L.A. Louver

Gajin Fujita’s unique practice brings together wildly diverse styles, cultures, and time periods in riotous compositions that proudly affirm the artist’s Los Angeles roots. Blending West Coast graffiti styling with Edo-period Japanese aesthetics, Fujita’s work simultaneously tells two sides of his own story: a teenage tagger from Boyle Heights associated with the KGB and KIIS crews; and the son of Japanese immigrants, both artists, who was introduced to traditional Japanese art and craft at an early age.

Leon Kossoff had a lifelong practice of drawing from the Old Masters, most often in the galleries of London’s National Gallery. He stated that “working from the Old Masters opens doors for you to go on with your own work,” and as such he studied the classics intently and methodically. He had a privileged pass that allowed him access to the galleries before the general public, and he often hauled sketchpads and etching plates across town and into those hallowed halls in the early predawn hours. His process encompassed hundreds of drawings, completed very quickly, made in order to achieve a visual intimacy with his subject, be it a classical painting, a model in the studio, or the landscape around him. Drawing was his foundation, a means of knowing, remembering, experiencing, and “seeing” the world.

'The Flower Show' includes over 50 artists who work from diverse perspectives and cultural origins. From historic botanical study and still life composition, to assemblage sculpture and interactive video, the exhibition features flowers in formal, symbolic and narrative contexts. Themes of life, death, identity, memory and the environment infuse the presentation.

L.A. Louver is pleased to present a new, transformational body of work by Gajin Fujita. Created between 2020 and 2023, the paintings and drawings in True Colors demonstrate radical technical and thematic developments in Fujita’s oeuvre as the artist explores experimenting with shadow and line, the realm of social critique, and the incorporation of portraiture into his practice. This will be the artist’s sixth solo exhibition at L.A. Louver.

L.A. Louver is delighted to present Color Play, a Rogue Wave exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles based artist Dion Johnson. A coalescence of ideas and techniques developed over years of observation and painting, Dion Johnson: Color Play conjures mesmerizing vistas, layered temporalities, and affective experiences. Painted with acrylic on canvas and ranging in size from 32 x 36 in. (81.3 x 91.4 cm) to 60 x 72 in. (152.4 x 182.9 cm), Johnson’s works communicate through immediate sensation. Akin to romantic landscapes, the compositions summon emotional responses through sublime and atmospheric expansiveness, expressed by gradient color fields and cascading bands of light. Inspired by the natural world, his paintings reproduce the effects of light shifting, focusing on a spiritual in-betweenness.

L.A. Louver is pleased to present Kienholz: Exchange of Values, an exhibition of text-based artworks by Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz. Renowned worldwide for their collaborative assemblage works and immersive tableaux installations, this presentation is a unique illumination of the creative interchange between the couple in their respective art practices. Consisting of seventeen watercolors by Ed and nineteen lenticular works by Nancy, Exchange of Values places emphasis on the conceptual and relational underpinnings of Kienholz.

L.A. Louver is pleased to participate in the fourth edition of Frieze Los Angeles with a powerful presentation of rare works by the American artists Edward and Nancy Kienholz. Titled American Exceptionalism, this focused exhibition of works created between the years of 1961 and 2008 platforms the couple’s aesthetic criticisms of American ideology, society, and government.

L.A. Louver is proud to present new work by Alison Saar. In this presentation, Saar employs historical memory and media as a lens through which to view the contemporary and delves deeper into the realities, histories, and layers of Black womanhood in the United States. Titled Uproot, this exhibition excavates the intersection of racialized gender inequity and reproductive rights, taking as inspiration images of the Sable Venus and the use of herbal abortifacients as a means of resistance and revolution. Comprised of sculptures and paintings, this will be the artist’s eighth solo exhibition at L.A. Louver.

Five of the world’s leading galleries are coming together to present 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures, an unprecedented international exhibition by David Hockney. The global exhibition will be jointly presented this fall and winter across five cities: Annely Juda Fine Art in London; Galerie Lelong & Co. in Paris; GRAY in Chicago; L.A. Louver in Los Angeles; and Pace in New York. 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures presents works created by Hockney in 2021, expanding on a series of iPad paintings in 2020 while quarantining at his studio and residence in Normandy, France. Inspired by his daily observations, Hockney devoted himself to the iPad, a medium of unique immediacy that allowed him to be prolific in his depictions of his home, the changing seasons, and surrounding countryside.

L.A. Louver is pleased to present drawings, prints, and ceramics by Beatrice Wood centered on the collection of renowned scholar and curator Francis M. Naumann. This selection of works, dating from 1917 to 1996, represents the breadth and variety of Wood’s art and provides remarkable insight into her extraordinary life and creative process.

L.A. Louver is pleased to present new work by Rebecca Campbell, Yvette Gellis, Iva Gueorguieva, Heather Gwen Martin, Sandra Mendelsohn Rubin, and Alison Saar in our second floor gallery.

A Rogue Wave Project, L.A. Louver is pleased to present new photography and sculpture by the Los Angeles-based artist Sean Higgins. In his new series of photographic works, Higgins seams together multiple views of real landscapes to create imaginary terrains. A form of digital cubism, in each of his compressed images, Higgins conjures the experience of moving through and existing within the landscape.

Ed Moses’s grid works are compositions that are simultaneously flat and spatial. The rotated grid, on the dynamic diagonal, underscores that the world is never still - the layers evoke an infinite, deep space, and affirm the fact that all surfaces have depth. The color choices can be understood symbolically: black stands for earth and the reality we all inhabit, red stands for blood and what makes us sentient creatures, green as a symbol of infinity. His art celebrates the everyday miracles only paint can achieve, and we celebrate what he was able to accomplish in these powerful grid works over 40 years.

L.A. Louver is pleased to present Frederick Hammersley: Out of the Blue, a survey exhibition of the artist’s work from 1945 through the mid-1980s. The exhibition includes a wide range of medium: painting, drawing, collage, printmaking and photography, and a focus on hard-edge and organic abstraction. Drawn from six private collections, many of the works are being shown publicly for the first time. Heralded as “one of the most sophisticated painters to emerge in post-war Los Angeles,” (Hunter Drohojowska-Philp) and his paintings “the best-kept secrets in the art world and easily the most ravishing… full of rigor and cosmopolitan wit,” (Dave Hickey), this exhibition encapsulates the rich diversity of Hammersley’s creativity.

L.A. Louver is pleased to present an exhibition of sculpture by fourteen of the most prominent artists of the last century. The exhibition will take place in our first-floor galleries. Artists included in this exhibition: Tony Cragg, Edgard de Souza, Richard Deacon, Mark di Suvero, Toshikatsu Endo, Shirazeh Houshiary, Sui Jianguo 隋建國, Edward Kienholz, John McCracken, David Nash, Olaf Nicolai, Ken Price, Alison Saar, and Peter Shelton.

At Frieze Los Angeles 2022, L.A. Louver will make a powerful presentation of important paintings and drawings by the artist Leon Kossoff. This will be a unique chance to experience works by one of Britain’s most celebrated postwar artists, many of which have been hidden in prestigious private collections for decades. These significant works are returning to the market at a moment when the artist’s oeuvre has come into celebratory focus via the publication of a catalogue raisonné and a traveling retrospective exhibition. Created over a lifetime of close observation and a career spanning over sixty years, Kossoff’s thickly layered impasto captures the evolving landscape of his beloved London, as well as the changing visages of loyal friends, family and sitters. Towering construction sites, pedestrian streets and Under- ground stations are rendered as fondly as portraits of those near and dear to the artist. The retrospective exhibition 'Leon Kossoff: A Life in Painting' will be on view at L.A. Louver’s Venice Beach gallery during the run of the fair.

Annely Juda Fine Art, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, and L.A. Louver are delighted to announce 'Leon Kossoff: A Life in Painting,' a major touring retrospective of paintings by seminal British artist Leon Kossoff (1926 – 2019) that will open in London in September 2021 and travel to New York and Los Angeles in early 2022. Comprising 58 works, this touring show will be the first posthumous and largest exhibition of Kossoff’s paintings in a commercial setting to date, and coincides with the publication of 'Leon Kossoff: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings' to be released in September 2021 by Modern Art Press. The exhibition is curated by Andrea Rose, former Director of Visual Arts at the British Council and editor of the catalogue raisonné.

L.A. Louver is pleased to present SeenUNseen, a group exhibition curated by Alison Saar. The ten featured artists seem to conjure their images from another plane, giving form to something heretofore unseen and immaterial. Artists include JOJO ABOT, Rina Banerjee, Vanessa German, Kathy Grove, Julia Haft-Candell, Keisha Scarville, Ricardo Vicente Jose Ruiz, Kenyatta A.C. Hinckle, Arthur Simms, and Saar herself.

L.A. Louver is pleased to present Don Suggs: Out of Body, an exhibition that features five large-scale paintings that Don Suggs (1945-2019) created towards the end of his life, accompanied by related prints. Suggs’s Out of Body paintings were generated literally out of the artist's own "body of work." In each instance he approached a previously resolved painting that he had created in the 1970s or 80s and reworked it not in destructive fashion but in "additive" re-resolution.

L.A. Louver is pleased to present Michael C. McMillen: A Theory of Smoke, a survey exhibition that includes Observatory, 2021, a film installation; Cinema Futura, 1990-2021, a time-based multimedia wall installation; and a selection of sculptural constructions created over the last three decades with shared thematic reference to architecture.

L.A. Louver is pleased to present Yvette Gellis: Verdure, a group of eight dynamic new paintings created over the last year and hung in the gallery’s light-filled second floor space. This is Gellis’ first exhibition with L.A. Louver, the latest in the gallery’s series of Rogue Wave Projects celebrating emerging artists.

No Mask is Wholly a Mask brings together painting, drawing, photography and sculpture by a score of artists to examine the idea of the mask, and what it is to either wear a mask or take off a mask, both literally and figuratively. Artists include Terry Allen, Sarah Awad, Tony Bevan, Rebecca Campbell, Binh Danh, Jimmie Durham, Lynn Foulkes, Gajin Fujita, Charles Garabedian, David Hockney, Ben Jackel, Nancy Reddin Kienholz, R.B. Kitaj, Michael C. McMillen, Jiha Moon, Christopher Pate, Katherina Sierverding, Sandra Mendelsohn Rubin and Tom Wudl.

L.A. Louver presents a select group of works from the 1980s that encompass the diversity of impulses that arose during the decade, from formalist abstraction to politically engaged sculpture, slick geometry and finish fetish to painterly figuration and assemblage. The strength of this heterogeneity allowed the art world, over the course of the 1980s, to coalesce into something recognizable to today’s eyes, evolving from a niche aesthetic endeavor to the market powerhouse that would carry it into the new millennium.

L.A. Louver is pleased to present Rebecca Campbell: Infinite Density, Infinite Light. This expansive exhibition brings together work from the last three years that delves into hidden histories and revels in the wonders of creation and young life. Over 20 paintings are complemented by a multimedia sculpture installation. With bravura painting technique, Campbell investigates her own family history, revealing the changing nature of relationships over time and space through a reimagining of found images.

L.A. Louver is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Heather Gwen Martin, featuring abstract oil paintings in a variety of sizes, and a series of intimate gouache on paper in saturated tones. The paintings in Nerve Lines and Fever Dreams were made during this strange pandemic period and reflect the lockdown-heightened awareness of both the body in the world and the mind in the body. These dueling physical and metaphysical concerns create a push- pull of compositional energy: Martin’s rich colors ignite the mind, while organic forms and lines encourage an embodied, dancing sort of viewing — quick, and then slow. Ideas that begin as sub- conscious stories via dreams and sense memories are communi- cated through the bodily act of painting.

L.A. Louver is pleased to present David Hockney: My Normandy, an exhibition of sixteen recent prints from the internationally acclaimed artist, including eleven prints from original drawings, three iPad prints, and two 40-foot-long frieze prints. This will be Hockney’s twenty-second solo exhibition with the gallery since 1978. The most up-to-date information regarding gallery hours and appointment availability can be found on our website: lalouver.com/appointments

L.A. Louver is pleased to present the group exhibition 45 at 45, which includes works by 45 artists, timed to celebrate the forty-fifth anniversary of the gallery located at 45 North Venice Boulevard in Venice, California. As the global pandemic has required we distance from one another and engage through screens, 45 at 45 celebrates L.A. Louver’s reopening of our gallery, and physical connection expressed through the materiality of the artworks on view. The largest group exhibition in L.A. Louver’s history, over half of the participating artists are based in Los Angeles, and reflects the gallery’s founding principle: To champion L.A. artists within an international program. 45 at 45 features long- represented L.A. Louver artists such as David Hockney, Ed and Nancy Kienholz, Alison Saar; those from L.A. Louver’s Rogue Wave program of emerging L.A.-based artists: Matthew Brandt, Tia Pulitzer, Eduardo Sarabia; well-established artists for whom the gallery has high regard: Nick Cave, Tacita Dean, Elliot Hundley, Liza Lou; and rising stars: Carmen Argote, Daniel Crews-Chubb, Gabriella Sanchez. 45 at 45 draws upon many thematic strands, from the body and sensuality, to personal narrative and magical thinking, among other connections we will highlight in curated, contextual online presentations. Artists also include Sarah Awad, Rina Banerjee, Wallace Berman, Deborah Butterfield, Rebecca Campbell, Gisela Colon, Richard Deacon, Marcel Duchamp, Jimmie Durham, Kohshin Finley, Gajin Fujita, Sherin Guirguis, Frederick Hammersley, Tim Hawkinson, Ben Jackel, Leon Kossoff, Tony Marsh, Heather Gwen Martin, Jason Martin, Patrick Martinez, Dave McDermott, Michael C. McMillen, Jiha Moon, Alice Neel, Christopher Pate, Sandra Mendelsohn Rubin, Analia Saban, Sui Jianguo, Juan Uslé, Matt Wedel, Flora Yukhnovich and John Zane Zappas. The exhibition will encompass all areas of L.A. Louver, including a newly remodeled showroom that adds additional exhibition space on the second floor of the gallery. On view for an extended period of time through early 2021, 45 at 45 will allow for a singular in-person viewing experience, ensuring our visitors can enjoy our renovated gallery in optimum safety and comfort. L.A. Louver will host a series of virtual programs throughout the duration of 45 at 45, including exclusive artist conversations, studio visits and special online features. For more details, please visit lalouver.com/45.