For Frieze Los Angeles this week, we’re sharing the best exhibitions in Los Angeles currently on view. This year’s shows promise an array of fresh and compelling work straight from the heart of LA’s dynamic art scene and beyond.
Barbora Žilinskaitė’s “Chairs Don’t Cry” at Friedman Benda
Photography by Timothy Doyon, courtesy of Friedman Benda and Barbora Žilinskaitė.
February 20 – March 30, 2024
The young Lithuanian designer’s inaugural show with Friedman Benda will employ surrealistic shapes and colored dyes to manipulate her chosen medium: reclaimed sawdust. Žilinskaitė’s pieces feature curves and bends that feel like bodily motion, injecting objects like bookcases, stools, and chairs with a personified fluidity.
The artist aims to imbue the pieces with humanoid autonomy, evoking an eerie sensation in the viewer who suspects that the objects are more than they seem. “Human-like features attract us, evoke emotions and feelings, they create this weird still friendly atmosphere,” she says. Her playful work, full of bright color and organic motion, asks the audience to contemplate their own relationship with objects.
“Borrowed Recipes” and “Box” at Commonwealth and Council
Installation view of “Borrowed Recipes,” photo by by Paul Salveson, courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, Mexico City.
January 27 – March 2, 2024
“Borrowed Recipes,” unites six artists’ explorations of inheritance. Anna Sew Hoy, Carmen Argote, David Alekhuogie, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, Jesse Chun, and Patricia Fernández offer a range of pieces–from dyed linens to paintings to sculpture to reworked cookbooks– diving into their personal and collective histories to interrogate all things ancestral and familial. The work celebrates generational stories, asking the viewer to find the universal in the particular, the truth in the myth. The exhibition takes its title from a piece by photographer David Alekhuogie, who set his lens in the direction of his parent’s relationship with soul food and their family history.
Patricia Fernández, José Luis Carcedo, “Box,” n.d./2016-24, hand-carved walnut, hand-carved pine, walnut dye, bone, ceramic, silver wire, cochineal dyed fabric, oil on linen, ink on cardboard, 16.75 x 33 x 13 inches, courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council.
Since 2013, “Box” has acted as a “personalized exchange system” through which Patricia Fernández creates a long-term sculpture project. Young Chung in the shared space of Commonwealth and Council has collaborated with Fernández to update the piece every year for the past decade. In each iteration, the box accumulates new elements like repurposed drawings, writing fragments, and paintings. Now, in its final presentation, the piece has accumulated new contents like the painting of a “bone ship” and a repeating motif of the number three. At the closing reception, an accompanying publication with contributions by Andrew McNeely and Doris Chon will be made available.
Jason Rhoades’s “DRIVE” at Hauser & Wirth
Installation view of “Jason Rhoades. DRIVE,” Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles, 27 February 27, 2024—January 14, 2025, © The Estate of Jason Rhoades, photo by Keith Lubow, courtesy of the Estate and Hauser & Wirth.
February 27, 2024 – January 15, 2025
A collection of automotive-themed works celebrating Jason Rhoades’s iconic career will premiere in conjunction with The Parking Space. The exhibition is a retrospective of the late artist’s relationship with cars and car culture. True to form, the collection will examine the idea of cars as class signifiers and “icons of art history.” The gallery will also offer various programs, including a curated film series overseen by film historian and critic Elvis Mitchell. Additionally, Hauser & Wirth’s Performance Project will deliver a dramatic production of Charles Mee‘s ‘Under Construction,’ which draws inspiration from Rhoades’ art as it relates to cars in modern America.
Throughout the year, the space will transform three times as the concept evolves from the Pit to the Racetrack, to the Garage. Cars featured in the show include a Chevrolet Caprice, a Chevrolet Impala, a Ferrari 328 GTS, and a Ligier microcar. The vehicles will be parked inside the gallery space alongside a video in which Rhoades speaks on his concept of the Car Projects.
Best Exhibitions in Los Angeles: John McCracken at David Zwirner
John McCracken, Wave, 2004, © The Estate of John McCracken. Courtesy The Estate of John McCracken and David Zwirner.
February 28 – March 30, 2024
Presented on the ninetieth anniversary of the late artist’s birth, John McCracken’s signature columns and planks will again be on view in his former home city of Los Angeles for the first time in twenty years. McCracken’s work will be presented in a solo show, reflecting on his incredible fifty-year-long career. Though he relocated to Santa Fe in the 1990s, McCracken’s work has always been inextricably associated with a minimalist West Coast sensibility– one which generations of subsequent artists have cited as an influence.
A pioneer figure, McCracken created starkly original works that were as grounded in materiality as they were otherworldly. For the artist, the plank and column structure was “multivalent, alternately functioning as a gateway to other worlds, a spiritual self-portrait, or simply just a pleasing object to be admired.” The selected pieces on view at David Zwirner will span the artist’s career, offering his audience a site at which to honor his life and work.
Summer Wheat’s “Fertile Ground” at Nazarian / Curcio
February 24 – April 6, 2024
Brooklyn-based artist Summer Wheat returns for her third solo show with Nazarian / Curcio. The works in the exhibition explore the dynamic between labor and leisure through a mix of sculpture and painting. Commentaries of gendered performance stand alongside surrealist visions of nature– explosions of flora and fauna that imagine a utopian world while reckoning with our own. The world in “Fertile Ground” holds recurring motifs of water, beekeepers, and swirling gardens. Wheat’s tactile paintings might appear to be tapestry or beadwork but are achieved instead by pushing paint through pastry bags, syringes, and wire to foster a sense of texture beyond the two-dimensional. The collected works explore a futurist sensibility in their articulation of the past.
Summer Wheat, “FOUNTAIN WITH SUNFLOWERS,” 2023, acrylic paint and gouache on aluminum mesh, framed, 69 ¾ x 48 ¾ inches, courtesy of the artist and Nazarian / Curcio.
