Featured Events in Los Angeles in February 2025 (March Updated)

Examine Getty’s much-loved painting, Irises by Vincent van Gogh, from the perspective of modern conservation science. This exhibition shows how the artist’s understanding of light and color informed his painting practice, and how conservators and scientists working together can harness the power of light with analytical tools that uncover the artist’s materials and working methods. Lastly, this exhibition reveals how light has irrevocably changed some of the colors in Irises. A painting we thought we knew so well has suddenly become quite unfamiliar.

Examine Getty’s much-loved painting, Irises by Vincent van Gogh, from the perspective of modern conservation science. This exhibition shows how the artist’s understanding of light and color informed his painting practice, and how conservators and scientists working together can harness the power of light with analytical tools that uncover the artist’s materials and working methods. Lastly, this exhibition reveals how light has irrevocably changed some of the colors in Irises. A painting we thought we knew so well has suddenly become quite unfamiliar.

Caldwell founded the KAOS network in 1984, and the exhibition traverses time, geography, history, and memory through Caldwell’s diverse practices of photography, film, video, music, performance, community design, and interactive media.

Explore 30 years of music history, from blues, folk, and rock ‘n’ roll to hip-hop and alternative music, through the lens of photographer Jay Blakesberg. Featuring more than 150 photographs shot on film between 1978 and 2008, RetroBlakesberg captures three decades of pivotal moments in music history. The dynamic exhibit showcases multiple genres and iconic musicians, ranging from Snoop Dogg, B-40, and Bob Dylan to PJ Harvey, Pearl Jam, and the Grateful Dead. Renowned photographer Jay Blakesberg was originally inspired by the Grateful Dead, whom he followed around the country as a teenager, capturing their live shows with his camera. Inspired by his experience, he moved from New Jersey to San Francisco to become part of the city’s vibrant music scene, which he’s photographed for more than 30 years. RetroBlakesberg reflects his remarkable body of work, from live performances to portraits to album and magazine covers.

With snowy peaks and rock formations spanning through eight countries, from France and Switzerland in the west to Austria and Slovenia in the east, the Alps have long captured the imagination of artists, being Europe’s largest mountain range. This focused exhibition highlights the different ways in which later 19th-century artists explored and depicted the Alps, particularly Giovanni Segantini’s monumental pastel Study for “La Vita” depicting the Alpine peaks that ringed his home in the Engadine Valley in Switzerland. Themes include the joys and difficulties of working outdoors and the connections between the land and its inhabitants. This exhibition is presented in English and Spanish. Esta exhibición se presenta en inglés y en español.

With snowy peaks and rock formations spanning through eight countries, from France and Switzerland in the west to Austria and Slovenia in the east, the Alps have long captured the imagination of artists, being Europe’s largest mountain range. This focused exhibition highlights the different ways in which later 19th-century artists explored and depicted the Alps, particularly Giovanni Segantini’s monumental pastel Study for “La Vita” depicting the Alpine peaks that ringed his home in the Engadine Valley in Switzerland. Themes include the joys and difficulties of working outdoors and the connections between the land and its inhabitants. This exhibition is presented in English and Spanish. Esta exhibición se presenta en inglés y en español.

In his luscious paintings, Ana Segovia (b. 1991, Mexico City, where he lives) twists assumptions of masculinity through a queer lens. Working with an aggressive palette of neon colors, daring compositions, and cinematographic framing and cropping, Segovia undermines the gendered basis of Mexican national identity built around male stereotypes standardized by film. The artist often develops specific display strategies for his paintings, borrowing from the language of installation, theater, dance, and video art to effectively situate them in the exhibition space. MOCA Focus: Ana Segovia will feature a new painting commissioned for the exhibition plus two recent bodies of work, including I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (2023), a suite of eight paintings depicting film stills from a non-existent queer film the artist wished to have seen in his formative years.

The exhibition aims to show the evolution of the Photorealism movement in the 1970s and further explore works related to Photorealism today, presenting works by figurative painters such as Gina Beavers and Serge Gomez.

Diego Velázquez’s extraordinary painting Queen Mariana of Austria (1652–53) forms the core of the exhibition Mariana: Velázquez’s Portrait of a Queen from the Museo Nacional del Prado, organized as part of the Norton Simon Museum’s Loan Exchange Program with the Spanish national art museum.

The exhibition explores the aesthetic connections between nearly 60 artists from Africa, Europe and America. The 70 paintings, sculptures, photographs and works on paper are divided into several different themes, including speech and silence, movement and transformation, imagination and expression.

Many artists pour blood, sweat and tears – and other unusual substances and materials – into their work. The exhibition, which draws primarily from the Grunwald Center for the Fine Arts’ collection, examines the motivations behind artists’ choice of “unorthodox” media such as blood, smoke, coffee, scrap metal, vegetable juice, pins, dryer sheets, cotton lint and more.

BLUM is pleased to present My Imperfect Self, Yoshitomo Nara’s tenth exhibition with the gallery, commemorating thirty years since the artist’s first US show, entitled Pacific Babies, at Blum & Poe in 1995. A standout piece from that first exhibition, titled There is No Place Like Home (1995), employs dark humor to explore the complexities of belonging for a young Japanese artist living in Germany on the cusp of international acclaim. Today, that restless uncertainty has given way to a deep-seated sense of connectedness, including attunement to remote places that remind him of growing up in Northern Japan. It was in Sapporo, Hokkaido, when Nara first started using remnants of unused clay to deconstruct his iconic image of the child into misshaped forms that bear traces of his hands, reestablishing his connection to the material and his sense of place. This process culminated in a new series of bronze sculptures, eleven of which are presented for the first time in this latest exhibition. Seen together, these works highlight how far Nara has transformed the kawaii aesthetic into an alternate realm of beguiling misfits.

Sculptor Kelly Akashi is from Los Angeles. She was initially influenced by photography as a medium, and the importance of traditional crafts and materials continues to be the driving force of her sculptural exploration. As her first solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery, she exhibited a number of new works, some of which were suspended from the ceiling, and some were placed in a landscape composed of stone sculptures supported by weathering steel bases. With the joint action of materials such as glass, soil, stone and bronze, a self-contained circular ecosystem was formed.

Pace is pleased to present The Monster, an exhibition curated by artist Robert Nava, at its Los Angeles gallery. On view from February 1 to March 22, 2025, this presentation will bring together paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by an intergenerational group of artists—including several LA-based artists—within and beyond the gallery’s program and will coincide with this year’s edition of Frieze Los Angeles.

Lisson Gallery presents the first U.S. solo exhibition in over five years by Tatsuo Miyajima, one of Japan’s most celebrated sculptors and installation artists. Known for his innovative use of LED technology to explore Buddhist philosophy, Miyajima’s work investigates themes of time, existence, and the cycles of life and death. The exhibition introduces three new series – Many Lives, Changing Life with Changing Circumstance, MUL.APIN, and Hundred Changes in Life – which build on explorations of ‘Seimei’, a Japanese concept encompassing life, being and consciousness.

David Zwirner is pleased to announce Spirit Level, a solo exhibition by Tau Lewis (b. 1993) at the gallery’s Los Angeles space at 616 N Western Avenue. The exhibition features five monumental sculptures and a circular quilt that debuted at Lewis’s 2024–2025 solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, curated by Jeffrey De Blois. The works in Spirit Level emerged from a period of profound loss for Lewis. In the conception of these anthropomorphic figures, the artist developed respective identities and narratives that implicate our ancestral pasts, spiritual and cultural similitudes, and multiplanar existences. Comprising found and inherited objects, each sculpture embodies the transitional period in which they were made as well as the liminal space in a material object’s journey as it changes hands and takes on a new form. Drawing from the faces of the Caribbean Sea, techno and dub music, literature, and studies of religion and spirituality, with this exhibition Lewis expands her world-building, weaving figures that reappear across her practice, connected by what she calls their “material DNA.” In the gallery’s airy space, these stately sculptures gather in quiet majesty, engaged in a silent spiritual dialogue.

Lisson Gallery presents the first U.S. solo exhibition in over five years by Tatsuo Miyajima, one of Japan’s most celebrated sculptors and installation artists. Known for his innovative use of LED technology to explore Buddhist philosophy, Miyajima’s work investigates themes of time, existence, and the cycles of life and death. The exhibition introduces three new series – Many Lives, Changing Life with Changing Circumstance, MUL.APIN, and Hundred Changes in Life – which build on explorations of ‘Seimei’, a Japanese concept encompassing life, being and consciousness.

Lisson Gallery presents the first U.S. solo exhibition in over five years by Tatsuo Miyajima, one of Japan’s most celebrated sculptors and installation artists. Known for his innovative use of LED technology to explore Buddhist philosophy, Miyajima’s work investigates themes of time, existence, and the cycles of life and death. The exhibition introduces three new series – Many Lives, Changing Life with Changing Circumstance, MUL.APIN, and Hundred Changes in Life – which build on explorations of ‘Seimei’, a Japanese concept encompassing life, being and consciousness.

In 2025, the Norton Simon Museum marks the 50th anniversary of its founding in 1975. The exhibition Retrospect: 50 Years at the Norton Simon Museum, on view in the main-level Focus Gallery from February 14, 2025, to January 12, 2026, celebrates five decades of art, education, research and community. Coinciding with the Exterior Improvement Project, which will transform the Museum’s gardens and grounds, Retrospect offers not only a reflective view of the past but also one of the horizon for decades to come.

As his second exhibition with the gallery, Australian artist Jonny Nish continues to use materials such as MDF, voile, aluminum and stainless steel to create abstract geometric works with bright gradient colors, giving viewers full sensory stimulation. Jonny's fascination with reflective materials originated from his childhood visit to a cosmetics counter in a department store with his mother. Later, inspired by the works of Robert Irwin and the Mark Rothko retrospective at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, Jonny's paintings extend from the interior to the entire environment. He does not want his works to be just two-dimensional static images, but to have a visual dialogue with the audience through the echo of paintings, materials and exhibition space.

As his second exhibition with the gallery, Australian artist Jonny Nish continues to use materials such as MDF, voile, aluminum and stainless steel to create abstract geometric works with bright gradient colors, giving viewers full sensory stimulation. Jonny's fascination with reflective materials originated from his childhood visit to a cosmetics counter in a department store with his mother. Later, inspired by the works of Robert Irwin and the Mark Rothko retrospective at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, Jonny's paintings extend from the interior to the entire environment. He does not want his works to be just two-dimensional static images, but to have a visual dialogue with the audience through the echo of paintings, materials and exhibition space.

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present Proof of Concept, Jon Rafman’s latest exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery, which features a groundbreaking installation that reimagines television for the AI age. Building on the artist’s long-standing exploration of digital culture and virtual worlds, Rafman has created a living, mutable stream of music videos, animations and experimental content – a hypnotic mirror of our digital era. Blending the collective viewing experience of MTV’s golden age with new technologies, Proof of Concept investigates our evolving relationship with artificial intelligence, nostalgia and media consumption.

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by artist Lisa Yuskavage, on view at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. This is the artist’s ninth solo exhibition with the gallery and her first in Los Angeles in thirty years. It anticipates the first comprehensive museum presentation of Yuskavage’s works on paper, featuring drawings from the early 1990s to the present, the majority of which have never been exhibited before, at The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, in June 2025.

This February, Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles hosts ‘The Bleed, Part II,’ British artist George Rouy’s first US solo exhibition with the gallery. Following upon Rouy’s recent London presentation, this ‘second chapter’ will feature all new works extending his exploration of human mass, multiplicity and movement. In works characterized by a distinctive dynamism, Rouy captures essential experiences of contemporary life—desire and vexation, the urge to connect frustrated by alienation—to address emotional extremities in a globalized, technologically-driven age.

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present Proof of Concept, Jon Rafman’s latest exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery, which features a groundbreaking installation that reimagines television for the AI age. Building on the artist’s long-standing exploration of digital culture and virtual worlds, Rafman has created a living, mutable stream of music videos, animations and experimental content – a hypnotic mirror of our digital era. Blending the collective viewing experience of MTV’s golden age with new technologies, Proof of Concept investigates our evolving relationship with artificial intelligence, nostalgia and media consumption.

Charles Gaines, an 80-year-old artist and educator from Los Angeles, is widely acclaimed for his contributions to the development of conceptual art and the formation of the Los Angeles art scene. This exhibition, the artist's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles since 2019, will present a series of new acrylics and watercolors as an elaboration of his iconic series "Numbers and Trees". Trees have been central to Gaines's work since the mid-1970s. He first painted trees through a numbered grid system in the "Walnut Orchard" series. This methodological experimentation continued in the "Numbers and Trees" series, which began in 1987, hinting at the arbitrariness of other manufactured systems in our society - such as politics, gender, race and class.

Charles Gaines, an 80-year-old artist and educator from Los Angeles, is widely acclaimed for his contributions to the development of conceptual art and the formation of the Los Angeles art scene. This exhibition, the artist's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles since 2019, will present a series of new acrylics and watercolors as an elaboration of his iconic series "Numbers and Trees". Trees have been central to Gaines's work since the mid-1970s. He first painted trees through a numbered grid system in the "Walnut Orchard" series. This methodological experimentation continued in the "Numbers and Trees" series, which began in 1987, hinting at the arbitrariness of other manufactured systems in our society - such as politics, gender, race and class.

American artist Woody De Othello is known for his diverse artistic practices that span sculpture, painting, and drawing. Using a variety of media including glazed ceramics, wood carvings, bronze, ink, and oil painting, he transforms everyday objects into vessels of personification and spirituality. Upon entering the exhibition hall, visitors are greeted by three bronze sculptures composed of hands, ears, feet, horns, and speaker cones. Othello advocates for the collapse of boundaries between vision, hearing, and feeling. Just as Wassily Kandinsky linked color, music, and spirituality in his abstract paintings, Othello seeks to externalize inner emotions.

American artist Woody De Othello is known for his diverse artistic practices that span sculpture, painting, and drawing. Using a variety of media including glazed ceramics, wood carvings, bronze, ink, and oil painting, he transforms everyday objects into vessels of personification and spirituality. Upon entering the exhibition hall, visitors are greeted by three bronze sculptures composed of hands, ears, feet, horns, and speaker cones. Othello advocates for the collapse of boundaries between vision, hearing, and feeling. Just as Wassily Kandinsky linked color, music, and spirituality in his abstract paintings, Othello seeks to externalize inner emotions.

Bruce Nauman: Pasadena Years is a historical reflection on the prolific decade that established one of the most important contemporary artists of our time. The exhibition emphasizes the radical foundation of Nauman’s practice while he lived in Los Angeles between 1969-1979. Across the entire gallery and garden, works on view will include sculptures, installations, sound works, videos, works on paper, and editions. Pasadena Years notably marks Nauman’s first exhibition in Los Angeles in over 30 years and will include a text for a room that the artist is recreating for the first time since its debut at the earliest retrospective of his work, which originated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1972.