This week the strongest shows in Los Angeles are all, in one way or another, about what a medium can carry once its subject has gone — the current in a root, a community’s history, a director’s eye, a sculptor’s night hours, a body in a stadium. At the Hammer Museum, Vibeke Mascini threads electrical cable through electroformed ceiba trees and orchids, turning plants into conductors and asking what else might be persuaded to carry a charge. At the Getty Center, Every Minute Is History gathers Laura Aguilar, Reynaldo Rivera, George Rodriguez, Patssi Valdez and Ricardo Valverde into five distinct accounts of Chicano/a Los Angeles across the second half of the twentieth century, each photographer widening what the record was willing to hold.
Pace Gallery brings five series of David Lynch’s photographs together for the first time — pictures made between 1979 and 2008, arriving here as the first presentation of his visual art since his death last year. In West Hollywood, Hauser & Wirth gives an entire exhibition to the spray paintings David Smith made at night between 1958 and 1964, works in which the object that blocked the paint is the only thing left behind. And Perrotin opens Paul Pfeiffer’s Olympia, where the machinery of mass spectacle is slowed, looped and stripped until the crowd’s attention becomes the subject rather than the game.
See the full lineup below.
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Featured Exhibitions
Hammer Museum | Westwood, Los Angeles
Hammer Projects: Vibeke Mascini
On view through January 17, 2027
@hammer_museum
Vibeke Mascini builds work around energy that has already lived somewhere else — a beached whale carcass, electric eels, a melting glacier — and for her first Hammer Project she runs electrical cable through electroformed ceiba trees and orchids until root system and wiring become difficult to tell apart. The plants, metallised and rigid, are made to do a job they were never built for, and the installation holds them at exactly the point where a botanical form turns into infrastructure. Organized by Pablo José Ramírez, it is the kind of piece that leaves the room’s ordinary wiring looking suddenly like something that grew there.
Getty Center | Brentwood, Los Angeles
Every Minute Is History: Five Views of Los Angeles
On view through January 3, 2027
@gettymuseum
Five photographers — Laura Aguilar, Reynaldo Rivera, George Rodriguez, Patssi Valdez and Ricardo Valverde — worked the same city across the second half of the twentieth century and came back with five incompatible versions of it, which is the exhibition’s argument rather than its problem. Aguilar’s portraits insist on bodies the frame was not built for; Rivera’s night pictures hold a Los Angeles that only existed after dark; Rodriguez shot the marches and the movie stars with the same steadiness. What accumulates across the five is less a survey of Chicano/a Los Angeles than a demonstration of how much a community’s record depends on who was standing there with a camera, and on what they decided was worth the exposure.
Pace Gallery | Beverly Hills
David Lynch: LA
September 19 – October 24, 2026
@pacegallery
Five photographic series made between 1979 and 2008 are brought into dialogue here for the first time, and the effect is of a sensibility caught working in a register it never had to explain to anyone. Lynch’s photographs share the films’ appetite for industrial surface — smokestacks, rot, corridors that end badly — but without narrative to carry them they sit closer to still life, patient and unpeopled, the atmosphere doing all the labor. This is the first Los Angeles presentation of his visual art since his death last year, which gives the whole room the quality of an archive opening rather than an exhibition mounting.
Hauser & Wirth | West Hollywood
Night Window - David Smith Spray Paintings, 1958 – 1964
September 17, 2026 – January 16, 2027
@hauserwirth
David Smith welded by day and sprayed by night, laying found objects and cut-out forms onto paper and working enamel around them until the object lifted away and left its own absence behind — negative space as structure, colour arriving as weather rather than as drawing. An exhibition given over entirely to these seldom-seen works reframes one of American sculpture’s central figures as someone who spent his dark hours testing what a picture could do without a single mark standing for a thing. The paint records only what it could not reach, which turns out to be the most precise account of the object available.
Perrotin | Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles
Paul Pfeiffer: Olympia
September 18 – November 7, 2026
@perrotin
Paul Pfeiffer has spent three decades taking the footage that mass audiences have already consumed and removing from it the thing they came for — the athlete, the ball, the decisive moment — so that what remains is the roar, the lighting rig, the tens of thousands of faces turned the same direction. Olympia extends that operation into the vocabulary of the sporting spectacle at its most ceremonial, where bodies are asked to stand for nations and the crowd’s attention becomes a material with weight and volume of its own. Stripped of its subject, the spectacle does not collapse; it simply reveals that it was never really about the figure at the center.
Also On View
Hollywood
Roy DeCarava: the sound i saw — Roy DeCarava · David Zwirner · September 19 – October 31, 2026 · @davidzwirner
Daniel Gibson: Manzanita — Daniel Gibson · Nazarian / Curcio · September 12 – October 24, 2026 · @nazariancurcio
Mid-Wilshire
Tacita Dean: FILM / Pierre Leguillon: Ads & Brands — Tacita Dean & Pierre Leguillon · Marciano Art Foundation · September 18, 2026 – February 27, 2027 · @marcianoartfoundation
Erin Wright: Memnosphere — Erin Wright · Anat Ebgi · September 19 – December 19, 2026 · @anatebgigallery
West Hollywood
Mia Middleton: Summoning Cleo — Mia Middleton · Roberts Projects · September 19 – October 24, 2026 · @robertsprojects
Chinatown
The Perez Bros: Lookout Weekend — Alejandro & Vicente Perez · Charlie James Gallery · September 11 – October 24, 2026 · @charliejamesgallery
Silver Lake
George Sherman & Virva Hinnemo: On the Street Where You Live — George Sherman & Virva Hinnemo · Marta · September 12 – October 24, 2026 · @marta.losangeles
Pasadena
Dané Estes: Alack, There Lies More Peril in Thine Eye Than Twenty of Their Swords — Dané Estes · Simchowitz · September 17 – October 16, 2026 · @simchowitzgallery
Glendale
Michael Mandiberg: Taking Stock: The Gym — Michael Mandiberg · Gattopardo · September 10 – October 16, 2026 · @gattopardo.la
Riverside
Camera Rotation: Subminiatures — UCR ARTS, California Museum of Photography · September 12, 2026 – February 14, 2027 · @ucrarts
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