This Week in LA: May 7→13
In this Edition: Collective Memory, Monumental Abstraction, and the Enchantment of the Familiar — Painting, Sculpture, and Installation Across LA
This week moves between collective memory and hard-edged clarity, special effects grotesquerie and the quiet enchantment of a glass of water at a Paris dive bar. Perrotin opens Kyungmi Shin’s My Fantasy’s Burdens, where archival images of Korean Americans are photo-transferred onto vintage chinoiserie wallpaper — ancestors rising through orientalist ornament to become the protagonists of their own stories. At Good Mother Gallery, special effects pioneer Gabe Bartalos brings his Ornamental Anger from the Hollywood workshop to the gallery wall, presenting phantasmagoric sculptures forged from bones, wire, clay, and foam latex that find beauty in deformity and humor in the macabre.
Water, Water, Everywhere at Parker Gallery finds Claudia Keep painting intimate moments — river swimmers, ocean waves, clouds — in oil on masonite from her personal archive, with multi-panel panoramic formats that freeze sensation in a diaristic key. James Fuentes Gallery fills a conspicuous gap with Epic Abstraction, the first Los Angeles solo of Al Held’s work in fifty years, presenting the late artist’s monumental leap from gestural abstraction to hard-edged geometry at the scale and intensity the work demands. Anna Kunz’s Tuning the Void at The Pit treats painting as an attention practice — layering acrylic and dye on unprimed surfaces until color achieves resonance, informed by early electronic composers and the charged light of dusk and dawn. MOCA presents Star-Crossed Rendezvous, where Haegue Yang’s two venetian blind installations — one a monochromatic reimagining of Sol LeWitt, the other synchronized to a Korean dissident composer’s concerto — appear as two halves of an imperfect whole. And Holding Time at the Long Beach Museum of Art pairs Elyse Pignolet’s politically charged ceramic sculptures with MyungJin Kim’s terracotta vessels rooted in Korean folk painting tradition.
The full lineup is below — dig in.
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On View Now
Perrotin | Mid-Wilshire
Kyungmi Shin: My Fantasy’s Burdens
On view through May 30, 2026
In her debut exhibition with the gallery, Kyungmi Shin turns from her family archive to USC’s Korean American Digital Archive — photo-transferring black-and-white images of Korean Americans directly onto vintage chinoiserie textile wallpaper, producing a translucent, shadowy ground where ancestors rise through layers of orientalist ornament as protagonists and storytellers of collective memory.
Good Mother Gallery | West Adams
Gabe Bartalos: Ornamental Anger: LOS ANGELES
May 9 – June 20, 2026
Special effects pioneer Gabe Bartalos — whose twisted creations have shaped Frank Henenlotter’s cult Basket Case films, Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle, and album covers for David Byrne and St. Vincent — presents Ornamental Anger, a gateway into phantasmagoric tableaus, grotesque anatomy, and monuments to the weird forged from wood, bones, hair, wire, clay, foam latex, and more.
Tierra del Sol Gallery | West Hollywood
Vessels
May 9 – July 2, 2026
Vessels proposes the vessel not simply as a functional object but as an expansive mystery through which life and history pass — spanning paintings, drawings, and ceramics by thirteen artists who explore bodies that contain and release, ships that drift across networks of trade and empire, and shorelines that hold the meeting point of land and water.
1301PE | Miracle Mile
Ken Karagozian: Wilshire Subway
On view through May 14, 2026
Celebrating the opening of the D Line Subway Extension’s first segment, Ken Karagozian’s Wilshire Subway captures three decades of documenting the return of rail to Los Angeles — photographs that pair the monumental scale of construction with intimate portraits of the workers who built the longest subway project ever to tunnel through tar-infested sands.
Parker Gallery | Hollywood
Claudia Keep: Water, Water, Everywhere
On view through May 30, 2026
Claudia Keep’s Water, Water, Everywhere captures intimate, nostalgic micro-experiences of water in various forms — river swimmers, ocean waves, clouds, and afternoon coffee — rendered in oil on masonite from her personal archive of photographs, with multi-panel panoramic formats freezing memories and sensations in a poetic, diaristic approach that invites reconnection with the enchantment of the familiar world.
James Fuentes Gallery | Hollywood
Al Held: Epic Abstraction
On view through June 18, 2026
The first solo presentation of Al Held’s work in Los Angeles in five decades, Epic Abstraction charts the late artist’s dramatic progression from pigment-heavy gestural abstractions to a disciplined vocabulary of hard-edged geometry — with the monumental Circle and Triangle reaching 12 feet high and spanning 28 feet across four panels, toggling between recognition and unexpected spatial dynamics.
The Pit | Atwater Village
Anna Kunz: Tuning the Void
May 9 – June 17, 2026
Anna Kunz’s Tuning the Void approaches painting as an attention practice — building color relationships across porous, unprimed surfaces through layered washes of acrylic and dye until the forms achieve something like resonance, informed by early female electronic composers and a palette drawn from threshold moments of dusk and dawn inflected by the charged saturation of 1960s psychedelic posters.
la BEAST gallery | Cypress Park
Justin N. Kim: In the Garden
May 9 – June 20, 2026
Drawing from the creation myth of Adam and Eve, Justin N. Kim’s In the Garden shifts focus from the figures to the expansive environment that surrounds them — layered leaves, rippling rainbows, and thick overgrowth define the space as the woods become the main character, enveloping the lovers, nestling them, and folding them into its branches.
MOCA Grand Avenue | DTLA
Haegue Yang: Star-Crossed Rendezvous
On view through August 2, 2026
Star-Crossed Rendezvous brings together two major installations by Haegue Yang executed using customized venetian blinds — one a monochromatic reimagining of Sol LeWitt’s open cubes through dense accumulations of slotted angular forms, the other a vibrant tribute to pioneering Korean composer and political dissident Isang Yun, with moving lights synchronized to his Double Concerto animating geometric structures in a shifting, multisensory encounter.
Long Beach Museum of Art | Ocean Gallery, Long Beach
Holding Time: The Works of Elyse Pignolet and MyungJin Kim
On view through June 7, 2026
Holding Time highlights two contemporary Southern California women artists who use ceramics — particularly vessels — as a medium for storytelling, with Elyse Pignolet addressing the tension between feminism and misogyny through politically charged sculptural forms, and MyungJin Kim drawing from traditional Korean Minhwa folk paintings to create handcrafted terracotta vessels depicting a primal botanical world of paired birds, owls, and ancient plants.
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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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