publication that charts the entire career of Alejandro Cartagena to date. Published by Aperture, Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules features 175 illustrations as well as contributions by Tatiana Bilbao, Álvaro Enrigue, Horacio Fernández, Charlotte Kent and Shana Lopes.

Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules is co-organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, where it will be on view from  June through August 2026.

The exhibition is curated by Shana Lopes, assistant curator of photography, with Alex Landry, curatorial assistant, photography.

SFMOMA - SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

151 Third Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 

www.sfmoma.org

Mary Corse @ Pace Gallery, Los Angeles

Mary Corse

Pace Gallery, Los Angeles

June 21 – August 16, 2025

MARY CORSE

Untitled (White Diamond with Black 

Reflective Inner Band), 2024 

© Mary Corse, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition of new works by Mary Corse at its Los Angeles gallery. This presentation marks the artist’s first gallery show in LA since 2017 and her first solo exhibition in the city since her 2019 survey at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Corse’s show at Pace in Los Angeles features new paintings and her 'Halo Room', a new architectural installation that she has been developing over the past few years. Holistically, the exhibition will trace her latest experimentations in painting, shedding light on her radical inquiries into the phenomenological dimensions of art and her role as a key figure in the LA arts community for more than six decades.

Throughout her storied career, Mary Corse—who has lived and worked in Los Angeles since she was a student at the city’s Chouinard Art Institute in the 1960s—has explored light, space, and perception in sublime, scientifically rigorous, and boundary-crossing abstractions across mediums. She is often associated with the California Light and Space movement and has always been committed to the possibilities of painting as her primary concern. As part of her empirical and highly tactile approach to art making, she has continually investigated the ways in which light can be both subject and material.

A sunset drive along Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu in the late 1960s changed the course of her practice. Searching for a way to embed light inside her paintings, Mary Corse investigated the industrial materials in the illuminated road markings along PCH and discovered glass microspheres. Soon after this revelatory event, she began applying these refractive microspheres onto the surfaces of her White Light paintings, endowing her works with a sense of illumination projected from within the picture plane itself that changes with the viewer’s position.

The artist’s presentation at Pace’s Los Angeles gallery centers on her new body of Diamond paintings—a continuation of the first diamond-shaped canvases she made in 1965—and includes several never-before- exhibited works produced this year. With her latest Diamond paintings, Mary Corse delves deeper into the fundamental concepts that have defined her practice from its outset. She expands the scope of her inquiry into the metaphysical dimensions of her oeuvre through new iterations of ideas that have long been essential to her work. In addition to Corse’s Diamond paintings, the show features one of her iconic, glowing light boxes. Early in her practice, the artist’s efforts to free her artworks from the wall led her to quantum physics, and she subsequently created a series of highly engineered light boxes, which she referred to as “light paintings.” Suspended using monofilaments, the light boxes are powered wirelessly by Tesla coils—high-frequency generators that transmit electromagnetic fields through walls, producing uncanny, spectral effects.

The exhibition also showcases Corse’s new 'Halo Room', an architectural installation that debuted in her 2024 presentation at Pace’s New York gallery. This work, which is installed in the Los Angeles gallery’s outdoor courtyard, offers a participatory, intimate experience of scale, space, and light. When a viewer enters the room, they encounter a white light painting and as they approach the painting the resulting effect produces a glowing halo around the viewer’s shadow, registering their presence but also incorporating it into the painting itself.

This installation hinges on the energetic relationship between individual and object, producing a moment of intersubjective collision that facilitates a spiritual manifestation of bodies within space. Up to two participants will be allowed inside the installation at a time, and each viewer will only be able to see their own halo—a phenomenon that speaks to the personal nature of experiencing Corse’s art. The presence and presentness of the viewer within the Halo Room become a pure expression of grace, reflecting the ethos that has animated Corse’s practice for decades: as she puts it, “the art is not on the wall, it’s in your perception.”

ARTIST MARY CORSE

Mary Corse (b. 1945, Berkeley, California) investigates materiality, abstraction, and perception through the subtly gestural and precisely geometric paintings that she has made over her sixty-year career. Earning a BFA in 1968 from Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles, Corse developed her initial work during the emergence of the Light and Space movement in Southern California. Throughout the 1960s, she experimented with unconventional media and supports, producing shaped canvases, works with plexiglass, and illuminated boxes. In 1968, Mary Corse discovered glass microspheres, an industrial material used in street signs and dividing lines on highways. Combining these tiny refractive beads with acrylic paint, she creates paintings that appear to radiate light from within and produce shifts in appearance contingent on their surroundings and the viewer’s position. First developing her White Light paintings, by the 1970s she began making her Black Light series with black acrylic and microspheres. The Black Earth works followed-large ceramic slabs that she fired in a custom-built kiln and glazed black. After thirty years of working monochromatically, she reintroduced primary colours into her paintings based on her understanding of colour as constitutive of white light. Corse’s art emphasizes the abstract nature of human perception, expanding beyond the visual to include subtleties of feeling and awareness.

In 2021, Mary Corse was the subject of a major solo exhibition at the Long Museum, Shanghai which traveled to the Amorepacific Museum of Art in Seoul. Mary Corse: A Survey in Light, the artist’s first solo museum survey, was presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Comprehensive catalogs were published with both surveys. A focused presentation of Corse’s work was on view at Dia: Beacon in New York for four years highlighting historical works from the collection.

Mary Corse was also included in the major presentation Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A., Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970 at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2011. The artist’s work can be found in the permanent collections of Dia Art Foundation, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the National Gallery, Washington D.C.; The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Long Museum, Shanghai; Amorepacfic Museum, Seoul; and other institutions.

PACE GALLERY LOS ANGELES

1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA

www.pacegallery.com

Richard Diebenkorn: Prints from Two Decades @ Crown Point Press Gallery, San Francisco

Richard Diebenkorn 

Prints from Two Decades

Crown Point Press, San Francisco

Through June 30, 2025

RICHARD DIEBENKORN

Spade Drypoint, 1982

© Richard Diebenkorn Foundation

Coutesy of Crown Point Press

I’m making my drawing in spite of the metal. I think I’m going to make a straight line, and it says, ‘Oh, no you don’t!—Richard Diebenkorn, 1962

Crown Point Press presents Richard Diebenkorn: Prints from Two Decades, a radiant exhibition of prints made by the artist during a series of residencies at the Press between 1980 and 1990. Organized with the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation and Crown Point Executive Director, Valerie Wade, the show takes place on the occasion of the highly anticipated release of Richard Diebenkorn: The Catalogue Raisonné of Prints (Yale University Press, 2025), which includes new scholarly essays, more than 850 significantly scaled images, and a richly illustrated chronology of Diebenkorn’s printmaking years. The works on view in the Crown Point Gallery were created in the final decade and a half of the artist’s life, the “high point” in his printmaking oeuvre, writes Starr Figura, Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art. In her essay Richard Diebenkorn, Printmaker, she adds that the objects made during this period “rank among the most extraordinarily luminous and elegantly structured prints ever produced.”

Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993) was highly accomplished in printmaking and worked with professional print shops over a period of more than 30 years (1962–1992). Master Printer Kathan Brown at Crown Point Press published a selection of his earliest intaglio prints in 1965 as 41 Etchings Drypoints. “It was Crown Point Press in San Francisco and the intaglio print processes it offered that captivated him the most: etching, drypoint, aquatint, and related techniques for incising an image into a metal printing plate,” Starr Figura adds, which “provided endless horizons for his work.”

In 1980, the artist began his Clubs and Spades series of works on paper containing symbols and heraldic imagery that had fascinated him since he was a young person; the iconography appeared in his prints as early as 1963. A series of intaglio prints made at the Press in which he deployed clubs, spades, and crosses in the early 1980s is “the first occasion,” Starr Figura writes, “when Diebenkorn’s prints start to rival the saturated color, imposing presence, and painterly ambition of his paintings on paper.” Spade Drypoint (1982) evinces his love of the drypoint process with its aggressive lines, while a shimmering aquatint with scraping made the same year, Green Tree Spade, is remarkable for its vividness and texture.

Ne Comprends Pas and Oui, both from 1990, were made during one of his most productive residencies at the Press. Oui, with its floating, broken detritus, marked a return to reversal techniques, which he had experimented with nearly a decade prior in 1981. Emily York, in Magical Secrets about Aquatint: Spit Bite, Sugar Lift and Other Etched Tones Step-by-Step (Crown Point Press, 2008), recalls that Renée Bott made an aquatint reversal of Ne Comprends Pas, which became Oui. “Diebenkorn mainly drew with asphaltum to make Ne Comprends Pas, a predominantly black image in which the drawn forms come through as the white of the paper. After finishing the print, he wondered what it would look like if the lines were dark on light,” writes Emily York.

The very experimental, geometric Passage I and Passage II were made during the same time as Ne Comprends Pas and Oui and were also created with the reversal process. Richard Diebenkorn added a strip of color to Passage I, as he did with his most celebrated print, Green, published in 1986 by the Press. “It wasn’t the first time that Dick had done that,” and “not a lot of artists that I’ve worked with have done that,” says Renée Bott, from a wide-ranging interview conducted by Karin Breuer, Curator in Charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and featured in the volumes. “He kept looking at it and…it wasn’t complete to him without adding something.”

The exhibition culminates in the weightless 1990 etchings Domino I and Domino II which are, observes Starr Figura, “among the most richly textured and densely composed images that Diebenkorn had ever produced.” As Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park geometries seem on the brink of dissolving…there is the sense of familiar forms and structures being opened up, loosened, and softened.”

Special Film

A new and special film with the late Kathan Brown and Valerie Wade, and together with Andrea Liguori, Executive Director of the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation and Editor, Richard Diebenkorn: The Catalogue Raisonné of Prints, explores the artist’s history with the Press and the “golden era”of printmaking during the 1980s. Andrea Liguori, in a tender interview conducted with Kathan Brown in late 2023, unearths brightly hued paper scraps discovered during filming that the artist had used to construct an iconic print image. The film was produced at Crown Point Press by Matthew Pendergast and is now available on crownpoint.com and diebenkorn.org.

CROWN POINT GALLERY

20 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

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RICHARD DIEBENKORN: PRINTS FROM TWO DECADES

CROWN POINT PRESS, May 23 – June 30, 2025