Vielmetter 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.

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.

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.

"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 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.