Featured Events in California 2024: Matches, Shows, Tours, Calendar&Tickets (December Updated)

‘And Then Came the Environment’ presents a range of Gustav Metzger’s scientific works merging art and science from 1961 onward, highlighting his advocacy for environmental awareness and the possibilities for the transformation of society, as well as his latest experimental works, created in 2014. The exhibition title comes from Metzger’s groundbreaking 1992 essay ‘Nature Demised’ wherein he proclaims an urgent need to redefine our understanding of nature in relation to the environment. Metzger explains that the politicized term ‘environment’ creates a disconnect from the natural world, manipulating public perception to obscure pollution and exploitation caused by wars and industrialization, and that it should be renamed ‘Damaged Nature.’

New York-based artist Firelei Báez has achieved wide acclaim over the past decade for her rigorous paintings, drawings and immersive installations that explore the influences of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. Conjuring forgotten narratives, Báez carefully fills history’s lacunae with joyful rebellion. In her first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth since joining the gallery in 2023, Báez presents new large-scale canvases, drawings and her first-ever bronze sculpture at the gallery’s Downtown Arts District center in Los Angeles. Complex and layered, Báez’s work depicts fantastical hybrid figures and reimagined worlds. Employing beauty to reprocess the enduring effects of violence and trauma, Báez challenges traditional representations of history, nationality, gender and race. United by common cause, the paintings incorporate a wide range of subjects including art history, science fiction, anthropology, pop culture, folklore and fantasy. ‘The fact that it amazes me does not mean I relinquish it’ is a reference to the work of Martinican writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant, a key figure in shaping theories informing the Caribbean’s influence on the global stage. Drawing inspiration from Glissant’s text, ‘Poetics of Relation’ (1990)—from which the title directly quotes—Báez navigates the tensions between identity and place, using Glissant’s concept of opacity to explore modes of resistance, namely the ability to navigate the world freely within a refusal of being fully understood—both to others and to oneself. Báez considers mythology an important tool, ‘a way of correcting the past and projecting a different future.’ Growing up in the Dominican Republic, the artist heard local folk stories about a mythic femme trickster called a ‘ciguapa’ who was known for her elusiveness. While such lore was shared to discourage unruly and wild behavior, Báez has embraced the ciguapa in her work as a figure of endless possibility. Ever-morphing and multiplying, her composite creatures are often depicted with human legs, a coat of delicate fur and backwards facing feet so that she remains traceless and ultimately unknowable. In the ciguapa, Báez explores the body as a living archive, a shape-shifting repository of meaning and history, whose continuous transformation is inherently defiant.

‘And Then Came the Environment’ presents a range of Gustav Metzger’s scientific works merging art and science from 1961 onward, highlighting his advocacy for environmental awareness and the possibilities for the transformation of society, as well as his latest experimental works, created in 2014. The exhibition title comes from Metzger’s groundbreaking 1992 essay ‘Nature Demised’ wherein he proclaims an urgent need to redefine our understanding of nature in relation to the environment. Metzger explains that the politicized term ‘environment’ creates a disconnect from the natural world, manipulating public perception to obscure pollution and exploitation caused by wars and industrialization, and that it should be renamed ‘Damaged Nature.’

In conjunction with Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide, Roberts Projects presents Betye Saar’s monumental altar assemblage, Mojotech. Created in 1987 during the artist’s residency at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), this installation-based work is a testament to the fusion of contemporary technology and the mystique of ancient spirituality.

In September 2024, Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967, Copenhagen; lives and works in Berlin) presents a new site-specific installation made for The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. In line with Eliasson’s career-long exploration of light and color, geometry, and environmental awareness, the installation playfully engages with material and immaterial qualities of the museum’s architecture. A series of large-scale optical devices designed specifically for MOCA Geffen will respond to the building itself, as well as to the everchanging atmosphere of Los Angeles. Visitors will encounter a dazzling range of sensory experiences that harness the laws of geometric optics to address feelings and concepts of embodiment, perception, and participation.

In September 2024, Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967, Copenhagen; lives and works in Berlin) presents a new site-specific installation made for The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. In line with Eliasson’s career-long exploration of light and color, geometry, and environmental awareness, the installation playfully engages with material and immaterial qualities of the museum’s architecture. A series of large-scale optical devices designed specifically for MOCA Geffen will respond to the building itself, as well as to the everchanging atmosphere of Los Angeles. Visitors will encounter a dazzling range of sensory experiences that harness the laws of geometric optics to address feelings and concepts of embodiment, perception, and participation.

Southern California’s iconic art event, PST ART, returns in September 2024 with over 800 artists, 70 exhibits, and 1 amazing theme:Art Meets Science. This “collision” will explore the intersection of art and science, past and present, with organizations presenting exhibits on topics such as ancient cosmology, Indigenous science fiction, environmental justice, and artificial intelligence.

In September 2024, Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967, Copenhagen; lives and works in Berlin) presents a new site-specific installation made for The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. In line with Eliasson’s career-long exploration of light and color, geometry, and environmental awareness, the installation playfully engages with material and immaterial qualities of the museum’s architecture. A series of large-scale optical devices designed specifically for MOCA Geffen will respond to the building itself, as well as to the everchanging atmosphere of Los Angeles. Visitors will encounter a dazzling range of sensory experiences that harness the laws of geometric optics to address feelings and concepts of embodiment, perception, and participation.

For several decades, artist Cai Guo-Qiang has used gunpowder and pyrotechnics to create drawings, paintings, and explosion events. The exhibitionCai Guo-Qiang:A Material Odysseywill fill the first floor galleries at the USC Pacific Asia Museum. Based on years of research by the Getty Conservation Institute and the Getty Research Institute,A Material Odysseywill explore the nature and properties of gunpowder and chronicle its use by the artist. This explosive material, invented in China over 1,100 years ago, has come to define Cai’s work. Its unpredictable nature dictates his artistic process and determines the outcome. Through gunpowder, the artist invites uncontrollable forces to participate in the creation of his work. With an abundance of artworks and scientific displays, the exhibition will narrate the lifelong love story of Cai Guo-Qiang with gunpowder. Programs accompanyingA Material Odysseywill include videos illustrating the making of fireworks, the process of creating gunpowder paintings, interactive displays, and a variety of film screenings and conversations.

L.A. Louver presents the debut American exhibition of a new body of work by Los Angeles-based architect and artist Thom Mayne. Investigating the philosophical intersections of impermanence and materiality, Mayne demonstrates how technology – at the frontiers of computer language and object-creation – can reframe and readdress timeless questions at the essence of artmaking.

L.A. Louver presents the debut American exhibition of a new body of work by Los Angeles-based architect and artist Thom Mayne. Investigating the philosophical intersections of impermanence and materiality, Mayne demonstrates how technology – at the frontiers of computer language and object-creation – can reframe and readdress timeless questions at the essence of artmaking.

Step into the spectacular world of Korean dramas, music, film, TV, fashion and beauty - from Netflix hits like Squidward and Oscar-winning Parasite, to chart-topping K-pop idols and influential designers - and discover how South Korea has reinvented itself as a 21st century pop culture phenomenon. Created by the V&A and touring the world, Korean Wave! “Korean Wave”includes nearly 200 objects and artworks showcasing the boundless creativity of the world’s largest and fastest-growing contemporary cultural wave from Asia.

With work that exudes cool elegance and unconventional sensuality, Tamara de Lempicka (1894-1980) helped define Art Deco. Her paintings captured the glamour and energy of postwar Paris and the cosmopolitan glamour of Hollywood celebrity. This exhibition, the first major museum retrospective of Lempicka in the United States, explores the artist's unique style and eclectic life through four main chapters. The more than 100 works on display include her post-Cubist works from 1920s Paris, her most famous nudes and portraits, and melancholic still lifes and interiors from her last days in the United States and Mexico. The exhibition offers an in-depth look at the artist's drawings and research, revealing the creative process behind her iconic paintings.

Caldwell founded the KAOS network in 1984, and the exhibition traverses time, geography, history, and memory through Caldwell’s diverse practices of photography, film, video, music, performance, community design, and interactive media.

Christina Ramberg (American, 1946–1995) is best known for her stylized paintings of fragmented female bodies. In her work, she develops a visual vocabulary of fetish objects from hands, torsos, shoes, and locks of hair. Over time these images become increasingly abstract, eventually reduced to a set of simple geometries. The first comprehensive retrospective devoted to Ramberg in almost 30 years, the exhibition presents approximately 100 works including paintings, quilts, and archival ephemera.

Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures, created in collaboration with scientists at the Carnegie Observatories and the Griffith Observatory, presents a group of rare and visually stunning artworks from different cultures and time periods to explore the variety of human attempts to explain the universe’s origins, mechanics, and meaning. Nearly every ancient culture has seen the heavens as a mirror of cosmic structure and process, and ancient measurements of time were directly influenced by the movements of heavenly bodies.Mapping the Infinitereveals how, as religions evolved, cultures conceived of and depicted cosmic deities and concepts of time and space through works of art and sacred architecture. The exhibition illuminates this history of cosmologiesaround the globe from the Stone Age to the present, from Neolithic Europe to the present day and including Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, South and Southeast Asia, East Asia,the Islamic Middle East, the Indigenous Americas, Northern Europe, and the United States.

Pace is pleased to present Overview Effect, an exhibition of new paintings by Loie Hollowell, at its Los Angeles gallery. On view from November 9, 2024 to January 18, 2025, this will be the artist’s first solo presentation in Southern California, showcasing six of her largest works to date, each measuring eight by six feet, along with two new, intimately scaled, multi-part nipple paintings. Overview Effect follows Hollowell’s solo exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut—her first museum survey and first museum presentation on the East Coast, now on view at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Institute for Contemporary Art through March 9, 2025—and her recent show at Pace’s New York gallery, Dilation Stage. Her upcoming exhibition in LA takes its title from what astronauts describe as the “overview effect”—the experience of seeing Earth from space. From that vantage point, the planet becomes a unified whole without borders or boundaries, a single system of which humanity is a tiny part. In her new Overview Effect paintings, Hollowell gives viewers a bold first impression: searing our retinas with the force of bright color, extreme lighting, symmetry, and strong geometries that take on larger-than-life proportions. Stare for a while, and you will feel the paintings’ lasting effects as afterimages linger over your field of vision and leave a psychic mark. The limited palette in this body of work, based on primary colors and their combinations, suggests something basic and elemental floating in the cosmic soup.

Artists: JOJO ABOT - Whitney Bedford - Tony Berlant - Rebecca Campbell - Richard Diebenkorn - Gajin Fujita - Vanessa German - David Hockney - R.B. Kitaj - Heather Gwen Martin - Michael C. McMillen - Alison Saar - Matt Wedel

Artists: JOJO ABOT - Whitney Bedford - Tony Berlant - Rebecca Campbell - Richard Diebenkorn - Gajin Fujita - Vanessa German - David Hockney - R.B. Kitaj - Heather Gwen Martin - Michael C. McMillen - Alison Saar - Matt Wedel

Artists: JOJO ABOT - Whitney Bedford - Tony Berlant - Rebecca Campbell - Richard Diebenkorn - Gajin Fujita - Vanessa German - David Hockney - R.B. Kitaj - Heather Gwen Martin - Michael C. McMillen - Alison Saar - Matt Wedel

Lisson Gallery is pleased to announce a new exhibition by multi-disciplinary artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, marking his first show in Los Angeles in over a decade. The presentation, titled Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form, showcases Sugimoto’s investigation of the visible and invisible world through the forms of photography, architecture, sculpture and the written word. At its core is the American debut of Brush Impression, Heart Sutra (2023), accompanied by iconic photographs from the artist’s Sea of Buddha series and a new mathematical model based on Kuen’s Surface.

David Zwirner is pleased to present The Last Dyes, an exhibition of new dye-transfer prints by William Eggleston opening at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. The works on view are from Eggleston’s celebrated Outlands and Chromes series, as well as several images that were first shown in the artist’s groundbreaking exhibition of color photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1976, and the concurrent publication William Eggleston’s Guide. The presentation is the last major group of photographs ever to be produced using the dye-transfer printing method, making it a unique opportunity to see a number of works by Eggleston in the format in which he originally presented them. Eggleston, in consultation with his sons William and Winston, chose this group of images for his final dyes as a representative selection of the immense photographic project he undertook between 1969 and 1974 during his travels through the American South and West. The Last Dyes is presented as part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, a landmark regional event exploring the intersections of art and science, both past and present. PST ART is presented by Getty.

Amy Sherald quickly came to the public eye with her portraits of former US President Barack Obama and his wife. She defined her portrait subjects as "Americans" to express that black people are also an integral part of American identity. The nearly 50 paintings on display continue her figurative representation of the black experience, placing the characters in historically typical and everyday environments, inviting the audience to participate in a more complex debate about the recognized concept of American identity.

Louis Stern Fine Arts present a series of rarely seen works by Doug Ohlson (1936-2010), created during 1969 and the first half of the 1970s. The paintings, consisting of brilliant orbs of brushed and aerosol paint that hover on richly colored backgrounds, represent a transitional phase in the artist’s career. Acting as a vehicle for his developing investigations of chromatic relationships, these process-based works facilitated Ohlson’s changing focus to color as his primary subject matter.

Marian Goodman Gallery presents the first exhibition with French artist Bernard Frize since announcing representation of him earlier this year, as well as his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in twenty years. Since the late 1970s, Frize has concentrated his practice on abstract conceptual painting that reflects on what it means to make a painting as well as how a painting can be made. Through a dedicated methodology that is at once playful, mechanical, and spiritual, Frize liberates his work from the self-expressive promise of the painterly gesture through a range of strategies that reflexively question the role and labor of the painter.

Marian Goodman Gallery presents the first exhibition with French artist Bernard Frize since announcing representation of him earlier this year, as well as his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in twenty years. Since the late 1970s, Frize has concentrated his practice on abstract conceptual painting that reflects on what it means to make a painting as well as how a painting can be made. Through a dedicated methodology that is at once playful, mechanical, and spiritual, Frize liberates his work from the self-expressive promise of the painterly gesture through a range of strategies that reflexively question the role and labor of the painter.

Sean Kelly presents Europa / America, Candida Höfer’s first solo exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery, curated by renowned architects Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee of the Los Angeles-based firm Johnston Marklee. Inspired by German-Prussian architect Erich Mendelsohn’s 1929 publication, Russland Europa Amerika: Ein architektonischer Querschnitt (An Architectural Cross Section), Johnston and Lee have selected fourteen photographs taken by Höfer between 1993 and 2015. Through Höfer’s carefully composed photographs of interior spaces primarily intended for entertainment, study, and worship, Europa / America explores sites that convey social significance in North American and European society. This novel grouping reveals a compelling impulse throughout Höfer’s oeuvre: to capture how architecture illuminates the cultural histories of a particular time and place.

Perrotin Los Angeles presents artist Leslie Hewitt’s solo presentation New Waves. This is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with Perrotin and her first at the gallery’s Los Angeles location.