Derrick Adams Flirts With the Idea of Sensuality in Come as You Are @ Gagosian in Los Angeles

 

Derrick Adams, Be the Table, 2023. © Derrick Adams Studio. Photo: Jeff McLane

 

In Derrick Adams’ debut exhibition with the Gagosian, the artist continues to develop pictorial vignettes centering the Black figure, this time in new works borne from the artist’s imagined invitation to the real or fictional personalities he paints.

The exhibition’s title offers encouragement to be present without the need to conceal one’s true self, dreams, and aspirations—a prompt to shed the pressures of adaptation and conformity. Adams counters hackneyed narratives by presenting figures in moments of carefree leisure, inspired by his belief in the constructive power of scenes that uplift and support Black culture. Adding elements of fantastical daydreams along with a few icons familiar from previous series, he dramatizes lived experience and self-actualization in compositions that balance vivid and muted tones, flat planes and multidimensional space.

Come as You Are is on view through October 28 @ Gagosian, 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills

Group Exhibition: Dark Fantasy @ UTA Artist Space In Beverly Hills

Based on the concept of Archeofuturism, which focuses on excavating forms of the past in order to shape future narratives of design, Dark Fantasy guides the viewer through a whimsical world of the fantastic and the obscure, questioning the constraints of reality and what it means to dream. By highlighting advanced techniques, traditional master craft, and new technology, Dark Fantasy brings to life organic and telluric forms that allude to bygone eras of production. The exhibition explores over a decade of functional art from 24 artists from Carpenters Workshop Gallery’s program, creating a dialogue between space, time and contemporary archeology.

The exhibition features over fifty pieces by Virgil Abloh, Atelier Van Lieshout, Maarten Baas, Aldo Bakker, Sebastian Brajkovic, Fernando and Humberto Campana, Nacho Carbonell, Wendell Castle, Vincenzo De Cotiis, Ingrid Donat, Vincent Dubourg, Najla El Zein, Kendell Geers, Steven Haulenbeek, Anton Hendrik Denys, Kostas Lambridis, Mathieu Lehanneur, Frederik Molenschot, Rick Owens, Random International, Robert Stadler, Studio Drift, Charles Trevelyan, and Verhoeven Twins. Dark Fantasy is on view through November 16 at UTA Artist Space 403 Foothill Rd. Beverly Hills, California

Ai Weiwei's CAO/Humanity @ UTA Artist Space In Los Angeles

Cao / Humanity is a new exhibition by the acclaimed Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, which is in tandem with two other Los Angeles exhibitions. This marks an exciting milestone for both Ai and the city of Los Angeles, where he is exhibiting for the first time. Having designed the new UTA Artist Space location in Beverly Hills, Ai’s Cao / Humanity offers a one-of-a-kind experience for visitors—an expansive celebration of his artistic practice in a space he himself designed, the only architectural project he’s undertaken in the United States.

Central to the exhibition is a new collective performance project by Ai Weiwei: Humanity. This global campaign is a reaction to the tens of millions displaced by war, famine and climate crises, and gives a personal and group voice in support of the idea that humanity is one. 

Cao presents a wide range of his work, from the iconic middle finger motif wallpapered through the space and the glass sculpture Up Yours(2018), to the massive Iron Tree Trunk (2015), a collection of individual pieces welded together into a deceptively life-like form, weighs nearly two tons. CAO/Humanity is on view through December 1, 2018 at UTA Artist Space 403 Foothill Road, Beverly Hills. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

"Nighthorses" by Adam McEwen @ Gagosian Gallery

As Adam McEwen’s title suggests, anxiety resides even in the most common images and objects. His art draws attention to the vestigial dramas of daily life; the forgotten is memorialized, the subliminal laid bare. Narrative flow is tempting to seek yet impossible to find. See more exhibition images here. "Nighthorses" is on view through June 9 at Gagosian Gallery 456 North Camden Drive Beverly Hills. photograph by Oliver Kupper

Thomas Houseago "The Ridge" @ Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills

Gagosian presents “The Ridge,” an exhibition of sculpture and paintings on canvas by Thomas Houseago. This is his first exhibition with the gallery in his hometown of Los Angeles. The title of the exhibition derives from Houseago's childhood memory of a rocky pass in Leeds, England, known locally as "The Ridge," where a manmade stone wall runs along the upper edge of a steep natural stone ridge. With the stone wall of the adjacent estate, this creates a narrow footpath or ginnel, blocking the drop beyond the ridge and the sightlines within the pass. Houseago's recollection of this place is as much about a sense of peril and rite of passage as the actual physical experience. Thomas Houseago "The Ridge" will be on view until February 16, 2017 @ Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. photographs  by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Peter Lindbergh "A Different Vision On Fashion Photography" Book Signing @ The Taschen Store In Beverly Hills

Peter Lindbergh reunites with Milla Jovovich, Tatjana Patitz, Karen Alexander and Amber Valletta to celebrate and sign his new monograph, A Different Vision On Fashion Photography, at the Taschen store in Beverly Hills. Click here to read our interview of Lindbergh. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper and Summer Bowie

Gagosian Beverly Hills 20-Year Anniversary Invitational Exhibition in Los Angeles

To mark the twentieth anniversary of Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills on North Camden Drive, founder Larry Gagosian has selected a special exhibition of works by more than thirty artists spanning three generations. Born in Los Angeles, Gagosian opened his first galleries on Almont Drive and Robertson Boulevard in the early 1980s. Chris Burden and Jean-Michel Basquiat were among the first artists to be exhibited. Drawing on the city's abundance of talented artists, Gagosian was at the forefront of developing a bicoastal model for contemporary art galleries—the beginning of a global expansion that now numbers fifteen galleries in three continents—when he moved to New York in 1985 and opened his first gallery there, in collaboration with Leo Castelli. Los Angeles provided both artists and galleries with an ideal infrastructure for creating and exhibiting diverse bodies of artwork, sometimes on a very large scale, and in 1995 Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills, designed by acclaimed American architect Richard Meier, opened with new sculptures by Frank Stella. The Beverly Hills 20-Year Anniversary Invitational Exhibition will be on view until December 19, at Gagosian Beverly Hills, 456 North Camden Drive Beverly Hills, CA

Opening Night of Urs Fischer's "Fountains" @ Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills

Gagosian Beverly Hills presents an exhibition of sculptures and paintings by Urs Fischer. Constantly searching for new sculptural solutions, Fischer has an uncanny ability to envisage and produce objects undergoing psychic transformation in a bewildering range of materials. As its title suggests, this exhibition is conceived around fully functional fountains, “active sculptures” that transform the galleries into humid and energized places through which viewers can wander, as if in a town square. The lumpen fountains are cast in bronze from hand-built clay models; the rims of the water basins are powder-coated white, while the base is left as raw roseate metal. In one gallery, a sort of roughly formed, almost naturalistic blowhole spouts water, splashing merrily and drowning out all other sound; in the other, water hisses from a misting ball, and spills down over two tiered basins. A third fountain, also in cast bronze and delicately powder-coated in parts, is a human skeleton arched across a chair over which a draped garden hose gently flows—the latest in Fischer's lexicon of darkly humorous vanitas. Urs Fischer "Fountains"  will be on view until October 17, 2015 at Gagosian Beverly Hills. 

Read: 'Beauty and The Light-Switch Are Thick As Thieves' →

Read 'Beauty and The Light-Switch Are Thick As Thieves'. It will be the first installment of a short non-fiction series, entitled A Trendy Tragedy, by Los Angeles based writer Max Barrie exploring sex, drugs and growing up in the vapidness of Beverly Hills and the entertainment industry. Click here to read.