Materiality is the Impetus of Perrotin's Pacific Abstractions in Los Angeles

text by Mia Milosevic

Materiality lays at the center of Perrotin’s Pacific Abstractions. The use of material fluctuates between artists, but the physicality of abstraction remains distinctly intact. 

Lee Bae uses five different forms of wood to construct his charcoal ink on paper. An ode to movement embodies the work, where motion is inextricable from risk. Each charcoal stroke is entirely reliant on the mobility of Lee’s artistic hand—no gray-hued ribbon is ever erased or redone. The movement of material is the final product. 

Naotaka Hiro’s corporeal paintings are imbued with a kind of where-the-wild-things-are sexual innuendo. The work’s technicalities deconstruct the body, and then reinstate it with a phallic abstraction that is just discernible enough to make the body knowable. Two perfect, symmetrical holes perforate the bottom of his Untitled (Uproar). These circular lesions mark the negative space the artist inserted his legs into as a processual requirement. The alteration of the canvas threatens prescribed limitations of material—Hiro’s anatomical segmenting shatters the fourth wall of space. 

Kazuo Kadonaga’s Wood No. 5 Cl is an intricately constructed log made from paper-thin slices of real wood. The veneer slicer he used to create these vellums pays homage to his upbringing in forestry. The trunk’s growth rings explicitly mimic the surreality of Earth’s extraordinary constructions, made with the caliber of precision and detail generally credited to the hands of the divine. Alas, we may come to question Kadonaga’s mortal statehood. The portrait of an axed tree excavates a visceral reaction: Should we mourn the losses wrought by Big Paper or must we instead celebrate post-natural invention? By virtue of materiality, reincarnation is imminent. 

Pacific Abstractions is on view through November 9 @ Perrotin in Los Angeles, 5036 W Pico Blvd

MSCHF Presents Art 2 @ Perrotin in Los Angeles

MSCHF presents Art 2, their latest exhibition and second solo show with Perrotin, which is being featured at their Los Angeles location. A compilation of some of their most prominent works, what stands most strikingly at the center of the gallery is the 2004 PT Cruiser which made its way across the United States. An understandable $19.99 could earn the average citizen rights to the car’s keys, prompting an all-american car chase which found its end in Truckee, California. MSCHF’s notorious, oversized shoes make a recurring appearance throughout the exhibition, which the product’s founders claim to “haunt the gallery.”

An Ikea-esque contraption stands assumingly amidst the chaos–it’s a sink made from standard hardware. One of the sink pieces was installed in the bathroom of the MET in New York City–so, MSCHF now has a permanent installation in one of the most renowned museums in the world. Lining one of the gallery walls are 249 copies of Picasso’s infamous La Poisson, which is a small wooden sculpture of a fish. The original stands among them, but the viewer may never know which one really laid in the hands of the great Spanish painter. Regardless, buyers receive an official bidding certificate which directly replicates the one MSCHF founders received when they successfully bid for the wooden object at a Christie’s auction. There’s no need to sue for copyright infringement. Near the entrance of the gallery is a Botero–once a portrait of a jarringly corpulent businessman has been visibly edited into a skinnier version. MSCHF retitled the work Ozempic (Botched Fumador de Cigarillos). 

Art 2 is on view through June 1 @ Perrotin, 5036 West Pico Boulevard Los Angeles

Izumi Kato's Not-Quite-Human Figures Are Apparitions of Coexistence in Perrotin's Inaugural Los Angeles Show

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Untitled, 2023

Photo by Kei Okano
Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin ©2023 Izumi Kato

Perrotin inaugurates their new Los Angeles location with an exhibition of work by Japanese artist Izumi Kato.

Imagine, for a moment, that Izumi Kato’s figurative subjects have a life of their own. From the artist’s studio in Tokyo, his subjects have traversed the ocean, crossing the Pacific to emerge in Los Angeles. Making their way to Pico Boulevard, they appear utterly at home in Southern California—a place where one can encounter the extremes of both prehistoric geology and urban modernity, where tar pits coexist with gleaming new buildings, where eternal ocean cliffs abut concrete highway. These binaries of ancient and modern, geological and man-made, are dualities that also coexist in Kato’s work, making his exhibition a fitting choice for Perrotin’s inaugural exhibition in Los Angeles.

Izumi Kato’s exhibition is on view through March 23 @ Perrotin in Los Angeles, 5036 W. Pico Boulevard