From Bruce Nauman’s first solo exhibition in the city in three decades, to Togar’s immersive exploration of early cinema, here’s what to see in LA now.
Kelly Akashi | Lisson Gallery | 20 February – 29 March
For her first exhibition at Lisson Gallery, Los Angeles-based artist Kelly Akashi wanted to make an intimate body of work. ‘It was always my intention for these works to show the handling of glass over time’, she told me, ‘but, of course, it wasn’t my intention to show the patina they accrued from a historic fire.’ Initially scheduled to open in late January, Akashi’s show was delayed when the Eaton Fire destroyed her Altadena studio, along with most of her art. Akashi is remaking the lost paintings and sculptures – such as striking bronze-and-glass seed pods that sprout from massive alabaster pedestals – and repairing others with a flame torch, including a delicate chain of glass that survived the inferno inside the artist’s kiln. While these works aren’t explicitly about resilience and perseverance, Akashi acknowledges that’s possibly how they’ll now be seen. ‘They were always meant to be true and honest to my process, and that allows them to carry this added layer of history.’
Bruce Nauman | Marian Goodman Gallery | 19 February – 26 April
Beginning in 1969, Bruce Nauman spent eight foundational years living with his family in curator Walter Hopps’s Pasadena home before moving to the nearby artist enclave of Altadena. Yet, this exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery is his first solo in Los Angeles for three decades. Nauman’s prolific period in the San Gabriel Valley placed him at the centre of West Coast conceptual art and landed him an influential 1972 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art when he was only 31 years old. ‘The Pasadena Years’ includes the first-ever re-creation of Text for a Room(1973/2025) – an important, minimalist installation initially made for when the retrospective travelled to New York’s Whitney Museum of Art – along with a sharp selection of early sculpture, video and text-based works that showcase the artist’s genius for game-like construction.
Kour Pour | Nazarian / Curcio | 15 February – 22 March
The paintings in Kour Pour’s exhibition see the British-Iranian artist reconfigure his longstanding interests – Persian miniatures, Islamic architecture, sacred geometry – into enchanting new forms. Intricately layered on stacked, shaped canvases, these architectural paintings reference Frank Stella’s compositions from his 1963 trip to Iran. Pour’s presentation will also coincide with a new instalment of ‘Mehmooni’, an exhibition series curated by the artist for Guest House project space – located inside his Inglewood studio complex – featuring work by Iranian artists living in Los Angeles, home to the largest Persian diaspora in the US. It’s a beautiful meditation on syncretism and the construction of cultural identity.
Jon Rafman | Sprüth Magers | 15 February – 12 April
Operating at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, Jon Rafman’s ambitious solo show ‘Proof of Concept’ is a hallucinogenic collage of sight and sound inspired by music videos from the 1980s and ’90s as well as MTV’s experimental animation series ‘Liquid Television’ (1991–95). In Rafman’s videos, fictitious musicians, with playful names like Cloudy Heart, perform a pastiche of dissonant genres (think ‘prep metal’) drawn from the artist’s imagination. Additional works feature CGI talking heads developed using actors who have licensed their likenesses to AI companies, and algorithmically assisted renderings of album covers, band merch and other memorabilia representing the fabulated discographies. The result is a riveting view on pop culture calibrated by sterile, ‘if you like this, you may also like’ recommendation models.
Indonesian artist Julian Abraham ‘Togar’ first incorporated drums into his research-based practice while in residence at Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie during COVID-19 lockdown. ‘Ghost strokes’ sees the artist expanding these earlier experiments at Commonwealth and Council, a small independent gallery known for exhibiting cerebral, beguiling work on institutional memory, whose roster includes Gala Porras-Kim and American Artist. Togar’s powerful installation resembles an early cinema. An automated drum set titled Acoustic Analogue Digitally Composed #15 (2024) and That must follow (2025), a black and white film shot at a megaphone factory, are projected on canvas like shadow puppets; nearby, text-paintings relay cryptic phrases such as ‘POLYRHYTHMONO STEREOPTICON’. Throughout his work, Togar seeks to make complex political histories, like the relationship between folklore and propaganda, not only visible but also audible.
At Château Shatto, located across from a discount furniture store in the burgeoning Melrose Avenue gallery corridor, Charlie Engelman’s seductive sculptures beckon and tease. Using high-density foam and salvaged redwood, the artist hews gently curved, organic forms and leaves them lounging on puffy plinths or tied up with black string. In one sculpture, forest-green urethane seems to puddle at the base; in another, a pink, egg-shaped vessel is delicately cracked, offering a glimpse inside its rim. Engelman does to polymer what Genesis Belanger does to porcelain or Kristi Cavataro to glass, drawing from the material a carnal and alluring quality that, in his hands, feels entirely innate.
Issy Wood | Michael Werner Gallery | 15 February – 17 May
The fourth exhibition at Michael Werner’s new Beverly Hills outpost is American-born, London-based painter and musician Issy Wood’s first in the city, which feels a fitting home for the artist. ‘Los Angeles is a city driven by media, self-mythologizing, nostalgia and ideal beauty,’ says gallery co-owner Gordon VeneKlasen. ‘Beneath its glamorous exterior, it’s also a city of detachment.’ A number of the paintings – all oil on linen or soft velvet – follow the recent release of Wood’s album Accidental American(2024). The artworks and album alike are informed by her relationship with a man who, as Wood says in the catalogue, was fond of showing off his ‘beautiful metal Smith & Wesson guns’. Tack-sharp yet slickly rendered, the paintings mostly depict cinematic vignettes featuring revolvers, assault rifles and shotguns, along with cars glistening with erotic sheen. These are objects of desire, and they want to harm us back.
