TOTAH

TOTAH presents Western Gate, featuring new paintings by Mara De Luca. Western Gate will be on view from December 11th, 2024 through February 15th, 2025. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Mara De Luca’s recent paintings are storied meditations on the promise of utopia. Taking California as her inspiration, she translates its atmospheric light and littoral skyscapes into the language of abstraction. Light takes on a metaphoric value; the physical labor of painting is redressed as a sheer architecture of color and space. Moving past the observations which serve as her starting point, her paintings offer up a sheer constellation of forms for which there is no natural equivalent. Depicting skies that are more than skies, or light overwhelming sight, the works on view in Western Gate foster a specific quality of attentiveness that is equal parts experience and chimera. A technical feature apparent throughout Western Gate is De Luca’s facility for layering, which underscores the oppositions inherent in her work. Using graduated washes of color that move from warm tones to cool, subtle gestural shifts come into play. A painting like Sun Gaze (2024), for instance, is a diptych combining a systematic gradient on one side and an aleatory pour gesture on the other. Thematizing natural light, De Luca amplifies its presence to a nova-like brilliance. Across two canvases, light successively gives way to a spectral granulation of the act of seeing. As patches of canvas show through the yellow monochromatic wash, Sun Gaze analogically suggests a state of spiritual blindness, where excessive brightness is tantamount to the absence of light. The segmented narratives discoverable in De Luca's work crystallize time as a dissolving force. In paintings such as Western Gate 2 (2024), a tension emerges between the ethereal content of the image, and the stark materiality that gives it shape. Alluding to conceptualism as much as romanticism, spatial references of center and periphery become blurred. The ambiguity is less a trick of the eye than a visual gloss on the nuanced emotions registered by the viewer. De Luca uses techniques that not only add layers of visual depth, but also enhance the emotional complexity of her methods. Each wash of color or subtle obscuration represents a nuanced idea or unconscious feeling. Even when her canvases are occluded in some manner, as when a fold curtains the surface of a canvas, this only serves to affirm her chosen theme. A seamless texture that is virtually endless if not visually infinite, where the perception of a scene shades into the imagination of it, unfolding over the facture of each work like a luminous penumbra. Mara De Luca's (b. 1973, Washington D.C.) work extends the celebration of illusionism, romanticism, and the sublime with a deeply informed response to modernist painting. De Luca received an MFA from CalArts, Los Angeles, California and a BA from Columbia University, New York. Her work has been displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego and is in prominent collections, including the Buck Collection at UC Irvine, the Alexander Plaza Berlin, Germany, New York Medical College, New York, and the University of Oslo, Norway. She has been reviewed in Artforum, Cultured Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, Artweek LA, and others. De Luca is a recipient of the 2019 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists. She has taught Painting at UC San Diego, UC Irvine, UC Davis and UC Riverside, where she is currently a Visiting Professor. Based in Los Angeles for over a decade, De Luca now lives and works in New York. For further information please contact info@davidtotah.com IMAGE: Mara De Luca, Western Gate 2, 2024, acrylic on primed and unprimed canvas with brass plated element, 59 × 132 inches (150 × 335 cm). Image courtesy the Artist and TOTAH.

TOTAH presents ALL SALES FINAL!, an exhibition of paintings by Mel Bochner opening April 25th and on view through June 15th. This is Bochner’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

TOTAH presents Clockwise, a group exhibition comprising 12 artists. All of the artists included are currently represented by the gallery. Clockwise does more than highlight commonalities among the 12 artists affiliated with TOTAH. Embodying a curatorial strategy where each artist chooses a favorite work by another, what results is a symposium of overlapping admirations, a laboratory of democratized influences distilled across numerous points of esteem. The avenues of communication established between the works on view speak to the essential qualities each artist is known for, yet also reveal lesser known aspects of their sensibilities.

TOTAH presents Morphologies, an exhibition of recent works by Mike Cloud, Odili Donald Odita, Sam Jablon, Jo Messer, and Sam Messer. The exhibition presents two works by each artist depicting chaos, structure, architecture, color, and the figure. Morphology is the study of meaning, shape, and form. Each exhibited artist plays off each other and vacillates between directness and subversion. The show revolves around a dialogue and exchange linking artists who create work that employs a dichotomy of structure and significance.

TOTAH presents Letters from Home, an exhibition of recent works by TR Ericsson. Letters from Home will open September 7th, and run through November 4th, 2023. This is Ericsson’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

TOTAH presents Who is Lun*na Menoh?, an exhibition of paintings, a runway show performance, and documentary film on the multidisciplinary artist. Who is Lun*na Menoh? opens May 17th, 2023. The film examines the finer details of Lun*na Menoh’s biography and creative practice, and will screen on Saturday May 20th. This is Menoh’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, and TOTAH is pleased to announce her inclusion in the program of represented artists. Who is Lun*na Menoh? Originally from Japan, for many years Menoh has made Los Angeles her home. With a multidisciplinary repertoire that spans fashion, music, painting, performance art, and filmmaking, Lun*na Menoh is at once person and persona, a living cross section of the art and artifice her adopted city has come to offer: documentarian fanfic with a quintessentially Futurist spin. While Menoh’s earliest work in design quite literally refashioned the detritus of American life—repurposing discarded television sets or couches as wearable items of clothes—Menoh’s visual art, particularly her “dirty collar” series, rests more vulnerably on a consciousness of antagonisms, of polarities that don't necessarily converge so much as they bring out what is most singular at each extreme. While nodding to the fashion industry as well as pop culture celebrity, the paintings included in Who is Lun*na Menoh? are actually portraits. But while traditional portraits focus on the class, family, and religious affiliations of a sitter, Menoh’s portraits highlight the vestigial traces of dirt which her absent sitters have left around their collar area. Figures like Prince, or Gustave Courbet, although their bodies are absent in the works alluding to them, still inhabit Menoh's paintings on a level that is more than ghostlike. Her portrait of Duchamp, for example, makes no direct reference to the artist, but more fundamentally alludes to his posture, his physique, his habits of dress. Menoh asks viewers to consider if unseemly traces of dirt and labor, traces which stain the brands she renders so carefully, have more claim to authentically represent her absent sitters than conventional portraiture would allow for. By eliminating one polarity of the portrait tradition—reference to a person’s face—she brings to light another, less sought-after reality which portraits uniquely capture. Namely, that the individuals who sat for their portraits were once living, breathing persons; flesh and blood brings, who, even after death, have stained the world with vestigial traces of their work and labor. Lun*na Menoh is a Japanese-born Renaissance artist who lives in Los Angeles. Her work deals with garments that expose the invisible thread between performance and fabric by making sculpturesque dresses, paintings, sculptures, and a series of runway shows with her conceptual but wearable outfits. Starting In 1999, she made a series of paintings of men’s white shirts that are given a dirty, stained ring around the collar. In early 2005, she started making music, and currently performs as Les Sewing Sisters. In 2019 Les Sewing Sisters held a musical tour through 22 closets of private homes in Los Angeles. Their pop songs are about dresses and dressmaking but are approached with experimental touches, such as using the sewing machine as a musical instrument, and their debut album was released in 2021 with Lun*na Menoh's performance of Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” using Sewing machine noise. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, and the Hayward Gallery, London. Since the early 1990s she has presented work at Los Angeles art spaces and venues including Sue Spaid Fine Art, Beyond Baroque, Track 16 Gallery, Velaslavasay Panorama, and South Coast Plaza. Her work is held in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

TOTAH presents Radium, an exhibition of recent works by Brian Wills. Radium opens March 29th, 2023, and will be on view through May 13th. Wills last exhibited at TOTAH alongside Helen Pashgian for their 2017 show Transient. This is his first solo exhibition with the gallery, and in New York. Working primarily with threads and using paint only sparingly, Los Angeles-based artist Brian Wills is known for his ingenuous geometric compositions whose color saturation is only visible from specific angles. His appeal to optical illusions, or optical stimulation, leads viewers to question the objectivity and stability of the realities they encounter every day. A frame is no longer a frame in Wills’s work, but a portal guiding viewers into hidden vistas of textured surfaces and fluid variations. Image: Brian Wills Untitled (YKB beveled), 2023 oil and single-strand thread on maple diptych, each panel: 36 × 36 inches (91.5 × 91.5 cm)

TOTAH presents Dad?, an exhibition of new paintings by artist Alex Sewell. Dad? opens February 8th, 2023. This is Sewell’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. In the context of Alex Sewell’s recent body of work, autobiography and formal innovation are brought into graceful confluence. With some paintings dating from the pandemic, and others reckoning with the joys and responsibilities of fatherhood, Sewell continues to recast objects earmarked by desuetude or nostalgia, reframing them as spectral talismans.

TOTAH presents FLASH LIGHT, featuring new paintings by Luca Pancrazzi, on view from October 26th and recently extended through to February 4th, 2023. This is Pancrazzi’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

TOTAH presents CURRENTS, an exhibition of recent works by artist Melissa McGill, on view from September 8th, 2022 through October 22nd, 2022. This is McGill’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

TOTAH and Rail Curatorial Projects present Singing in Unison: Artists Need to Create On the Same Scale That Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, a group exhibition unfolding across multiple New York City venues, curated by Phong Bui and Cal McKeever. This is the first time the gallery has collaborated and hosted an external curatorial project. This exhibition supports the Rail's continued efforts to provide an independent and critical forum for visual arts, culture, and politics.

TOTAH presents WOODZ ‘N THINGZ, an exhibition of new paintings by Kenny Scharf. WOODZ ‘N THINGZ opens on the eve of Earth Day, April 21st, 2022. This is Scharf’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

TOTAH presents I STILL DON'T GET IT, featuring eleven new works by Mel Bochner,on view from February 10th, 2022 through April 16th, 2022. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, following the duo Bochner/Boetti inaugural exhibition at TOTAH in 2016. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Christopher Bollen.

TOTAH presents The Last Trapeze Artist, featuring new works by London-based artist David Austen, on view from November 11th, 2021. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Incorporating painting, watercolor, gouache, and film, the world-creating artistry of David Austen literalizes the fictitiousness of narratives. Alluding to the uncanniness of myth and fairytale, and the all-too-neat closure of stories, Austen's works are artifacts torn from a world gowned in the flesh of our own, even as they introduce viewers to a place that is intrinsically surprising and strange.

TOTAH presents Off the Grid, featuring 45 works by California art legend Wallace Berman (1926-1976), on view from September 8th through November 6th, 2021. Rarely shown on the East Coast, this exhibition is Berman’s long overdue return to New York since his last major solo retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1978.