This Week in LA: July 30→August 5
In this Edition: Camera-Less Photograms, a Billboard of Eyes, and Picasso in Disguise — Bergamot Station to Downtown LA
This week Los Angeles turns its attention to how a picture actually gets made — and how much handwork survives inside images we assume the machine produced. At Von Lintel Gallery, two German artists set the camera aside completely: Floris Neusüss burned life-size silhouettes straight onto light-sensitive paper, while Christiane Feser folds and pierces her prints into shallow sculptural reliefs, together insisting that photography’s true subjects were always light, paper, and surface. A few doors on across the Bergamot campus, Craig Krull Gallery shows Holly Roberts painting directly onto photographs until figure and ground — document and dream — can no longer be separated.
Downtown, François Ghebaly gives Patrick Jackson the whole room for a four-part installation of watching billboards, altered bus-shelter posters, and a lone mother-and-child statue that scales the street up to monument size only to jam its own signals. In Westwood, the Hammer Museum hands Chicago painter Mike Cloud a Hammer Projects commission built from bare stretcher bars and objects sunk into troweled oil paint, nudging the picture off the wall toward sculpture. And at LACMA, a focused survey reframes Pablo Picasso’s portraiture as a lifelong exercise in disguise, every lover and friend and self dissolving into harlequin, minotaur, and cipher. Photograms, painted photographs, assembled objects, masked faces — a week about the image caught in the act of being built by hand.
Check out the full lineup is below.
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Featured Exhibitions
Hammer Museum | Westwood, Los Angeles
Hammer Projects: Mike Cloud
On view through January 10, 2027
@hammer_museum
For its latest Hammer Projects commission, the Hammer Museum gives Chicago-based painter Mike Cloud a room built from bare stretcher bars — the wooden armature usually hidden behind a canvas — reassembled into polygons, stars, and open frameworks that push painting off the wall and toward sculpture. Objects surface from fields of thick, troweled oil, so that each work reads at once as picture and as accumulation, a container for whatever the artist has pressed into its skin. Cloud’s paintings ask what a painting is supposed to conceal, then decline to conceal any of it.
Von Lintel Gallery | Bergamot Station, Santa Monica
Floris Neusüss and Christiane Feser: Unique Works in Photography
On view through August 22, 2026
@vonlintelgallery
Von Lintel Gallery pairs two German artists who set the camera aside entirely to ask what a photograph really is — Floris Neusüss, whose life-size photograms registered bodies and objects as ghostly silhouettes burned directly onto light-sensitive paper, and Christiane Feser, who folds, cuts, and pierces her prints into shallow reliefs that hover between picture and sculpture. Placed side by side, the two make a quiet argument that photography’s real subjects were always light, paper, and surface — the trace and the sheet it lands on — rather than whatever sits in front of a lens. It is a show about the medium caught touching the world with no shutter in between.
Craig Krull Gallery | Bergamot Station, Santa Monica
Holly Roberts: Witness
On view through August 29, 2026
@craigkrullgallery
At Craig Krull Gallery, Holly Roberts continues her decades-long practice of painting directly onto photographs until the two media can no longer be pried apart, figures and animals surfacing in thick, worked oil from grounds that began as ordinary prints. Witness treats the photograph not as a finished image but as raw material — a surface to be buried, scraped back, and rebuilt until what emerges is equal parts document and dream. The pictures hold the uncanny stillness of both at once: the camera’s fixed instant and the slow deliberation of the painter’s hand.
LACMA | Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles
Pablo Picasso — Portraits in Disguise
On view through December 6, 2026
@lacma
On the third floor of BCAM, LACMA gathers a focused survey of Pablo Picasso’s portraiture around a single restless idea — the face as something to be masked and remade rather than faithfully recorded. Across paintings and works on paper, lovers, friends, and the artist himself dissolve into harlequins, minotaurs, and geometric ciphers, each likeness a costume tried on and discarded. The exhibition makes the case that for Picasso the portrait was never about resemblance at all, but about the endless capacity of a face to become someone — or something — else.
François Ghebaly | DTLA, Los Angeles
Patrick Jackson: All Signs Fail
On view through August 15, 2026
@francoisghebaly
François Ghebaly hands Patrick Jackson the full gallery for All Signs Fail, a four-part installation that inflates the language of the street to the scale of a public monument — a towering billboard of watching eyes, a run of altered bus-shelter posters, a mother-and-child statue, and a single looming structure anchoring the room. Jackson borrows the visual grammar of advertising and civic signage precisely in order to jam it, staging a city that has lost the thread of its own messaging, where every sign points somewhere and none quite arrives. The effect lands as both comic and ominous — an urban environment turned inward on its own failure to speak.
Also On View
West Hollywood
By Hand & By Heart — Group Show · Mash Gallery · Through August 29, 2026 · @mash_gallery
Slow Burn — Kevin Yaun · Megan Mulrooney · Through August 1, 2026 · @meganmulrooneygallery
West Adams
The Good Life — Kevin Lyons · Thinkspace Projects · Through August 1, 2026 · @thinkspace_art
Hollywood
Madonna: The Rise of the Material Girl (1980–1985) — Group Show · Musichead Gallery · August 1 – September 26, 2026 · @musicheadgallery
Flaccid Candles, Rising Smoke — Ohan Breiding · OCHI · Through August 22, 2026 · @ochigallery
Glassell Park
INTERWOVEN — Marleigh Culver & Sara Marlowe Hall · Keystone Gallery · Through July 27, 2026 · @keystoneartla
Chinatown
Being and Longing: Enough Is Never Enough — Group Show · Gene’s Dispensary · Through August 29, 2026 · @genes_dispensary
Velvet Dragons — Gregg Stone · Eastern Projects Gallery · Through August 22, 2026 · @eastern_projects_gallery
DTLA
THERMIDORIAN REACTION — Group Show · Wonzimer · Through August 14, 2026 · @wonzimer
Exuviae — Group Show · Monte Vista Projects · Through August 9, 2026 · @montevistaprojects
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LA Insider is the weekly newsletter that connects you to LA’s vibrant art and culture scene. From the Hollywood Hills to downtown, Malibu and beyond, we uncover a curated selection of standout exhibitions, cultural events, and creative experiences that define the City of Angels.
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