Portia Zvavahera @ David Zwirner, Los Angeles - 'Zvibereko zvemweya wangu' Exhibition

Portia Zvavahera

Zvibereko zvemweya wangu

David Zwirner, Los Angeles

November 14, 2025 – February 7, 2026

Portia Zvavahera

Takasunungurwa, 2025 

© Portia Zvavahera. Courtesy Stevenson and David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents Zvibereko zvemweya wangu, its third solo exhibition with the Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavahera. Taking place at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles, this presentation features a series of new works that continues to develop Zvavahera’s experiments with different painting processes and subject matter by joining her carefully charted dream worlds with her lived experience and daily rituals. Portia Zvavahera expands her practice with familiar motifs and narratives; her works are populated by symbolic creatures that become powerful conduits for the interpretation of spiritual visions and the contemplation of our earthly existence. 

In her paintings, Portia Zvavahera gives form to emotions beyond the domains of everyday life and thought. Her vivid imagery is rooted in the cornerstones of our earthly existence—life and death, pain and pleasure, isolation and connection, and love and loss. These deeply personal visions are realized through layers of vibrant color and ornate, veil-like patterns that the artist builds up into palimpsestic surfaces through a combination of expressive brushwork and elaborate printmaking techniques. Zvavahera’s compositions draw on particular traditions of figuration in past and present Zimbabwe, first expressed in the work of Thomas Mukarobgwa in the 1960s, while also pointing to postwar artistic practices that probe the nature of the human condition.

Zvavahera’s latest exhibition powerfully continues this exploration of the human condition. Themes of love, loss, fear, family, and protection recur throughout this new series of paintings, mirroring her broader practice. The show title Zvibereko zvemweya wangu loosely translates from Shona as the “fruits of my soul,” aptly describing the intense creative output behind these works. These monumental paintings are among her most energetic to date, deeply inspired by her love for family and, particularly, the passing of her late grandmother. Here, Portia Zvavahera resumes her study of dreamscapes, delving into subject matter that women, especially mothers, have experienced across time. She strips away the protective veneer of modern society, exposing core emotions that relate to the profundity of life and death. Incorporating new motifs like vessels, trees, water lilies, and snakes, Zvavahera’s paintings guide viewers on journeys, telling abstracted stories about the strength within the maternal and matriarchal world, where reality and imagination merge.

Shona is the artist’s native language, which she speaks at home; titles in Shona are provided with a translation only when Portia Zvavahera feels that the English words suffice. Experimenting with batik and block printing, oil sticks, and acrylic paints, Zvavahera's canvases are applied with layers, and then, like dreams, unfold into camouflaged compositions rich in symbolism and psychological depth. Within Zvibereko zvemweya wangu, Portia Zvavahera portrays small figures, children unbound by the canvas and surrounded by protecting arms and feathered veils painted with leaves, using a traditional wax-resist batik method, in works such as Kubuditswa muhari (2025). Others like Kubudiswa (redeemed) (2025) show a series of bowing figures—a community seemingly praying as a form of collective strength, demonstrating their power in numbers.

Artist Portia Zvavahera

Portia Zvavahera was born in 1985 in Harare, Zimbabwe, where she currently lives and works. She studied at the BAT Visual Arts Studio, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, from 2003 to 2005. She then received a diploma in fine arts from Harare Polytechnic in 2006.

Portia Ndakaoneswa murima, the artist’s first solo presentation in New York and her second with the gallery, was on view at David Zwirner, New York, in 2021. Zvavahera’s first exhibition with the gallery, Ndakavata pasi ndikamutswa nekuti anonditsigira, was at its London location in 2020.

The artist has presented several solo exhibitions with Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg (2014–2020), and a solo exhibition with Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles (2017). The National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, presented her solo exhibition Under My Skin in 2010, and in 2020, the Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean, Port Louis, Mauritius, held her solo exhibition Walk of Life. She was invited to show her work as part of the Zimbabwean Pavilion exhibition Dudziro: Interrogating the Visions of Religious Beliefs at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. In 2022, her work was included in the 59th Venice Biennale.

In 2024, Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, England, presented Portia Zvakazarurwa, a solo exhibition of the artist’s work organized in collaboration with Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, where the show traveled in 2025. Curated by Tamar Garb, this exhibition marked Zvavahera’s first solo institutional presentation in the United Kingdom. Also in 2024, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, presented Imba yerumbidzo (House of praise), as the fifteenth iteration of its Open Space solo exhibition series. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, opened Hidden Battles / Hondo dzakavanzika, Zvavahera's first institutional solo exhibition in the United States, in August 2025. The artist also opened her first solo institutional exhibition in Germany at Fridericianum, Kassel, on September 27, 2025.

DAVID ZWIRNER LOS ANGELES

616 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA

www.davidzwirner.com

R. Crumb @ David Zwirner, Los Angeles - 'Tales of Paranoia' Exhibition

R. Crumb: Tales of Paranoia

David Zwirner, Los Angeles

October 10, 2025 – January 10, 2026

Panel from R. Crumb, I'm Afraid, 2025

© Robert Crumb, 2025 

Courtesy the artist, Paul Morris, and David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of new drawings and prints by iconic illustrator and cartoonist R. Crumb (b. 1943), on view at the gallery’s 616 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. In his works of the last several years Crumb reflects on life in his eighties and his sixty-year career as well as themes of personal and mass paranoia during these times of social and political unrest. Crumb’s most mordant attacks are, as always, reserved for himself and show him contending with his own manic anxieties in a humorous and insightful manner.

The new works in this exhibition represent Crumb’s first extensive solo comic work in over two decades, marking an impressive late-career resurgence. Many of these incisive, introspective, and formally adventurous illustrations were made for the artist’s publication, Tales of Paranoia. This new comic book—Crumb’s first in twenty-three years—was published this month by Fantagraphics. Created in the wake of the 2022 passing of Crumb’s wife and longtime artistic partner, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, these works reveal a mind turning inward without its usual counterpoint—absent her grounding presence, the work veers further into obsessive, unfiltered reflection. As Crumb noted in 2019, “Success and the love of real women helped me a lot. Aline really saved my dismal ass.” [1] Crumb and Kominsky-Crumb had frequently collaborated, particularly in the decade preceding her death, and her absence is felt directly in the content of these recent works.

While Crumb’s early work skewered both mainstream and countercultural figures with a hyper-libidinal, satirical edge, his recent drawings meditate on paranoia, particularly around medicine and disease. These works convey a heightened self-awareness, oscillating between genuine suspicion and conspiracy; they incisively mirror a broader culture of mistrust of authority and the erosion of shared meaning and reliable information in the world today. In A Difficult Conundrum (2025), each panel depicts an increasingly agitated Crumb, his speech bubbles multiplying in a spiraling monologue directed against a pharmaceutical company. Through the familiar conventions of the comic form, Crumb constructs a self-portrait steeped in uncertainty and vulnerability. In other works he revisits his past, exploring difficult and disturbing moments that continue to affect him. As the title suggests, The Very Worst LSD I Ever Had (2025) documents a harrowing acid trip that Crumb experienced in 1966, which led him to seek several sessions of regressive hypnosis.

Also on view is a rare sketchbook from earlier in Crumb’s career, which offers an intimate glimpse into Crumb’s process and preoccupations. Placed in dialogue with the recent drawings, it highlights not only the evolution of the artist’s style and tone but also the enduring idiosyncrasies—formal, psychological, and narrative—that continue to define his work. Numerous recent etchings Crumb produced in collaboration with the renowned print studio Two Palms, New York, are also featured.

Artist R. Crumb

Born in Philadelphia, R. Crumb (b. 1943) moved to the dynamic Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco in 1967, and relocated in 1991 to the south of France, where he currently lives and works. Crumb joined David Zwirner in 2006. This is Crumb’s seventh solo exhibition with the David Zwirner gallery.

Solo exhibitions of Crumb’s work were presented at the Contemporary Art Galleries, University of Connecticut, Mansfield (2020), and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, California (2018). In 2016, the Cartoonmuseum Basel organized Aline Kominsky-Crumb & Robert Crumb: Drawn Together, the first comprehensive museum presentation of the artists’ joint work. A retrospective of Crumb’s work was held in 2012 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In 2011, his work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of American Illustration at the Society of Illustrators, New York. A major solo show devoted to Crumb’s work was organized by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, in 2007, and traveled from 2008 to 2009 to the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston; and the Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana, California. Other solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have been organized by the Whitechapel Gallery, London, a show that traveled to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (both 2005); and Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2004). Terry Zwigoff’s documentary Crumb was named the best film of 1994 by the late critic Gene Siskel and won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1995

Work by the artist is represented in major museum collections worldwide, including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles; Musée régional d'art contemporain Occitanie, Sérignan, France; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

[1] Nadja Sayej, “Robert Crumb: ‘I am no longer a slave to a raging libido’,” The Guardian, March 7, 2019. Accessed online.

DAVID ZWIRNER, LOS ANGELES

616 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA

www.davidzwirner.com

Luc Tuymans: The Fruit Basket @ David Zwirner, NYC + Los Angeles

Luc Tuymans: The Fruit Basket 

David Zwirner, New York 

November 6 – December 19, 2025 

Luc Tuymans

The Family, 2025

© Luc Tuymans. All rights reserved

Courtesy Studio Luc Tuymans, Antwerp, and David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of new paintings by Belgian artist Luc Tuymans on view at the gallery’s newly renovated 533 West 19th Street location. Luc Tuymans has been represented by David Zwirner since 1994; this is the celebrated artist’s eighteenth solo show with the gallery. The Fruit Basket will travel to David Zwirner Los Angeles in February 2026.

One of the most important painters working today, Luc Tuymans pioneered a distinctive style of figurative painting beginning in the 1980s that has been singularly influential to his peers as well as subsequent generations of artists. Featuring subject matter that ranges from the mundane to the profound, the artist’s deeply resonant compositions insist on the power of images to simultaneously reveal and withhold meaning. Over time, Luc Tuymans has adapted both the content and formal construction of his works to engage with contemporary visual culture and the sociopolitical contexts in which they are shown, thereby continually asserting the relevance of painting in a digitally saturated world.

Thematically, The Fruit Basket picks up where Tuymans’s previous exhibition—The Barn, held at David Zwirner New York in 2023—left off, delving further into the deleterious effects of the conflation of image and reality. The exhibition considers the pervasive atmosphere of fracture that is specific to the United States at this moment. Foregrounding the highly mediated state of contemporary experience, Luc Tuymans reinforces a growing sense of dissolution through varied subject matter and formal approaches, which are installed in an unexpected cadence across the show. Throughout, he modulates the tonality of his colors to match the heightened artifi ciality of the imagery he has carefully chosen, creating thought-provoking juxtapositions of scale and technique. 

Measuring sixteen feet tall and more than twenty-three feet wide, The Fruit Basket (2025)—from which the exhibition takes its title—presents a picture that is literally fragmented, composed of nine distinct parts arranged into a grid. Based on an iPhone photo that Luc Tuymans took of an actual basket of fermenting fruit projected onto a blue-cast multipart screen, the eerie tones and diffuse focus of this painting betray the presence of digital light. An object of fascination for the artist, the fruit basket—sometimes seen as a symbol of plenty—and its contents are distorted almost beyond recognition, becoming something else entirely, a kind of memento mori. Due to the sheer size of the composition, the viewer must step back to take in the work in full, only to notice the intrusion of the artist’s fingers at the bottom corner that indexes his engagement with the image on his phone. The strong diagonal that cuts across the picture plane mimics the construction of the similarly scaled epic history painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819) by Théodore Géricault. In likening a fruit basket—an object that is also commonly gifted to the sick—to Géricault’s raft of the dying, adrift from a shipwreck, Luc Tuymans emphasizes decay rather than abundance. 

A related group of four large-scale works, collectively titled Illumination, is installed throughout the show, appearing at first as fields of color that are lit from within in a manner akin to the rectilinear abstractions of Mark Rothko—a prodigious artist whose life ended in tragedy, and an ongoing interest for Tuymans. Tuymans’s paintings harken back to 1950s and 1960s abstract expressionism and color field painting, non-referential styles that had their heyday during a period of intense sociopolitical turmoil in the US and are now the subject of renewed interest. In contrast to the spontaneity of abstract painting, Tuymans’s works are deliberately constructed, based on zoomed-in stills captured on his phone from a documentary about the restoration of fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts. Luc Tuymans decided to encase these compositions in nearly black hues (though using no actual black pigment), applied by hand in thick bands around their borders. These off-square “frames” occupy almost as large a portion of the canvas as the actual image, further emphasizing the light that these colorful passages seem to emit—in this case reproducing the bright and mottled light that artifi cially results from taking a photo of a screen with a smartphone and drastically enlarging it. The subject of these paintings is amorphous, opening onto multiple readings that signal the instability of memory and the ways in which the past can be reinvented through image. 

Another group of canvases, painted in Tuymans’s distinctive and recognizable style, literalizes a feeling of intrusion at the heart of the exhibition. Hollow (2025) features the empty interior of a prosthetic latex mask, which floats against a dark, monochromatic ground. The inverse of a face, this image foregrounds the question of what is real and what is fake. Meanwhile, the smallest work in the show, The Maggot (2025) presents a close-up of the titular insect, alternately considered a harbinger of decay and rot and a medical cure capable of cleansing an open wound. Migrants (2025) glows urgently with hot reds and oranges and a looser treatment of paint. Rendered in an impressionistic style that is legible only from a distance, the image of dozens of faceless figures cloaked in shadow derives from a news photograph of migrants waiting at a border—the only work in the show to be based on an unmanipulated, “real” image. 

Finally, a group of four canvases based on 3D-printed figurines of actual people feature individuals that in different ways read as quintessentially American. Appearing at once uncannily lifelike and frozen in time, the people are rendered with an increased feeling of dimensionality, hinting at their status as objects. Executed on a more intimate scale that brings the viewer face-to-face with the subjects depicted, these paintings are meant to project optimism. However, Luc Tuymans has bestowed the canvases with an ashen underlayer, coupled with a thin treatment of paint, causing the figures to appear as if they were never alive to begin with. Paintings from this group both open and close the exhibition. In the first gallery, Hall of Fame (2025) features a figure donning the yellow NFL Hall of Fame jacket and holding a football between his hands as he stares vacantly ahead, a champion of the most American of pastimes. Likewise, the last painting in the show, The Family (2025) features a group portrait of three generations clustered together, smiling brightly while receding before our very eyes, underscoring the impossibility of a certain kind of reality.

Artist Luc Tuymans

Born in 1958 in Mortsel, Belgium, Luc Tuymans is one of the most important painters of his generation. His first major museum presentations were held in 1990 at the Provinciaal Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Ostend, Belgium, and the Vereniging voor het Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent. In 1992, the artist participated in Documenta IX in Kassel, in addition to having a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern, which helped cement his growing reputation in Europe. In 1994, Luc Tuymans: Superstition debuted at Portikus, Frankfurt, and traveled to David Zwirner, New York; the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto; The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; and Goldie Paley Gallery, Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia, establishing him as a major influential artist abroad. In 2001, the artist represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale to great acclaim. Luc Tuymans lives and works in Antwerp. 

One of the first artists to be represented by David Zwirner, Luc Tuymans has had numerous solo exhibitions at the gallery since joining its roster in 1994. In May 2023, David Zwirner presented The Barn, a solo exhibition of Tuymans’s work, at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location in New York. This was the artist’s seventeenth show with the gallery and his first solo presentation in the United States since 2016. Previous shows at David Zwirner include Eternity (2022); Monkey Business (2021); Good Luck (2020); Le Mépris (2016); The Shore (2015); The Summer is Over (2013); Allo! (2012); Corporate (2010); Forever, The Management of Magic (2008); Proper (2005); Fortune (2003); Mwana Kitoko: Beautiful White Man (2000); Security (1998); The Heritage (1996); Francis Picabia and Luc Tuymans: Paintings (1995); and Superstition (1994). 

Luc Tuymans has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions worldwide. An in-situ temporary mural by the artist, L’Orphelin, was on view at the Rotunda Valentin de Boulogne in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, in 2024–2025. In 2024, the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, presented The Past, a major exhibition of the artist's work. Other solo presentations include those held at Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2019); De Pont Museum, Tilburg, The Netherlands (2019); Museum aan de Stroom (MAS), Antwerp (2016), which traveled to the National Portrait Gallery, London (2016); Qatar Museums Gallery – Al Riwaq, Doha (2015); Menil Collection, Houston (2013); the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2009), which traveled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and BOZAR – Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; and Tate Modern, London (2004), which traveled to K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

The artist has received numerous awards and honors, including the Medal of Honor, International Congress of Contemporary Painting (ICOCEP), Porto, Portugal (2019); the Coutts Contemporary Art Foundation Award, Zurich (2000); and the Flemish Culture Award for Visual Arts (1993). His works are featured in museum collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Pinault Collection, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Tate, United Kingdom. 

Luc Tuymans’s catalogue raisonné of paintings, from 1972 to 2018, is available from David Zwirner Books and Yale University Press. The three volumes feature full-color images and documentation of more than five hundred paintings.

DAVID ZWIRNER

533 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.davidzwirner.com

Robert Smithson. Casting a Glance: Dancing With Smithson @ Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles - Exhibition Curated by Lisa Le Feuvre

Robert Smithson 

Casting a Glance: Dancing With Smithson

Curated by Lisa Le Feuvre

Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles

8 November 2025 – 24 January 2026

In 1968 Robert Smithson declared: “A great artist can make art by simply casting a glance.” This exhibition takes him at his word. Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson invites eighteen artists to join him on the floor as partners who resist, improvise, and extend the rhythm of his thinking.

Robert Smithson with Leonor Antunes, Nairy Baghramian, Daniel Boyd, Tony Cragg, Tacita Dean, Pierre Huyghe, An-My Lê, Steve McQueen, Julie Mehretu, Ana Mendieta, Delcy Morelos, Bruce Nauman, Gabriel Orozco, Giuseppe Penone, Tavares Strachan, Álvaro Urbano, Adrián Villar Rojas, and James Welling.

Casting a Glance tracks Smithson’s trajectory from his early 1960s drawings that confront the crumbling ideals of European Modernism with a queer sensibility to his searing critiques of industrial capitalism and attention to geological timescales, positioning him as both provocateur and visionary. Robert Smithson called for artists to infiltrate corporations, championed the agency of all earth-beings, choosing the exhausted edges of suburbia over charismatic metropolitan centers. His innovative conception of the site/Nonsite dialectic, his redefinition of what sculpture could be, and his conviction that art is a philosophical encounter with the Earth’s surface converge in this vibrant dance among the artists on view.

Rarely seen works by Robert Smithson — chosen in dialogue with the participating artists — capture his restless energy. His drawings of landmark earthworks, pseudo-minimalist sculptures, references to the occult and the erotic, sit alongside renderings of imagined islands and material experiments. Smithson asked urgent questions about place, decay, and the fictions of permanence. Mirror Displacement Indoors (1969), colloquially known as “Dead Tree,” anchors the exhibition. It is comprised of an uprooted tree, with leaves and root ball intact, and double-sided mirrors inserted into the tangle of roots and branches. Over time the tree dries, the leaves fall, the earth falls from the roots, while the fixed structure of the mirrors remain stable. Decay and entropy are key concepts for Smithson, and are threads running through the exhibition.

The eighteen artists gathered here both challenge and align with Smithson’s art and ideas. Tony Cragg’s In No Time (2018) joins works by Leonor Antunes and Álvaro Urbano in a knot of arboreal forms, extending Smithson’s fascination with trees and their mirrored lives. Delcy Morelos’s grounded forms quietly speak to An-My Lê’s charged landscape, which, in turn, suggests a kinship to Smithson’s imagined islands. James Welling’s Barbizon (2025) channels Smithson’s dismissive obsession with constructed landscapes, while Giuseppe Penone’s Geometria nelle mani – ovale (2005) stands in dialogue with Smithson’s reclining, decaying tree. Ana Mendieta’s earthworks resonate with Smithson’s Hypothetical Continents, with both artists employing the photographic image to make their temporal sculptures immutable.

Smithson’s speculative crystal universes are echoed in Pierre Huyghe’s evocation of half-million-year-old selenite, while Tavares Strachan’s redefinition of polar exploration rub against Smithson’s mapping of New Jersey as a different kind of elsewhere. A rarely seen mirror table sculpture from Smithson’s studio supports three hand scaled sculptures by Gabriel Orozco, reflecting the continuity of these mirrored surfaces into the present.

Nairy Baghramian’s Jupon Suspendu (2017) folds her sculptural lexicon into the conversation, gently interrupting Smithson’s hand-built Minimalism. Daniel Boyd’s collages double back on Hercules, pushing against Smithson’s conflation of camp bodies with classical statuary, while two scores by Bruce Nauman ask for a hired dancer to clear a room and telephone the artist. Adrián Villar Rojas’s Return the World X (2012) shares time with Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1970). Julie Mehretu’s Six Bardos: Luminous Appearance (2018) which meditates on time, memory, and transcendence, is placed in dialogue with the atmospheric veils of color in Smithson’s 1963 painting Tear.

Steve McQueen’s Broken Column (2014) speaks directly to Smithson’s acute attention to materiality and material history, while Tacita Dean’s Salt (A Collection) (2013–14) from the Great Salt Lake slips beside Smithson’s own drawings of Spiral Jetty (1970); both charting the eponymous film. Three moving image works complement the exhibition. East/Coast West Coast, made with Nancy Holt in 1969, is an improvised a dialogue in which Holt and Smithson perform the stereotypical positions of American East Coast and West Coast artists of the late 1960s. Robert Smithson described the thirty-five-minute film Spiral Jetty (1970) as “a set of disconnections, a bramble of stabilized fragments taken from things obscure and fluid, ingredients trapped in a succession of frames, a stream of viscosities both still and moving” – a phrase that reverberates across and through Casting A Glance. Swamp, from 1971, also made with Nancy Holt, is shot in the swamplands of New Jersey, Smithson’s home state, a location he frequently returned to in his work.

Curator Lisa Le Feuvre

Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator, writer, and editor. In 2018 she became inaugural Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, the artist foundation dedicated to the legacies of artists Nancy Holt (1938-2014) and Robert Smithson (1938-1973).

Lisa Le Feuvre has curated more than seventy-five exhibitions as an institutional and independent curator, edited over thirty books and journals, spoken at 150 museums and universities across the world, and has published more than 125 essays and interviews with artists. Her recent curated exhibitions include For What It’s Worth: Value Systems in Art since 1960 at The Warehouse, Dallas, (2024, curated with Thomas Feulmer); Robert Smithson / Teresita Fernández at SITE SANTA FE, New Mexico (2024, curated with Fernández); at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio Nancy Holt: Power Systems and Maria Hupfield: The Endless Return of Fabulous Panther (Biimskojiwan) (2025); and, on display through next year at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Joan Jonas: An Island Departure (with Jaime DeSimone). Le Feuvre’s recent publications include the introduction to the compendium Great Women Sculptors (Phaidon Press) and texts on the artists Henry Moore, Kapwani Kiwanga, Delcy Morelos, Charlotte Moth, Lucia Pizzani, Robert Rauschenberg and Medardo Rosso.

About Holt/Smithson Foundation

Nancy Holt (1938-2014) and Robert Smithson (1938-1973) transformed the world of art and ideas. Holt/Smithson Foundation develops their distinctive creative legacies and is the hub of all things Holt and Smithson. Holt and Smithson recalibrated the limits of art, changing what art can be and where art can be found. Their art, writings, and ideas built the ground from which contemporary art has grown. Collaborating with artists, writers, thinkers, and institutions the Foundation realizes exhibitions, publishes books, initiates artist commissions, programs educational events, encourage research, and develops collections globally from its headquarters in New Mexico.

MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY

1120 Seward Street, Los Angeles, California 90038

www.mariangoodman.com

Now Showing: Youssef Nabil's I Saved My Belly Dancer LACMA, Los Angeles - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Now Showing: Youssef Nabil’s I Saved My Belly Dancer 

LACMA, Los Angeles

Through January 11, 2026

Youssef Nabil

I Saved My Belly Dancer #XXIV, 2015

Courtesy of the artist

© Youssef Nabil

Youssef Nabil

I Saved My Belly Dancer #II, 2015

Courtesy of the artist

© Youssef Nabil

Youssef Nabil

I Saved My Belly Dancer #XXV, 2015

Courtesy of the artist

© Youssef Nabil

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Now Showing: Youssef Nabil’s I Saved My Belly Dancer, the first public presentation of the film since it entered the museum’s collection in 2025. The exhibition is centered around Nabil’s film, I Saved My Belly Dancer (2015), which marks its 10th anniversary this year. Tahar Rahim, who resembles Nabil, embodies the artist’s alter ego, while Salma Hayek stars as the titular belly dancer. For Youssef Nabil, the dancer represents both a remembered and an imagined memory of Cairo. He states, “I wanted to talk about belly dancing as an art form that is probably unique to us [Egypt]. It’s our dance. I’ve always loved it. So, I wanted to talk about saving the idea of belly dancing in my memory, more than anything.” 

The installation of Now Showing intends to evoke the type of mid-20th-century movie theater, including retro seats, contemporaneous with the Egyptian films that inspired the works in the exhibition. The space contains a photographic portrait of the director, hand-colored by Nabil’s mentor, Van Leo, and vintage movie posters. Additionally, the exhibition features photographs, based on the film, created by Nabil’s signature practice of hand-painting on silver gelatin prints rendered dreamlike by the unearthly intensity and tonality of the color palette. This is a revival of a mid-20th century technique associated with such Cairo-based photographers as Van Leo (Levon Alexander Boyadjian (1921–2002)).

This presentation continues LACMA’s history of exploring how film and popular culture interrelate with traditional areas of art from all periods and cultures. Over the past 30 years, the museum has acquired time-based media objects in nearly every curatorial department, including Nam June Paik’s Video Flag Z (1986), Matthew Barney’s REPRESSIA (decline) (1991), Bill Viola’s Slowly Turning Narrative (1992), and Mariko Mori’s Miko no Inori (1996), as well as works by Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Pierre Huyghe, Christian Marclay, Steve McQueen, Bruce Nauman, and Diana Thater.

Artist Youssef Nabil

Born in Cairo in 1972, Youssef Nabil began his career as a photographer in 1992, shooting his friends and creating scripts for them to perform, inspired by films from Egypt, Europe, and Hollywood. He developed a distinctive style by hand-painting gelatin silver prints reminiscent of glamorous celebrity portraits from the 1940s and ’50s, a technique he mastered through his friendship with renowned studio photographer Van Leo (Levon Alexander Boyadjian (1921–2002)). In 2003, Youssef Nabil left Cairo for an art residency in Paris, where he began taking self-portraits, addressing more personal issues of identity and displacement. Nabil continued his artistic practice in New York, where he lived from 2006 to 2018. His artistic practice addresses universal themes of absence, nostalgia, and cultural identity, while maintaining strong connections to his Egyptian heritage. Youssef Nabil has continued to draw inspiration from cinema, making portraits of contemporary film stars and artists, such as Catherine Deneuve, Omar Sharif, and Marina Abramovic. He also makes video works, collaborating frequently with actor Tahar Rahim. Currently, he is working on his first feature film, which will be multilingual and partially filmed in Egypt. Today Youssef Nabil resides between Paris and New York.

This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and is curated by Linda Komaroff, Curator and Department Head, Art of the Middle East, LACMA.

LACMA - LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART 

5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90036 

lacma.org

Now Showing: Youssef Nabil’s I Saved My Belly Dancer 

LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art 

August 24, 2025 – January 11, 2026

Line, Form, Qi: Calligraphic Art from the Fondation INK Collection @ LACMA, Los Angeles + Catalogue

Line, Form, Qi: Calligraphic Art from the Fondation INK Collection

LACMA, Los Angeles

Through October 19, 2025

Gu Gan 

Spring Rain, 2000 

Los Angeles County Museum of Art,

promised gift of the Fondation INK 

© Gu Gan Estate, photo by Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva,

courtesy of the Fondation INK

Joey Leung Ka-yin

Daisy Asks, 2012 

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 

promised gift of the Fondation INK 

© Joey Leung Ka-yin, photo by Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva, 

courtesy of the Fondation INK

Fung Ming Chip 

Buddhist Heort Sutra, ref 14, 2006 

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, promised gill of the Fondation INK 

© Fung Ming Chip, photo by Maurice Aeschimann, Geneva, 

courtesy of the Fondation INK

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Line, Form, Qi: Calligraphic Art from the Fondation INK Collection. The exhibition examines experimental works by 34 modern and contemporary calligraphic artists including Fung Ming Chip, Gu Gan, Inoue Yūichi, Lee In, Henri Michaux, Nguyễn Quang Thắng, Qiu Zhijie, Tong Yang-Tze, Wang Dongling, Wei Ligang, and Xu Bing, among others. This is the second in a series of exhibitions of works from LACMA’s Fondation INK Collection, a 400-piece collection of contemporary art in the spirit of ink.

Regional groups of avant-garde modem and contemporary calligraphers have developed across East Asia from the mid-20th century to the present, many of whose works engage with or respond to Chinese characters. Spanning ink on paper, Works on canvas, wood board pieces, and ceramics, the exhibition illuminates how their practices have influenced and informed one another, as well as connections between East Asian calligraphy and Western abstract art. Line, Form, Qi is curated by Susanna Ferrell, Wynn Resorts Associate Curator of Chinese Art, and Wan Kong, The Mozhai Foundation Assistant Curator of Chinese Art, at LACMA.

"While East Asian calligraphy is anchored in tradition, it remains an extremely lively and experimental practice," said Susanna Ferrell. "I am thrilled to introduce to our visitors— many, for the first time—work by artists and art groups with limited exposure in the U.S., such as the Vietnamese Zenei Group of Five."

"As an art historian trained mostly in traditional Chinese art, I find it incredibly exciting to see how artists continue to reveal infinite possibilities for integrating deeply rooted traditions with contemporary concepts and materials," added Wan Kong.

"Line, Form, Qi makes critical connections between artistic practices from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, as weil as Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and France," said LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director Michael Govan. "With the unparalleled support of Fondation INK Collection founders, Gérard and Dora Cognié, LACMA is advancing its mission to reflect Los Angeles's diverse, interlocking cultures across our collection, exhibitions, and scholarship."

Une, Form, Qi presents more than 60 works across four thematic sections:

The evolution of Chinese characters from oracle bane inscriptions to standard script has been a process of abstraction: from painting pictorial images to writing standardized symbols. The exhibition's first section, Pictograph, spotlights experimentation with the interplay of writing and painting. Here, artists explore and deconstruct the origin of Chinese script. This includes Gu Gan's merging of Chinese tradition and Western abstraction in Spring Rain (2000), which simultaneously recalls and defies historical references. In Landscript (2022), Xu Bing situates written characters within his landscape to retether contemporary characters to the natural elements that once inspired their design.

Message probes relationships between content and form in Chinese writing. The artists featured in this section are conscious of bath the linguistic and visual expression of characters, and incorporate these dual aspects into their works. One of the earliest works included in the exhibition, A (1961), shows lnoue Yiiichi's return to single, inked characters on paper after years of breaking boundaries between abstract painting and calligraphy. Moving through ti me, Joey Leung Ka-yin's Daisy Asks (2012) contemporizes the gongbi (fineline) painting technique by instilling it with imagined narratives grounded in the daily life and culture of Hong Kong. Leung's Cantonese text merges satiricallanguage with classical poetic structure, reading like a single-panel comic strip with an inscription that mimies Fangsong, an imitation Song-dynasty typeface.

Calligraphers in East Asia have traditionally learned by referencing and copying specifie scripts established by their predecessors. Re-Form, however, explores how artists have come to create new forms of characters through persona!, cultural, and existential experiences. In Buddhist Heart Sutra, ref 16 (2006), Fung Ming Chip's calligraphy appears to be relatively standard, but on closer inspection, the center of each character is punctuated by slightly more saturated ink. Buddhist Heart Sutra, ref 14 (2006) juxtaposes the composition with white triangles surrounded by faint impressions of the same text.

ln the final section, Abstraction, artists distill components of calligraphie art, such as a single black ink brushstroke or the shape of a black of text. Departing from tradition, these calligraphy-inspired works must be experienced rather than read. Irene Chou cultivated a language of li nes in her abstract paintings, inspired by script found carved into a series of Sth-century boulders in north-central China. Her featured work, The Universe is My Mind, combines elements of her one-stroke painting technique with the shape of a circle-an evolution of a sphere motif that had previously emerged in her work as a symbol for love and her inner mind.

Line, Form, Qi: Calligraphic Art 

from the Fondation INK Collection

Published 2025 | ISBN: 9781636811581

Image courtesy of DelMonico Books

Publication: The exhibition's accompanying catalogue explores significant trends and innovations in contemporary calligraphic art, including abstraction of the character, performance and phenomenological practice, and experimentation with alternative or nontraditional materials and calligraphy methods such as incense burn drawing and lithography. This publication also addresses different through lines from premodern calligraphy to contemporary practice, reflecting the evolution of the Chinese language from pictograph to ideograph and beyond. Line, Form, Qi: Calligraphie Art from the Fondation INK Collection is edited with text by Susanna Ferrell and Wan Kong. Foreword by Michael Govan. Text by Rika Hiro, Stephen Little, Virginia Moon, and Li Wei Ng. Co-published by LACMA and Del Monica Books/D.A.P.

Line, Form, Qi was organized by the Los Angeles Counly Museum of Art and curated by Susanna Ferrell, Wynn Resorts Associate Curator of Chinese Art, and Wan Kong, The Mozhai Foundation Assistant Curator of Chinese Art, at LACMA.

LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90036

www.lacma.org

Line, Form, Qi: Calligraphic Art from the Fondation INK Collection

LACMA, Los Angeles

April 6 - October 19, 2025

Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia @ LACMA, Los Angeles

Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia

LACMA, Los Angeles

May 11, 2025 – July 12, 2026 

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia. International in scope, this exhibition examines key concepts of Buddhist thought and practice through sculptures, paintings, textiles, and ritual objects. Incorporating 180 masterpieces of pan-Asian Buddhist art, Realms of the Dharma begins with the religion’s origins in India in the 5th century BCE and follows its spread through Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, and East Asia. Drawn from LACMA’s permanent collection, with several significant loans from private collections, the exhibition explores the life of the Buddha, the role of the bodhisattva or Buddhist savior, Buddhist cosmology, and such key concepts as dharma, karma, nirvana, mantra, mudra, and mandala. The show will focus on art associated with such key phases of Buddhism as Theravada (early monastic Buddhism), Mahayana (the “Great Vehicle”), Vajrayana (the “Diamond Vehicle”—tantric or esoteric Buddhism), and Chan (Zen).

“Realms of the Dharma presents an exciting opportunity for visitors to learn about the Buddhist religion, cosmology, and practice through works of art,” said Stephen Little, Florence & Harry Sloan Curator and Department Head of Chinese & Korean and South & Southeast Asian Art. “The exhibition explores the key concepts underlying this religion’s historical development and the reasons for its widespread popularity across Asia.”

Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director said, "Following our recent exhibition Mapping the Infinite, which looked at cosmologies across cultures, Realms of the Dharma continues LACMA's commitment to presenting stories, perspectives, and ancestries that are deeply connected to the people of L.A. County. We've made that a cornerstone of the museum's approach to studying and sharing the collection with our vast public.” 

Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia is divided into two sections. The first section tells the story of Buddhism’s birth and growth in and around the Indian subcontinent. The second section follows Buddhism as it travels beyond India to Sri Lanka, Myanmar [Burma], Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Kashmir, Nepal, Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan.

Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia - Highlights

Buddha Shakyamuni 

India Uttar Pradesh, late 6th century 

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 

gift of the Michael J. Connell Foundation

Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

From the late 6th century, the north Indian image of the historical Buddha Shakyamuni, with its serene countenance, embodies the style of the late Gupta dynasty (320–600), a balance of elegant form and inner spirituality. Although the Gupta rulers were Hindu, they actively patronized Buddhism. This Buddha embodies two ideals basic to Buddhism, the perfect yogi and the universal ruler. He possesses the yogi's supple body and contemplative gaze, and the ruler's strong shoulders, firm body, and webbed hands and feet. Time-honored traditions of portrayal connect the Buddha's human form with nature; his long eyes are shaped like fish, his curls like snail shells, and the profile of his left shoulder and arm like the trunk of an elephant. Following the invasion of northern India by Islamic rulers from Afghanistan in the 12th century, this sculpture was long preserved in a Tibetan monastery.

The Bodhisattva Maitreya 

India, Bihar, Gaya District, 11th century 

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 

from the Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection, 

Museum Associates Purchase 

Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

In Buddhism, Maitreya first appears as a bodhisattva—a fully enlightened being who was prophesied to become the Buddha of the next cosmic eon, or kalpa, after the end of the current universe. Until that time it is thought that Maitreya exists as a bodhisattva, but will eventually descend to earth from the heaven where he currently resides, undergo his final rebirth, and become a Buddha. In the 11th century schist The Bodhisattva Maitreya, the figure can be identified as Maitreya by the presence of a miniature stupa (reliquary) in his headdress. Maitreya's name means “The Benevolent One."

The Cosmic Buddha Vairochana 

China, c. 1600 

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 

gift of Richard and Ruth Dickes 

Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

The Cosmic Buddha Vairochana is a rare painting from China of the primordial Buddha Vairochana, a central figure of the Five Cosmic Buddhas of the Mahayana and Vajrayana pantheons. The veneration of Vairochana first flourished in China during the Tang dynasty (618–906), and worship of this Cosmic Buddha soon spread to Korea and Japan. The historical Buddha Shakyamuni was believed to be a manifestation of Vairochana, who exists beyond time and space. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this work—in addition to its remarkable state of preservation—are the large numbers of smaller Buddhist and Daoist figures, among which are the guardians of the four cardinal directions and Dizang (Kshitigarbha or Earth Matrix), Bodhisattva of the Underworld.

The Buddhist Deities Chakrasamvara and Vajravarahi 

Tibet, c. 15th century 

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 

from the Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection, 

Museum Associates Purchase

Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

The vibrant The Buddhist Deities Chakrasamvara and Vajravarahi depicts the embrace of the deities Chakrasamvara and Vajravarahi, symbolizing the two essential elements of Buddhist belief and practice: compassion (male) and wisdom (female). Chakrasamvara is the central deity of the Chakrasamvara Tantra, a text composed in the late 8th or early 9th century in India, the main purpose of which is to provide a path to spiritual awakening and enlightenment through the meditation on the deity Heruka Chakrasamvara in union with Vajravarahi. The tantra outlines rituals, philosophies, and practices designed to cultivate enlightened states of mind by uniting the principles of bliss (right method) and emptiness (wisdom).

As part of the museum’s effort to share its permanent collection with audiences around the globe, a version of this exhibition was on view at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, in 2018, Las Huellas de Buda (The Footsteps of the Buddha). 

Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The exhibition is curated by Stephen Little, Florence & Harry Sloan Curator and Department Head of Chinese & Korean and South & Southeast Asian Art, and is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with essays by Stephen Little and Tushara Bindu Gude, LACMA’s former Associate Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art.

Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia

Edited with text by Stephen Little, Tushara Bindu Gude 

Foreword by Michael Govan

Published by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art / D.A.P.

Hardcover, 288 pages, 9 x 11 in., 254 color illustrations

ISBN: 9781942884781 -  Published 2025

LACMA - LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART 

5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90036 

lacma.org

Robert Therrien @ The Broad, Los Angeles - "Robert Therrien: This is a Story" - The largest museum exhibition of the artist’s work to date

Robert Therrien: This is a Story

The Broad, Los Angeles

November 22, 2025 – April 5, 2026

Robert Therrien

No title (folding table and chairs, dark brown), 2007

Painted steel and aluminum, fabric, and plastic 

Courtesy of Glenstone Museum 

Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com

The Broad presents Robert Therrien: This is a Story, the largest museum exhibition of the late artist’s widely-adored work to date. Therrien’s meditations on scale and material are a deeply influential and well-known approach within the field of contemporary sculpture, significant to The Broad’s own identity as a museum, and long admired by visitors of all ages. The installation will showcase Therrien’s personal vocabulary of images and symbols—from enormous tables, chairs, and dishes, to intimate drawings of snowmen, birds, and chapels—as they become a language of continuous creation and transformation for the artist over time. Featuring more than 120 works spanning five decades, the exhibition offers unprecedented access to the artist’s exploration of scale, memory, and perception, just miles from the downtown Los Angeles home and studio space he operated out of for close to thirty years beginning in 1990. Many of the works on view, including those created just before Robert Therrien’s untimely death in 2019, have never been featured in museum exhibitions and will offer new avenues of understanding his practice.

“Robert Therrien has longstanding ties to The Broad and was one of the very first L.A.-based artists to enter the Broad collection decades ago, in its first, formative years. His massive sculpture Under the Table has captivated visitors to our museum’s galleries since the day The Broad opened in 2015, as a surreally enlarged wooden table offering layers of the artist’s intellectual and art historical inquiry within an aura of domestic familiarity,” said Joanne Heyler, Founding Director and President of The Broad. She added, “For our visitors who know and love Under the Table, this ambitious show will reveal a deeper and wide-lens look into the completely unique world Therrien created–a Los-Angeles-based body of work that reshaped contemporary sculpture.”

Robert Therrien

No title (bent cone relief), 1983 

Lacquer and wax on wood 

Courtesy of The Broad Art Foundation

Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com

Robert Therrien

No title (black witch hat), 2018 

Carved Delrin plastic

Courtesy of Robert Therrien Estate.

Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com

Robert Therrien (1947–2019) was born in Chicago and relocated to Los Angeles in the 1970s to complete an MFA at the University of Southern California. Despite the prominence of conceptual and minimalist practices at the time, he developed his own adjacent artistic vernacular that saw the infinite potential of ordinary objects across basic forms and their three-dimensional counterparts, varying in size, color, and detail. A single Robert Therrien gesture can expand, contract, change materially, or seamlessly transform into other images entirely. A chapel will become an oil can; the oil can will become a pitcher; the pitcher, a cone, then morphing into a witch hat. At the heart of Therrien’s practice is a sense of artistic animation, by turns fun, playful, and serious.

“Los Angeles has been and remains a historically important place to make sculpture and Robert Therrien is vital to that story” said Ed Schad, Curator and Publications Manager at The Broad. “From his handmade and intimate responses to Minimalism in the 1970s, to his early involvement in what would become a golden age of L.A. fabrication, Therrien made important contributions to many of sculpture’s central conversations for over forty years. However, the most important thing to know about Therrien is that he can evoke a sense of wonder. What starts in Therrien’s personal and closely guarded memories and passions, becomes a mysterious place in which a viewer can think about and dwell in one’s own.”

Visitors will be able to walk under and around large tables and chairs, approach enormous hanging beards, and navigate around large, stacked dishes designed to appear to be in motion and alter one’s sense of balance. In addition, a special collaboration with the artist’s estate will expose visitors to partial reconstructions of Therrien’s studio environment, including his project tables, drawings, and tools, to full-sized rooms full of surprises and encounters that are a hallmark of the artist’s practice. Therrien’s living and working space in Downtown L.A. remains pivotal to his understanding of space and size.

In addition to being the largest solo museum presentation of his work to date, Robert Therrien: This is a Story places his legacy within the broader arc of contemporary sculpture in Los Angeles and beyond. An exhibition catalog published by DelMonico Books will develop these connections further, edited by curator Ed Schad and featuring texts by Kathryn Scanlon, Richard Armstrong, and Darby English, as well as reflections from Vija Celmins, Vicky Arnold, Jacob Samuel, Christina Forrer and more.

THE BROAD

221 S. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012

www.thebroad.org

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.

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