"Posthumously Speaking: Dear Dear Summer Some Are” by Kenny Rivero
Where: Móran Móran
When: November 16, 2024 - January 18, 2025
Why It’s Worth a Look: Kenny Rivero utilizes his work in painting, collage, drawings, and sculpture to dismantle and rearrange the historical narrative he was fed growing up. Here, he establishes a more complex sense of identity, exploring his experience as a Dominican-American born and raised in Washington Heights.
Know Before You Go: This show features a series of 13 paintings and four drawings completed this year during moments of unprecedented sociopolitical fray.
“Holding” by Carmen Argote
Where: Commonwealth and Council
When: November 9 - December 21, 2024
Why It’s Worth a Look: Born in Guadalajara, Los Angeles-based Carmen Argote explores play as a generative foil to creative blocks. Through construction, destruction, and reconstruction, she crafts sculptures and paintings bearing her own handprints.
Know Before You Go: While making the works, Argote was prone to destroying what she deemed uninspiring. She hammered some works to bits, painted over her canvases, and once threw a piece over her fence.
"When Lottery" by Julia Yerger
Where: Château Shatto
When: November 9, 2024 - January 4, 2025
Why It’s Worth a Look: Julia Yerger, one of CULTURED’s 2023 Young Artists, maintains a firm sense of momentum in her digitally inspired oil paintings and collaged works. Her nearly inscrutable canvases point to figuration or other scenes, while maintaining the dizzying input of visual information characteristic of the Internet age.
Know Before You Go: “In painting, I try to translate the spirit of my digital work. There are super-close-up details and super-receded graphic ideas happening all at once,” she told CULTURED last year. “I’m working through that in the painting, where it is a lot more challenging to make it what I want.”
“Joe Brainard”
Where: Chris Sharp
When: October 18 - November 30, 2024
Why It’s Worth a Look: The late Joe Brainard’s work spanned poetry, painting, and collage. As a definitive figure of the New York School of poetry and early Pop artist, his work proved prodigious in his lifetime and only continued to gain notoriety following his death due to AIDs-related complications in 1994.
Know Before You Go: Focusing on a selection of rarely exhibited work made from 1966-77, the exhibition includes paintings on paper, a cut out, drawings, and a number of collages depicting everyday moments from the late artist’s life.
“Pearl Lines” by Walter Price
Where: David Zwirner
When: November 16, 2024 - February 1, 2025
Why It’s Worth a Look: Walter Price’s “Pearl Lines” features his quintessentially dynamic paintings and drawings. This new body of work centers on car culture, fusing the sleek exteriors of automobiles with the flashy iconography of Hollywood.
Know Before You Go: The Brooklyn-based artist’s show is his first at David Zwirner since the gallery announced his representation earlier this year, and his first solo in LA.
“Color Plays” by Kikuo Saito
Where: James Fuentes
When: October 26 - December 7, 2024
Why It’s Worth a Look: The heart of “Color Plays” is composed of works from Kikuo Saito’s “Theatre Paintings” series. The pieces commemorate a time when the artist worked on stage sets in his native Japan. At 26, after unsuccessfully pivoting to art, Saito destroyed the totality of his work and moved to New York, where he dipped back into stage settings and costume design, eventually blending his two passions on the canvas.
Know Before You Go: While the artist landed stateside in 1966, this exhibition focuses on works created in the 2010s.
“House” by Uri Aran
Where: Matthew Brown
When: November 2, 2024 - February 8, 2025
Why It’s Worth a Look: To view New York-based artist Uri Aran’s “House,” one must navigate through an entryway with projectors lining one wall, casting images onto the other. The eerie, if nostalgic, hum of music and machinery leaves the visitor in an ethereal state of transience as they face the collection of sculptures, paintings, and films on view.
Know Before You Go: The show’s title nods to both the architectural elements in the work, as well as the childhood whimsy and familiarity that permeates its themes.
"Europa / America" by Candida Höfer
Where: Sean Kelly
When: November 16, 2024 - January 11, 2025
Why It’s Worth a Look: Candida Höfer’s first solo exhibition at the gallery highlights 14 photographs, taken between 1993 and 2015, that depict a breadth of interiors set between American and European cultures.
Know Before You Go: Curators Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, of the Los Angeles-based firm Johnston Marklee, were inspired by Erich Mendelsohn’s monograph, Russland Europa Amerika: Ein architektonischer Querschnitt (An Architectural Cross Section), that featured architectural imagery from New York and Moscow post-World War I.
“Flunking the Talent Test” by Peter Saul
Where: Michael Werner
When: November 23, 2024 - February 8, 2025
Why It’s Worth a Look: Peter Saul’s balance of humor and the grotesque crafts an unmatched specificity of tone, somewhere between delight and devastation. In the exhibition’s titular work, a canvas is shown rejecting its painter. Here, Saul lampoons the subjectivity of art, on the part of both its creator and critic.
Know Before You Go: Of his distinct style, the artist said in a statement, “I needed to figure out some purpose if I was going to be an artist, some reason to expect a viewer to look at my pictures with interest. My solution was to try and pack my picture with as much psychology, narrative, unusual distortions, etc.”
“Overview Effect” by Loie Hollowell
Where: Pace
When: November 9, 2024 - January 18, 2025
Why It’s Worth a Look: Loie Hollowell’s first solo exhibition in Southern California features six of her grandest works to date, as well as two multi-part nipple paintings. Playing with geometry and color, the artist crafts a lingering display of extremity.
Know Before You Go: Named for the experience of viewing Earth from space, the exhibition explores the sorely missing sense of unity in contemporary society.
“Profit & Loss” by Walead Beshty
Where: Regen Projects
When: November 7 - December 21, 2024
Why It’s Worth a Look: In his fifth solo exhibition with Regen Projects, Walead Beshty explores representation and image production in the digitally networked age. Spanning the Los Angeles-based artist’s work in photography, painting, and drawing, “Profit & Loss” centers on the experiences of immigration and our profit-making systems.
Know Before You Go: The exhibition includes both Beshty’s “Bandit Sign Painting” series, depicting signs of both an inane and shady nature attached to property without permission, and his cigarette drawings, exaggerated forms that circle themes of commerce and migration.
“Jogo de Mesa (Table Game)” by Beatrice Arraes
Where: Sea View
When: November 9 - December 14, 2024
Why It’s Worth a Look: São Paolo-based artist Beatrice Arraes blends tenderness and magical realism in her examination of Northeastern Brazil. In her paintings, influenced by various artists from her hometown including Gustavo Diógenes and Paula Siebra, Arraes strikes a harmony between esoteric mysticism and the mundane.
Know Before You Go: “I have a very spiritual and curious relationship with nature. This is largely due to a certain affection I have for my homeland itself, a desire to belong to something,” the artist said in a statement. “I think nature in the form of these sublime events also constitutes an internal landscape, a certain state of being.”
“Gothic Electronica” by William Leavitt
Where: Sebastian Gladstone
When: October 27 - December 1, 2024
Why It’s Worth a Look: In tandem with a presentation at Marc Selwyn Fine Art, 50 years of William Leavitt’s work is on display in Los Angeles this fall. Starting with his photography in the 1970s, “Gothic Electronica” will explore his creative practice up through his latest cyborg paintings.
Know Before You Go: As a writer and Californian artist, the legacy of Hollywood is intimately woven into Leavitt’s work. In his most recent paintings, cyborgs are as much a product of science fiction filmmaking as they are our social media-induced fantasies about the next wave of A.I.
