The Biggest Gallery Shows to See in LA during Frieze Week

“RETROaction (part two)” at Hauser & Wirth DTLA

Just over 30 years ago, conceptual artist Charles Gaines curated a group show at the University of California, Irvine’s Fine Arts Gallery that opened during an especially fraught cultural moment. The LA riots in the wake of the acquittal of police officers in the arrest and beating of Rodney King had happened only months before; AIDS officially became the a leading cause of death for young men in the United States. Artists including Carrie Mae Weems, Gary Simmons, Adrian Piper, David Hammons, and Lorna Simpson participated in the exhibition. Titled “Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism,” it laid bare the pernicious ways that artists of color are marginalized by the strictures of the art world. A new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s downtown location, “RETROaction,” sees artists that participated in the original incarnation, such as Simmons, Gaines, and Simpson, are paired with other closely watched artists like Rashid Johnson, Kevin Beasley, Torkwase Dyson, Lauren Halsey, and Mark Bradford, in a show that aims, not to look back, but forward during another era of tenuous upheaval.

February 27–May 5, at 901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles CA 90013.

“At the Edge of the Sun” at Jeffrey Deitch

Two years ago, rafa esparza and Maria Maea’s illuminating conversation about art appeared in Image, the style magazine of the Los Angeles Times. At one point, esparza asked Maea about her distinctive approach to transforming objects, like palms and ice, in her work. “The ways in which you care for these materials, the ways you keep them and the ways that you work with them isn’t dissimilar to how you engage with people — at least for me, I feel like it’s been a very caring and supportive relationship that I’ve had with you,” esparza said.

His comment gestures at how generations of distinctly Los Angeles–based artists, working from different vantage points and in varying mediums, have informed and supported each others’ artistic practices in idiosyncratic ways. This group show at Jeffrey Deitch bring together these two artists with 10 others, many of whom are esparza’s frequent collaborators, like Guadalupe Rosales, Shizu Saldamando, Diana Yesenia Alvarado, Ozzie Juarez, and Mario Ayala. Showing work that illuminates their individual experiences as artists living and working in Los Angeles, this grouping aims to highlight the conscious and subconscious swerves that bring people together and coalesce into ideas. While you’re there, swing by Deitch’s other location a few blocks up, on Santa Monica Boulevard, for an exhibition of works by painter Mr. Wash, his first solo outing since his acclaimed participation in the 2021 Made in L.A. biennial.

Through May 4, at 925 North Orange Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90038.

Marina Perez Simão at Pace Gallery

A few years ago, an interactive scrolling map made the rounds online detailing the creatures that survive at various depths of the ocean. The further you descend, the more baffling and unique these beings become—like the chiton (a brilliantly-painted flat mollusk) or the hadal snailfish—alive and thriving, 8,100 meters deep (around 27,000 feet), in the complete absence of light. I was reminded of this oceanic map, and the idea of survival in impossible conditions, while viewing Marina Perez Simão’s seismic “Solanaceae” paintings at Pace Gallery. The Brazilian artist’s latest paintings center around the “phenomenological effects of different conditions of light and its absence,” according to a release. She takes on the concept of bioluminescence, for instance, through her layered brushstrokes with vivid flecks of color, and a style reminiscent of fresco techniques made famous in Florence. Bold in composition, color, and scale, Simão’s entrancing paintings consider the astounding adaptability and resilience that’s possible even amid near-total darkness and extreme pressure.

Through March 2, at 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90019.

Catherine Opie at Regen Projects

Now in its closing weeks at Regen Projects in Hollywood, photographer Catherine Opie’s expansive “harmony is fraught” exhibition sees the breadth of the artist’s work over three decades. (In New York, she recently opened an exhibition dedicated to her recent series looking at the Vatican.) Opie’s photographs, numbering over 60 here, are rooted in her observations of Los Angeles as her adopted home and ever-shifting locale. Circuitous photographs of freeways, caught in rare moments of stillness, coexist with places that no longer exist (such as The Palms, the longest-running lesbian bar in California that shut its doors over a decade ago). The people that Opie has crossed paths with stare back at us in moments of repose and strife alike, a community that has similarly embarked on the lifelong pursuit of making a place for themselves here.

Through March 3, 6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles CA 90038.

Jose Dávila at Sean Kelly

Jose Dávila’s cut-out artworks often play with the idea of looking, and what we can discern from negative space. That’s especially true of his current show, “Photographic Memory,” at Sean Kelly. In it, the Mexican artist took on Richard Prince’s “Untitled (cowboys)” photographic series, excising the eponymous figures and galloping horses from those massive works, leaving only landscape limning the absent cowboys’ silhouettes. Drawing from traditions like papel picado, Dávila’s striking reimaginings of Prince’s distinctive photographs both turn the lens back on viewers and force them to grapple with longstanding notions of American iconography—and potentially poke holes in them.

Through March 9, at 1357 North Highland Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90028.

Nora Turato at Sprüth Magers

The title of performance and video artist Nora Turato’s new show, opening this week, feels at once like an admonishment and a dare: “it’s not true!!! Stop lying!” The exhibition sees the Croatian artist tackling a series of ideas, platitudes, and quotes that dominate cultural conversations today, ranging from hand-wringing over authenticity to the wellness industrial complex. Fittingly, Turato explores these notions through a range of mediums, including performance, graphic design, installation, and video, in such a way that feels as multifaceted as the infinite ways we’re exposed to—and making sense of—information right now.

February 28–April 27, at 5900 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036.
Performance and opening reception: February 27, beginning at 5 p.m.