Vielmetter Los Angeles

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present a new group of paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Esther Pearl Watson for Frieze New York 2021. The works will also be on view in the Greenhouse space at the gallery through May 29. Continuing her series of diaristic narrative paintings documenting the Covid-19 pandemic as it unfolds, Watson's works give a personal perspective filtering the timeline and reality of living through the pandemic through her own life in Los Angeles.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to present Jello and Petit Fours – 4 exuberant gouache paintings on paper by Ellen Berkenblit. Last summer, Berkenblit placed an online order for 30” x 22” sheets of paper. By accident, 30” x 44” sheets arrived. The vast sheets of paper barely fit on her drawing table. Approaching with pencil or brush, standing to engage the full span of her arm, even with this richness of space, her compositions could not be contained.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce an online presentation of new paintings by Monique van Genderen on both Gallery Platform Los Angeles and on the Vielmetter Los Angeles webpage. Titled “Each of These Paintings Can Be Named After a Famous Painter,” the group of works represent the artists foray into a new mode of painting focused on the mechanisms of drawing at an intimate scale. These material departures create a collection of bijou compositions that display van Genderen’s adeptness with abstraction. A selection of exquisite compositions will be featured on each platform to create a conversation between both groups of works.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present an exhibition of new photographs by Edgar Arceneaux, entitled Until, Until, Until...The Presidential Bookend Series (2015-2020). Marking Arceneaux’s eighth solo presentation with the gallery, the online exhibition features eight key photographic compositions archived from the performances of Until, Until, Until… — Arceneaux's first live work, investigating the infamous 1981 performance ( and its aftermath) of Broadway legend Ben Vereen, televised nationally - but not in full, as part of Ronald Reagan's inaugural celebration. This suite of photos represents a graceful distillation of the arc and breath of this tragic story.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present Genevieve Gaignard's solo exhibition "A Long Way From Home," in conjunction with MCLA Berkshire Cultural Center's Gallery 51. Gaignard's exhibition, the result of her residency at MCLA, features new collage works that address the historical and political turbulence of race in America and the reemergence of Black Lives Matter protests in response to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present an online exhibition of works on paper by April Street. Entitled “Circling the Drain” it features 12 watercolors which are related to her recent exhibition at the gallery and translate the artist’s relief-style painting onto a flattened plane. Lines of braids and plump shapes mimic meandering vines and overripe fruit - root vegetables and flowers in vibrant utopian settings appear cracked or bitten. These still-lifes and fanged landscape portals are infused with equal parts dark humor and aesthetic joy. Created over the past several months while in quarantine, this body of work juxtaposes Street’s painterly practice which is influenced by specific art historical contexts with the uncertainty and turbulence of this pandemic.

Sean Duffy’s Alone Now is an immersive installation which is both an experimental self-portrait and a commentary on the symbolic nature of the garage as a site of masculine creativity. The labyrinth-like installation is divided by steel frame structures and made up of a helter-skelter arrangement of finished and abandoned projects ranging from light fixtures made out of sports helmets to screen printed tapestries and magazine collages. The tight and cluttered space is tinged with an unsettling feeling of an abandoned room, a safe space of sorts that seems to have been left to collect dust for unknown reasons.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present Nevertheless..., an online exhibition of new drawings by artist Whitney Bedford.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present our second online exhibition during this unprecedented and challenging time. “Words of Encouragement” is a series of new works by Esther Pearl Watson painted while in quarantine.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present New Neural Pathways, an exhibition of new works by Brad Eberhard. Marking Eberhard’s second solo presentation with the gallery, the online exhibition includes a series of 12 paintings on canvas and 17 works on paper — showcasing the artist’s humorous and cosmic discourse with abstraction.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce a presentation of Kim Dingle’s “Home Depot Coloring Book” paintings on Gallery Platform LA.Dingle began making this series of paintings in 2017, utilizing OSB board, a utilitarian equivalent to compressed plywood. Recognizing the creative potential within the board’s patterns Dingle colors in the ready-made strands, creating inherent and endless compositions — of which the artist insists; anyone can do.

As the world has come to a moment of forced quietness, Vielmetter Los Angeles presents to you a series of online exhibitions during this unprecedented and challenging time. Our first online exhibition —“An Hour is a Sea” by New York artist Louise Fishman — features a suite of exquisitely tiny paintings (each measuring approximately 2 to 4 inches), alongside a serenely calm and meditative Untitled work from 1971, and a lustrous painting from 2016, entitled Jasper.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to announce our second solo exhibition of new work by Arlene Shechet. Shechet’s approach to sculpture is both rigorous and playful, rooted in transformations of experience and material. In Best Picture, the artist continues to explore the evocative potential of objects; bringing together a winning cast of characters rendered in ceramic, metal, and wood. Best Picture is an ironic name for a show of sculptures; it directs the viewer to consider Shechet’s painterly approach to sculpture. Her work revels in interactions between color and shape, balance and the askew, rendering sculptural objects that are at once convincingly unified shapes and obviously composed in “real-time.” The artist composes her work in a series of intuitive moves building one upon the other, without referring to sketches or maquettes. Color, in the form of glaze and paint comes last, always applied with a great deal of attention to finish and texture, compliment and contrast. This results in sculptures that defy viewers’ anticipations; “real time” discovery is part of the viewing experience too. With each turn, a new detail or element reveals itself, inviting prolonged examination and conversation between viewer and sculpture, building intimacy between their body and the work.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present Strange Fruit, the gallery's second solo exhibition with Genevieve Gaignard, opening Saturday, March 19 and running through May 7, 2022. With Strange Fruit, Genevieve Gaignard opens a door to haunting nostalgia of America's relationship to racial violence. This exhibition marks her most extensive and provocative body of work to date, focusing on historical and modern-day acts of lynching. The title, borrowed from Billie Holiday's iconic song, interfaces a range of unapologetic commentary on the American psyche, simulating its inseparable tie to the horrors visited upon black people. This work emerges against history's recent spate of calls for racial justice and draws attention to this country's racial progress—or lack thereof. Strange Fruit asks: Do you only want to see what you believe? One seminal work in the exhibition, The American Dream is a Pyramid Scheme, is marching for justice, personified. A mountain of headless salt and pepper shaker mammy figurines opens the cupboard to expose materials of America's past. At all once, Gaignard ushers caricature into confrontation, conjuring the march of millions, "SAY HER NAME," the terracotta soldiers, and a history of resistance that relies on collective voice and body. These vessels patrol every direction, in some sense steering viewers, as the exhibition is meant to do, into an experience of imagining others' realities and challenging how we assign value to objects and people. In Strange Fruit, Gaignard returns to figurines as her primary element. In the past, she has removed and discarded the heads of Royal Doulton figurines and replaced them with the heads of mammy housewares. Now, she brings us The Apple Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree, a display of life-sized Royal Doulton heads, tenderly placed upon plinths, symbolizing two different things: rediscovery in her practice, and simultaneously what goes unnoticed in our society. With these heads, figures of idealized white beauty evolve into a presentation of implied violence, or trophies. In the work titled Strange Fruit on the Juke Samantha Farrell, Gaignard’s childhood friend, sings a rendition of Strange Fruit that plays from a refurbished vintage jukebox, outfitted to fit within Gaignard's slippery landscape. Pulling on American sentimentality while reinforcing the place of song and protest in this work, this piece is a connector for Gaignard's preoccupations in the show. Gaignard's choices—the wallpaper, the ever-present bric-a-brac, re-tooled gumball machines, and neon—transport us into childhood and by-gone eras, but more importantly, they serve as cues to see the visual rhymes and dissonance in the work and systems of our world. In a series of sumptuous new photographs, Off With Their Heads, Gaignard embodies Royal Doulton figurines, posing amongst florals and fruit, against the background of a stately yet profoundly dilapidated mansion. Evoking the Southern Gothic tradition, Gaignard undermines a host of social hierarchies, standards of beauty, superiority, and race, leading us to a dreamlike place where these narratives might appear absurd and fragile. Gaignard inserts herself into the work, mining her own experiences to encourage reflection of the past and provoke a change in thinking. Strange Fruit entices you to images of seeming beauty—intricate portraits, layered installations, and sophisticated collage and assemblage—that serve as props to expand a narrative that still requires a major revision.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to announce our third solo exhibition with New York-based painter, Ellen Berkenblit, Other Shapes at Night. Berkenblit makes pictures that are neither narrative nor representational nor truly abstract. While she uses motifs that include people, animals, plants, and objects to construct her compositions–suggesting the possibility of narrative or representational content–it is the tension between the suggestion of this content and its absence that produces an electrifying aesthetic arousal in response to the artist’s paintings. Composed intuitively, shape and color responding to and covering over what came before, Berkenblit’s paintings evoke pictures of the subconscious; snapshots of visions and ideas that arise spontaneously and are as richly felt as they are fleeting. Throughout her career, Berkenblit has had an inexhaustible appetite for exploring the possibilities of paint. Her work is defined as much by her idiosyncratic polychromy, an always evolving palette that develops from her expertise in mixing and layering color, as it is by her unique graphic style, anchored in a calligraphic language of shapes emerging from rich and dynamic painted black grounds. In many of her new works, all painted over the last year, the palette has shifted and warmed, her usual bright colors now wrapped in a diffused, warm light, not dissimilar to the potent interaction of incandescent streetlights and high levels of humidity. The resulting body of work is dreamlike and surreal, heightening the suggestive nature of the artist’s compositions, drawing the viewer into an evocative interior space.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present Patterns for Models, an exhibition of new large-scale ceramic sculptures by Los Angeles-based artist Bari Ziperstein. The exhibition will open on February 5, 2022 in the Greenhouse Gallery. Over the past 20 years, Bari Ziperstein (b. 1978; Chicago, IL, USA) has developed a mastery of ceramics that allows her to push the limits of scale, experiment with color and finish, and use the shapes and surfaces of her sculptures to tell stories and convey ideas. Her work is materially experimental but conceptual and research-based at its core. She approaches her work from an intersectional feminist position, asking questions about how women and women’s work are positioned within societal frameworks, and her work reflects her interest in the ways that art and other visual and spatial materials convey meaning. Ziperstein’s process often starts with archival materials to explore the ways that visual culture and the built environment signal repressive social and political ideologies.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present Skinning the Mirror, the gallery’s eleventh solo presentation by Los Angeles-based artist Edgar Arceneaux, featuring a cohesive installation of multi-media paintings and sculpture. On this recent series of material-based abstractions, art historian Julian Myers-Szupinska writes: The matter of mirrors is central to Edgar Arceneaux’s new body of work. This is figuratively true—they are about mirrors and the self-relations they enable—and factually the case, as each artwork is derived from a found mirror. Through a strenuous process that is both chemical and physical, Arceneaux has decoupled the mirror’s reflective metal backing from its rigid glass substrate and imposed it onto loose canvas. That this is not a smooth or simple process is evident in the objects that result from it. The transfer is often rocky and incomplete—sometimes the transfer doesn’t take completely. And one witnesses across the ongoing series evidence of rippling, concussion-like impacts, where glass substrate broken along the way has impressed its fragmentation onto the distressed visual field. One sees, too, the layering of colors, black, rust, and toxic verdigris, that parse as gestural—even abstract.

“I must create a new regime Or live by another man's Before the moon falls I must create a new scheme And get out of others' hands Before the moon falls” Vielmetter Los Angeles presents “Before the Moon Falls”, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Raffi Kalenderian. Titled after The Fall’s 1979 post-punk song “Before the Moon Falls”, Kalenderian’s newest works hinge on the angst and bliss of creative output. Known for his visually dense and highly patterned portraits that fuse subjects with their environments and imbue them with a potent psychological charge, Kalenderian delights in the pleasure of looking closely and treating people and their environments with equal weight through sumptuous details, thickly laid paint, and vivid color.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present Sehnsucht, the gallery’s first exhibition with New York-based painter Ross Bleckner. This exhibition of recent paintings also marks the artist’s first solo show in Los Angeles in over 25 years. On view is a selection of paintings comprised of an array of symbolic imagery, such as flowers, ghostly figures, anatomical moments, and abstract landscapes. Ethereal and hallucinatory, the compositions blend abstraction with realism, as Bleckner’s visual iconography shifts in and out of focus, offering radiant passageways of hope within an ethos of transformation. Bright colors rendered with a blurred, glowing sense of light fade into the artist’s signature depths of impossible darkness — the masterfully executed paintings express a multitude of emotions and conditions such as anxiety and loss, while also proposing a quest for more; that which may be beyond suffering. The title of the exhibition — Sehnsucht — a German compound word, originating from an ardent longing (das Sehnen) and addiction (die Sucht) is used here to describe that yearning for an ideal. Over the last fifty years, Bleckner has chronicled his own continual search for truth and beauty through an ever-suggestive language of variety and vision — as if painting his contemplative awareness of time, our collective societal transitions, and the fragilities of existence. Bleckner’s paintings can often be seen as depictions of consciousness itself mutating, as a means of exploring the terrain(s) between the body, perception, and transcendence. Employing a wide range of expressiveness and painterly tropes Bleckner's immersive paintings seamlessly marry the metaphysical with the world of appearances, the inside with the outside, and the somber with the sensual.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to present Hugo McCloud’s second exhibition with the gallery, “translated memories”, featuring a suite of new flower paintings made of single-use plastic bags with artist-made frames. Over the last year, McCloud began a series of flower paintings as a strategy to maintain calm and focus during the pandemic – some bouquets in vases and others cropped close-ups of singular flowers. Continuing his exploration of plastic bags as raw materials, McCloud’s new paintings exhibit skillful expertise in manipulating the plastic to transform it into texturally rich swaths of color, creating complex and visually stunning forms.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is honored to present Nicole Eisenman's 2019 sculpture Man at the Center of Men. Sculpted from plaster, foam, fiberglass, and epoxy resin, Man at the Center of Men is exemplary of Eisenman's radically indeterminate and open approach to making narratives, metaphors, and allegories of the human experience. Man at the Center of Men was a central element of the artist's 2019 Whitney Biennial installation, shown on the Whitney Museum of American Art's 6th-floor terrace, as part of a massive installation of walking figures entitled Procession, 2019. There, the sculpture was together with its fellows through wind, rain, and sun; and has since been exhibited at The Contemporary Austin and the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo.

What do marbles, vintage erasers, maps painted by Las Vegas teenagers, and an atlas of animals have in common? Not much–but they are all subjects of interest to Pudgey Pomona, reference librarian, who has curated a collection of curiosities and collectibles, some by the hand of Los Angeles-based artist, Kim Dingle. Plus, Miss Pomona has also curated an exhibition of works by the artist Francesca Lalanne who is not a party to nepotism.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present “Afterimages,” Monique van Genderen’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery. Continuing her explorations in the field of abstraction and painting’s relation to spatial contexts, van Genderen’s latest project takes up the task of monumentally scaled horizontal paintings. The two thirty-five-foot-long paintings, entitled “A side” and “B side, are inherently related, yet slightly different, speaking to concepts of origination and genesis, one painting describing the other. Hanging on walls opposite each other they create a visual dialogue between abstract fields that are reflective in their compositions. Working simultaneously on the two large surfaces, van Genderen directed the painting through replication and repetition, references and shapes confirming each other into existence and culminating in a composition that is at once underwater and on the street.

Text by John Belknap Plot (a) A small piece of ground, generally used for a specific purpose. (b) Or, a measured area of land; lot. She sits upright on her stool. She pushes her twilight hair over her left eye leaving her right eye free to observe. A rippled collarbone supports her charm-pink neck and face. Below her collarbone are two incongruent breasts separated by a stroke of cerulean blue. She grips her left wrist with ambivalence. Two fingers silently tap the underside of her stool. She has purple legs. Her right foot arches as it balances on the bottom rung of her stool. Her left leg extends out and onto the negative space of the canvas so that her left foot finds support on deserted ground. The carmine blush on her foot gives weight to the abandoned terrain that surrounds her. She calls this land her own.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to announce “O’ Say Can’t You See,” Deborah Roberts' second solo exhibition at the gallery. Roberts' work is on view from September 4, 2021, until October 16, 2021. Roberts’ new collages on canvas and paper portray the humanity and grace of Black children as they face the harsh and relentless reality of a society that seeks to see and treat them as adults. Over the last decade, Roberts has primarily focused on imaging young girls, originally beginning with self-portraits of herself as a child, and she has in the last few years begun to incorporate young boys. Working in collage with sourced imagery and increasingly incorporating hand-drawn and painted elements, Roberts portrays the vulnerability, strength, and beauty of these children. The exhibition's title, “O’ Say Can’t You See,” repurposes text from the national anthem and posits the question to the viewer: can’t you see these children as children, deserving of the same care and dignity afforded to their peers?

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to announce Los Angeles based artist and activist Andrea Bowers’ fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, Energy with Intention. Her new exhibition centers on a group of larger-than-life original drawings of women practitioners of different forms of martial arts and self-defense. For years I’ve been determined to make representations of empowered women. In this exhibition I am continuing an ongoing series of larger-than-life drawings of femme identity. I’ve returned to the subject of women performing martial arts and self-defense techniques. The works are drawn and painted on large, collaged, cardboard grounds, a process that has been evolving for years, since attending Occupy Wall Street when I fell in love with the sublime collection of cardboard placards at the actions. I think about these collaged cardboard works as monumental protest signs. The grounds are made entirely of recycled materials while simultaneously providing interesting content with the cardboard browns and tans. I wanted to show the beauty of the collaged cardboard, so I kept these drawings minimal in their use of color and line. In my twenties I was reading about and studying minimalism as well as the Judson Dance Theater’s celebration of democratic movement, and I began to see the overlap between the two genres where minimal human scale objects become props for feminist dance. In these new works the gestures like the hammer strike, groin strike, open fist punch, etc. when stilled and framed as a drawing begin to feel like choreography. An ongoing theme in my work has been the linkage between civil disobedience and dance. The source material for these works are my own photos of women in the LA area who are practitioners of different forms of martial arts and self-defense. I asked them to wear street clothes and dresses. The dresses along with the line quality, scale and transparency, unexpectedly confound traditional notions of femininity, emotionality and power. This is the first time I have used my own drawings for these large cardboard works. In the past I appropriated and recontextualized historical images. Using my own drawings has allowed me to use formal elements in a very personal way; I’m trying to complicate empowered femme identity with vulnerability, physical agility, fragility, monumentality and strength. These works are a celebration of the triple goddess, the maiden the mother and the crone. The women I photographed are of various generations, while two are actually mother and daughter, and of course the artist is the proud crone. Patriarchy continues to normalize sexism, racism, economic inequality and rape culture. The battle continues. --Andrea Bowers, August 2021

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present, Skinning the Mirror, a new body of work by Los Angeles-based artist Edgar Arceneaux on view in our Greenhouse Gallery July 24 - August 21, 2021. Over the past two decades, Arceneaux has engaged in an expansive multi-media practice where linear logic is typically abandoned in favor of experimentation, association, and where seemingly disparate elements find synchronicity and new possibilities in the artist’s hands.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to present Vitreous Opacities, an exhibition of new works by Yunhee Min, on view from July 3 - August 14, 2021. The exhibition consists of new paintings on glass alongside standing works that explore Min's interest in the interaction of poured paint on glass. Vibrant hues of acrylic paint mixed with enamel spill out onto the glass surfaces, the clash of colors and mix of opaque and translucent pigments create energetic compositions that capture the liquid nature of paint. Fixed onto the glass, the paint's impression of wetness is heightened to engender a sense of suspension, akin to the surface tension of liquid materials trapped in a glass slide.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present a second iteration of the gallery’s 20th anniversary exhibition on view from June 26th through August 7th, 2021. As Los Angeles re-opens, we are thrilled to continue celebrating this important milestone with our artists, clients, staff, and guests. The gallery’s program was built with the belief that contemporary art has relevance for all audiences. For this reason, equity of representation has always been a guiding principle in our program. It is with great gratitude that we look back on a richly faceted exhibition history resulting from this approach.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present a new body of collages by Los Angeles-based artist Steve Roden. Over the past 30 years, Roden has developed a highly idiosyncratic aesthetic language and a complex practice across multiple media distilling personal meaning into abstract forms often relating to text and sound. Rooted in an interest in the relationship between sound and language, Roden’s new collages continue his particular visual lexicon of abstraction coupled with found imagery from his collection of album covers, bringing together his interest in abstract forms and experimental music onto intimately scaled visual planes. Taking the impetus from the collaged imagery Roden then improvises with acrylic paint creating dynamic and layered compositions.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Louise Fishman. The exhibition, entitled We’ll Meet Again will be on view from March 27- May 15, 2021. We’ll Meet Again presents a unique perspective on Fishman’s signature approach to working with the material possibilities of paint – pairing new paintings created in her studio in upstate New York over the past year (2020) of quarantine with a selection of older works made between 1974 - 1985 from the artist's personal archive. Also on view are a selection of recent watercolors on paper and board, intimate in scale, consisting of an array of color and texture. Though painted forty plus years apart from one another, the connections between the paintings in We’ll Meet Again are abundant; from the methodology and physicality of the artist’s application of paint to her preoccupation with an intuitive painterly knowledge to the striking surfaces of each artwork made evident through inventiveness, tactility, and rigor.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Patrick Wilson. The exhibition marks Wilson’s ninth solo presentation with the gallery and will be on view from March 13 - April 24, 2021. Patrick Wilson is an abstract painter and perceptualist, whose idiosyncratic work is imbued with such California movements as 'Hard Edge' and 'Light and Space,' and a keen discipline of observing and considering the ever-changing contemporary landscape.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to announce The touch of Otherness, Hayv Kahraman’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. Kahraman’s new paintings reflect her recent interrogation of the intersecting vocabularies of war and of immunology and epidemiology—Doctors envisioned as generals helping the patient fight the effects of external invaders, invisible terrorists, who multiply inside the body, weakening it and making it vulnerable to further contamination. In our current reality, it is impossible to ignore the parallels between the language used to describe viruses and cancers and the language used to describe migrant people. The language of war is nearly as destructive as war itself – it breaks social ties, undermines the possibility of existing in community, in solidarity, with those who are different, and renders longstanding damage to the potential of peaceful, equitable coexistence in the future. With a poetic visual language that oscillates between confrontation, humor, and tenderness, Kahraman’s recent work demands that we consider the long-term effects of militaristic metaphors in the discourse of health.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present the gallery’s first exhibition with Los Angeles based artist Math Bass. Titled Desert Veins, the exhibition will be on view from January 23rd to March 6th, 2021. Marking the artist’s first body of work composed of oil paint — the exhibition introduces a significant shift in medium, technique, mannerism, and possibility. Continuing to utilize their signature visual lexicon of symbols and shapes, Bass challenges and softens the notably graphic composition(s) found throughout the artist’s previous bodies of work. Along with the appearance of hand-painted gestures and an enhanced sensuality amongst the artist’s personal semiotics, Bass allows for a wider range of symbolism, as well as an intentionally spiritual angle to come through their already ambitious and cosmological practice. Within these additional levels of engagement, Bass creates a visceral sense of forgiveness towards the rigor of maintaining a hard-edge universe, conveying a more 'irreplaceable moment’ within their expressive powers.

This Is Real explores the directness and immediacy of small scale drawings, ultimately expanding the original size and formations into larger scale constructions which reflect on themes of identity and transformation. Hovering between representation and abstraction, the fragmented surfaces emote the presence of the hand—a physical body and its imprints—while the shapes, colors and content suggest the space of the mind, complicating the interplay between internal and external realities. Benning ruminates: asking us to further question how reality is constructed, manipulated and controlled—and how binary structures are used to do so.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present an ambitious series of new paintings by Esther Pearl Watson. “Safer at Home: Pandemic Paintings,” was begun in March at the onset of the shelter in place orders in Los Angeles and spans the timeline of the Covid-19 Pandemic through a diaristic narrative. In a continuous series of over 100 paintings Watson chronicles her and her family’s experience of the pandemic and subsequent events that have unfolded over the last several months offering an opportunity to reflect upon this year of upheaval and change.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition of Kennedy Yanko’s work, “Salient Queens.” Opening on October 10, 2020, the exhibition features a series of sculptures that both combine and juxtapose found metal with supple colored paint skins. The resulting conversations between these fundamentally opposite materials create striking forcefields within each sculpture where the impact of pressure applied to the metal contrasts sharply with the smoothly draped painterly skins that spill forth from cracks and openings in the powerfully bent metal.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce Los Angeles-based artist Rodney McMillian's sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. In addition to his exhibition at our gallery, McMillian’s work will be on view in several museums this fall. His 2010 work in black vinyl, titled Succulent is currently prominently installed in the Agnes Gund Garden Lobby at The Museum of Modern Art, NY for re-opening following the COVID-19 lockdown. A selection of McMillian’s video works that address the political histories of the United States is on view in the solo exhibition Historically Hostile at the Blaffer Art Museum until September 20. Also in Houston, Untitled (The Supreme Court Painting), 2004 – 2006 and Untitled (Flag IV), 2012 are on view in States of Mind: Art and American Democracy at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University. Taken together with the new works on view at Vielmetter, these presentations mark McMillian’s more than two-decade exposition of histories, ideologies, and structures that have shaped the United States.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce our first exhibition with Los Angeles based artist, Sarah Cain. Cain, who joined the gallery in 2019, paints exuberant abstractions that often extend beyond the canvas into installations, site- specific painting, stained glass and furniture that play with and meld references from throughout visual art, music, and our culture at large. Titled The possibility of overcoming negative thought, the work in this exhibition radiates an urgent and necessary optimism in a moment where we seem to be collectively teetering between infinite possibility and absolute despair. In this exhibition, which includes paintings, a new edition work in stained glass, and a large on-site painting in the gallery’s Lanai (viewable from the North parking lot at 1700 S Santa Fe,) Cain is weaving bits of her life into color, abstraction, and spatial intervention.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce the gallery’s fourth solo exhibition with New York-based painter Elizabeth Neel. Life in Halves presents a new suite of large scale paintings on canvas and a group of works on paper that extend her interest in the externalization of physical and psychological experience via abstraction. Using a diverse vocabulary of mark-making tools, including fingers, rags, brushes, mono-printing techniques and rollers, Neel’s paintings are ripe with emotive lyricism suggestive of the correlative and repetitious cycles of daily life.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to announce our first solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya, A conversation (about) around pictures. These new works, made in Sepuya’s Los Angeles studio between 2017 and early 2020 represent a subtle evolution of the artist’s thoughts about how pictures are made, seen, and circulated. In several of the works on view, multiple images of alternate points of view appear in the on screens of sitters' and collaborators' iPhones, reflected in the mirror that is the technical focus of all of Sepuya’s photographs. In others, the focus is on the space of the studio itself, rendered strange and indeterminate by multiple reflections and a proliferation of images in the form of test prints adhered to the wall, arranged on tables, or otherwise visible in the space of the image. Following his participation in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, where Sepuya included not only images made by his camera in his studio, but also images made by other artists in their cameras in his studio, several potential conversations around pictures emerge in this body of work.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to announce Double Dominant, an exhibition of new drawings by Karl Haendel. This suite of 24 monumental drawings will be presented in two parts. Part one, made up the first twelve drawings, will open January 25 with a reception from 4- 7pm; part two, a re-hang of the show with twelve new drawings, will open on February 15, 2020. A volume reproducing the complete set of works, published by Triangle Books with an essay by Natilee Harren, will accompany the exhibition.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present the gallery’s first exhibition with Los Angeles based portrait painter John Sonsini. Comprised of full-length figures, bust portraits, and still lifes, the exhibition, Cowboy Stories & New Paintings, centers on the theme of cowboys living in Mid City Los Angeles. Emblematic of Sonsini's 50 yearlong practice, his all-male portraits oscillate between the intimacy of depicting a specific person's likeness and more generally addressing broad issues of gender mythology. In “Francisco”, we see the sitter exchanging his street clothes for the western clothing he's unpacked from a suitcase, thus witnessing the transition from the everyday to the performative.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to announce Reflections on the Anthropocene, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Whitney Bedford. Reflecting upon how humans have chosen to record images of the natural world, Bedford's new landscapes draw upon an archive of historical landscape paintings to illustrate how images from the past underscore the dire reality of climate change and shifting ecosystems in the present.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to announce the opening of An Analphabet, an exhibition of new works by Shana Lutker opening on September 20, 2019. Lutker creates a precarious, shifting installation of sculptural forms. Highly polished reflective steel is cut into recognizable shapes—a lasso, a perforated A-frame, an eye—which are also suggestive of letters or sounds. Culled from her studio archives of materials, surrealist ephemera, and found objects, Lutker presents a body of work that yearns to be more. An Analphabet insinuates the possibility of a world, and all the shapes and objects in it, as a text to be read.

"The light touch is often the strongest gesture of all" - Helen Frankenthaler, 1962 Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present The Light Touch, an exhibition featuring a selection of artists working across numerous modes of abstract painting. The exhibition uses Frankenthaler’s quote as an organizing principle–the artists, though varied in their approaches, share an interest in the play of light and spirit of pleasure through color and gesture.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present our second solo exhibition with Los Angeles based painter Nick Aguayo, Wake the Town and Tell the People. In this new body of work, Aguayo presents a series of paintings whose style is evidently rooted in the process of collage – thick impasto surfaces and textural areas of built up and removed paint reveal layers of the compositions which appear both highly orchestrated and invigoratingly improvised.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition of new works by Los Angeles based artist Genevieve Gaignard, I’m Sorry I Never Told You That You’re Beautiful. Known for her exploration of Americana via racial formation, interiority and portraiture, Gaignard disrupts symbols and images, which attempt to assure supremacy and erase merging identities and notions of belonging. This exhibition explores affinity of place, desires of flight/departure, and an empathic turn through installation, collage, sculpture, and photography.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce Samuel Levi Jones’ second solo exhibition with the gallery, No More Tokens. In this new body of work, Jones continues his process of deconstructing academic reference books by stripping them of their covers and repurposing the materials to compose abstract paintings. The works in this exhibition are comprised specifically of fabric book jackets from art historical publications published in the last 50 years. Jones’ culls the book jackets from used and discarded art books in order to engage with authoritative narratives which perpetuate inequities in the art world, particularly the exclusion of artists of color, female artists, and other marginalized populations from such sources of knowledge.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present an exhibition of sculptural works by Edgar Arceneaux, Nicole Eisenman, Liz Glynn, Mary Kelly, Hugo McCloud, Rodney McMillian, Wangechi Mutu, and Ruben Ochoa in our new exhibition space in Downtown.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition by Deborah Roberts in our Downtown gallery entitled Native Sons: Many thousands gone.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition by New York-based sculptor, Arlene Shechet. Sculpture will also be the first solo exhibition in our new gallery located at 1700 S Santa Fe Ave in Los Angeles. Shechet’s work in ceramic, porcelain, wood, concrete, bronze, and other materials teases out longstanding tensions in sculpture between object and base, interior and exterior, figure and space. Building on the insights of artists like Marisol [Escobar], Sophie Tauber Arp, and Constantin Brancusi, (who’s Endless Column is nodded to in this exhibition with The Queen (2019), a cast-concrete sculpture topped with a bronze crenellation, that like the column takes a shape evocative of a pedestal as the final form of the sculpture) Shechet has forged a singular path as an artist. Her works combine “universal” formal concerns with the intensely personal, deeply felt, and politically opinionated. Her consistent attention to the decorative (i.e. feminine) and her commitment to ceramic (i.e. craft, women’s labor) and the ways in which she has monumentalized both in her sculptural projects represent a radical undermining of the historical imperatives of objects in three-dimensions. Shechet’s work does not kowtow to the ideal body or form, pay homage to great men, or memorialize violent histories. Instead, she has made the process of producing delicate porcelain teacups into monuments in her current installation in the Madison Square Garden Conservancy and toys with the over-serious modern project of utopia-construction in a group of table-top works in her exhibition at the gallery.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to announce the opening of our new exhibition space in downtown Los Angeles. Spanning the entire length of 1700 South Santa Fe Avenue, the 11,000 sf warehouse will host the gallery’s most ambitiously scaled exhibitions and provides additional space for both a screening and reading room. It will be used as a second exhibition space in addition to our Culver City gallery. The gallery design was developed in collaboration with TOLO Architecture and Anderson Studio. The gallery will open during Frieze LA with a preview on Friday, February 15, 2019, and will open to the public on Saturday, February 16. The inaugural exhibition will feature new and historic works by artists from the gallery’s roster:Edgar Arceneaux, Sadie Benning, Andrea Bowers, Kim Dingle, Sean Duffy, Nicole Eisenman, Charles Gaines, Karl Haendel, Stanya Kahn, Mary Kelly, Rodney McMillian, Wangechi Mutu, Ruben Ochoa, Pope.L, Amy Sillman, and Nicola Tyson. The inaugural exhibition will be followed by solo exhibitions of new work by Arlene Shechet, Deborah Roberts, Sam Levi Jones, Genevieve Gaignard, Andrea Bowers, Shana Lutker, and Liz Glynn. The downtown gallery is located at 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, just south of the 10 freeway. Parking is available on the north parking lot adjacent to the building.