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“Lee Lozano: Hard Handshake”
When: Through January 18, 2026
Where: Hauser & Wirth
Why It’s Worth a Look: This collection of drawings from the first nine years of Lee Lozano’s career presage the defiance and fierce independence she became known for. From grotesquely funny self-portraits to stark geometric forms, her personal iconography evolved from cheeky pop-inflected figuration to provocative Platonic abstractions. This is the first major exhibition in Los Angeles devoted to Lozano’s work.
Know Before You Go: Throughout her career, Lozano committed to her conceptual artworks wholeheartedly. In protest of the ghettoization of female artists, she refused to speak to other women for a month; she found the project suited her and continued to abstain from other women for the next 27 years. Her commitment to unsaleable “life art” took her to the center of the art world and then outside of it entirely—she retreated from exhibiting art after a solo show at the Whitney in 1970 and eventually moved to Dallas, where she continued to make art privately.
“Forbidden Colors (Free)(Palestine)(Sudan)” and “Transgender Abstraction to Transgender Conceptualism” by Puppies Puppies
When: Through December 6
Where: Ceradon
Why It’s Worth a Look: With these two installations, Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo, better known by the moniker Puppies Puppies, has transformed this Echo Park gallery into two giant flags. In the first room the artist has painted the walls green, red, and white—the colors of both the Palestinian and Sudanese flags—and outfitted the walls with neon signs reading “FREE.” The next room over takes on the blue, pink, and white hues of the trans pride flag.
Know Before You Go: “Forbidden Colors” is a nod to a 1988 piece by Felix Gonzalez-Torres of the same name, which presented four panels also painted in the colors of the Palestinian flag. Like Gonzalez-Torres’s piece, Kuriki-Olivo’s flags are metonyms: The artwork’s most salient content is found in the show’s notes, which provide resources to humanitarian aid for those in Sudan and Palestine.
“Absinthe, Smoke, Sugar, Choice” by Sabrina Gschwandtner
When: Through January 10, 2026
Where: Shoshana Wayne Gallery
Why It’s Worth a Look: Quilt-making was once women’s work: a domestic duty, yes, but also an outlet for creative expression. Sabrina Gschwandtner expands the techniques and motifs of the craft by sewing together strips of film illuminated from behind.
Know Before You Go: Gschwandtner’s new show plumbs the earliest years of film history to explore female bodily autonomy then and now. Her main sources? A 1931 documentary about a team on horseback who brought healthcare to women in rural Appalachia and a 1906 silent comedy about a pregnant woman who greedily steals sips of absinthe, puffs off a pipe, and candy from a baby (literally.)
“Souvenir” by Kathleen Ryan
When: Through December 20
Where: Karma
Why It’s Worth a Look: Psychoanalytic theorist Julia Kristeva once described abjection as a repulsive kind of ambiguity, and Kathleen Ryan’s souvenirs contain just that: enormous bejeweled fruits, overripe and rotting. In this new show, Ryan will debut a trio of concrete peaches cast in chrome. In lieu of a pit, they cradle Harley Davidson twin cylinder engines, melding the organic and the mechanical.
Know Before You Go: The California-born Ryan is on a hot streak lately: This exhibition opens the same day that her first institutional survey closes at the Hamburger Kunsthalle.
“Chin Music” by Ben Sakoguchi
When: Through December 23
Where: Marc Selwyn Fine Art
Why It’s Worth a Look: Ben Sakoguchi’s crisp paintings use the motifs of historic advertisements to animate history, both recent and distant. He’s distinctly American in his iconography: California oranges, baseball cards, and Old Westerns mingle with ripped-from-the-headlines verbiage and imagery like MAGA hats and Colin Kaepernick.
Know Before You Go: On display are over 50 canvases from the artist’s “Orange Crate Label” series, which take the colorful labels of the family San Bernardino grocery store of his childhood, and use them to advertise such “products” as the dodo bird and Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy. Other series are deeply personal, such as “Postcards from Camp,” which takes Japanese internment during WWII as its subject. Sakoguchi himself was imprisoned during this period as a child.
“Lifeworld Variations” by Will Stovall
When: Through December 20
Where: Château Shatto
Why It’s Worth a Look: What, you may ask, is a lifeworld? The things we take for granted in daily life: our shared personal, social, and cultural perceptions and beliefs. On welded aluminum that unfolds like a puzzle box, Will Stovall renders complex social spheres that exist somewhere between the real and the allegorical. The viewer is an anthropologist peering in on the lives of people exercising, playing, worshipping, and resting.
Know Before You Go: Early science fiction, adventure, and mythology are clear influences here. One piece, The Laputians, evokes an island of absentminded intellectuals from Gulliver’s Travels. Another, Journey to the Center of the Earth, finds four figures staring curiously into a bottomless pit.
“Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson”
When: Through January 24, 2026
Where: Marian Goodman Gallery
Why It’s Worth a Look: In 1968, Robert Smithson once declared, “A great artist can make art simply by casting a glance.” Consider this show a staring contest. Marian Goodman invited 18 artists including Julie Mehretu, Pierre Huyghe, Ana Mendieta, Bruce Nauman, and Steve McQueen to engage with the Land artist’s favorite themes: the dissolution of industrial capitalism, the agency of non-human creatures, and the expansion of sculpture as an art form.
Know Before You Go: Smithson found his muse in mining sites, quarries, and industrial wastelands at the edges of urban and suburban centers. Drawing inspiration from the scarred land, he created artworks intervening with the landscape itself, turning rocks, dirt, ditches, and jetties into sculptures in their own right.
“Afterlife” by Ken Gonzales-Day
When: Through December 20
Where: Luis de Jesus
Why It’s Worth a Look: In a moment when such institutions are under attack, Ken Gonzales-Day’s new collection celebrates the museum as a repository for cultural memory. For over 20 years, the artist has taken photos of objects in museum collections across the globe, which he digitally reassembles into new works. In the show’s centerpiece, busts of George Washington and Susan B. Anthony collide with Mesoamerican artifacts and a pile of human skulls.
Know Before You Go: Gonzales-Day will also debut a new work commissioned by the Los Angeles MTA for its new subway extension. This new monumental public work draws attention to the lack of Black, brown, and queer artists in LACMA’s permanent collection.
“4 Meters” by Beatriz Cortez
When: November 15 – December 20
Where: Commonwealth and Council
Why It’s Worth a Look: Beatriz Cortez’s latest show draws inspiration from Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes. A symbol of modernist development with its Art Deco and Neoclassical design, the Palacio has nevertheless sunk nearly four meters into the nearby Lake Texcoco in recent years thanks to deforestation and the excessive use of hundreds of nearby wells. Cortez reads this slow decomposition as an ode to the impermanence of all things, even her own sculptures.
Know Before You Go: The show likewise draws inspiration from the words of the poet ruler of Texcoco, Netzahualcoyotl, who said: “Not forever on Earth: only fleetingly here. Even if made of jade it breaks, even if made of precious metal it cracks, even if made of quetzal feathers it tears. Not forever on Earth: only fleetingly here.”
“Olga de Amaral”
When: November 14, 2025 – January 17, 2026
Where: Lisson
Why It’s Worth a Look: Olga de Amaral’s vast, floor-to-ceiling textile creations helped prove definitively that fiber arts should not be relegated to the status of craft—they are an art unto themselves. Her woven tapestries map new territories in a vast array of materials, from wool and horsehair to Japanese paper, palladium leaf, and turquoise-dyed threads of linen.
Know Before You Go: At 93, Olga de Amaral has just begun to receive the acclaim she deserves in the art world. Her first major exhibition made pitstops at both the Fondation Cartier and ICA Miami last year.
“Illuminations From a Captured Soul” by Gary Tyler
When: Through December 20
Where: Official Welcome
Why It’s Worth a Look: Gary Tyler’s story is a testament to the transformative power of art. In 1974, a 16-year-old Tyler was wrongfully accused of murder and became the youngest person ever to receive the death penalty. Thousands of civil rights advocates rallied behind him, but he was held in a Louisiana prison for 42 years before his release in 2016. Throughout his time in prison, Tyler turned to art and theater for solace, leading to an extensive body of work.
Know Before You Go: Tyler first began quilting during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s as a way to raise money and provide care for those in prison hospice. Tyler’s quilts, which follow a long history of quilt-making in African American art, serve as a repository for memory, a source of comfort, and a reminder of the future.
“Horror”
When: November 21, 2025 – February 14, 2026
Where: Sprüth Magers
Why It’s Worth a Look: Halloween may be over, but the influence of horror is eternal. This group exhibition taps deep into the psychoanalytic anxieties, traumas, and repressed desires that form the basis of horror not as a genre but an aesthetic. From fears borne of Cold War tensions to the psychosexual tension of 1970s B-movies to the existential dread of the Internet age, the genre has become a potent vehicle for exploration of social and individual contagion.
Know Before You Go: This exhibition includes contributions from filmmakers like giallo legend Dario Argento and provocateur Harmony Korine; writers like absurdist poet Antonin Artaud and literary It-girl Ottessa Moshfegh; contemporary art juggernauts like Anne Imhof and Arthur Jafa; and photographers like Tyler Mitchell and Cindy Sherman.
“Unkindness” by Camilla Taylor
When: Through January 10, 2026
Where: Track 16 Gallery
Why It’s Worth a Look: In early January, Camilla Taylor got into their car to return home after an artist’s residency in rural Oregon. By the time they pulled into their house, they had only a few minutes to find their partner and pet cats before fleeing the flames that ravaged the Los Angeles neighborhood, which would eventually destroy their home, studio, and much of their work. In the aftermath, Taylor salvaged, reinterpreted, and reproduced what they lost to make this show anew.
Know Before You Go: Taylor’s cast bronze sculptures find the tension between the strength of the material and the delicacy of the natural world. The only pieces to survive the fires are, fittingly, casts of the thorny branches of blackberry brambles. The pieces, blackened and ashy, have been arranged into a triangle, the alchemical symbol for fire.
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