The Los Angeles wildfires, as destructive as they were, failed to halt Los Angeles Art Week, with Frieze, Felix Art Fair and the new Post-Fair proceeding as planned. Art galleries and local cultural institutions are similarly back in action, opening their doors to stage some of the year’s most compelling shows—both for those intrepid visitors willing to venture west and, more significantly, as a source of solace for affected communities. “Each year, Frieze Los Angeles celebrates the city’s extraordinary artistic scene,” said Christine Messineo, director of Americas at Frieze, in a statement. “In these trying times, we reaffirm our commitment to Frieze’s vital role as a platform for creative recovery and renewal.”
In true Hollywood fashion, the show must go on, and this week’s L.A. art calendar brims with exhibitions worth exploring. To help you navigate the City of Stars at its most luminous, Observer has compiled a guide to the best of the week.
Kelly Akashi at Lisson Gallery, through March 29
Akashi was one of many Angelenos devastated by the fires, losing an entire body of works she and her team had been creating for months in preparation for her debut with the gallery. Despite the initial shock, Akashi and her team returned to work with the same resilience and perseverance that has driven the entire Los Angeles community to rebuild and reframe their losses. Now inseparable from the tragedy, her exhibition confronts the fragility of human existence, shaped by a material world that can be obliterated in seconds—often by natural disasters fueled by our unsustainable cycle of endless production and consumption. From the ashes of her studio, Akashi salvaged several bronze cast and borosilicate glass forms, their surfaces marked with a somber patina—the alchemic trace of the fire’s destructive force, which transformed the objects into something new. In doing so, the artist urges a reckoning with the cosmic cycle of creation, transformation and destruction, reminding us that we exist within a continuum beyond our control. While Akashi’s work reveres process and materiality, her visual language underscores the impermanence of the natural world, recording and indexing fragmented moments in time.
Olafur Eliasson’s OPEN and Wael Shawky’s Drama 1882 at MOCA Geffen
The MOCA Geffen is spotlighting two major crowd-pullers: Olafur Eliasson’s seductive light installation OPEN, on view through the summer, and the U.S. debut of Wael Shawky’s acclaimed video installation Drama 1882, first presented in the Egyptian Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale and unveiled for Frieze week.
Eliasson, known for bridging art, science and activism, continues his exploration of light, color and environmental phenomena in this site-specific installation. By engaging the liminal space between perception, embodiment and participation, he creates a dazzlingly holistic sensory experience through large-scale optical devices tailored to the museum’s architecture and the ever-shifting light of Los Angeles. Eliasson’s work invites visitors to confront the relationship between micro and macro scales, heightening their awareness of natural forces through a play of reflection, refraction and motion.
Shawky, meanwhile, blurs fact and fiction with his dramatic video restaging of the Urabi Revolution (1879-1882)—a populist uprising against 70 years of British colonial rule in Egypt. Set in the expressive interiors of a historic theater in Alexandria, where it was both performed and filmed, the installation creates an immersive visual and narrative spectacle. According to Shawky, the work “conjures a sense of entertainment, of catastrophe, and our inherent doubt in history,” confronting viewers with the ways narratives are constructed and histories shaped.
David Hammons and George Rouy at Hauser & Wirth, through June 1
Presented to the public for the first time since its debut over twenty years ago, Hauser & Wirth will showcase David Hammons’ acclaimed installation Concerto in Black and Blue through June 1, 2025—an undeniable highlight of the week. Hammons uses humor and intentional interactivity to confront themes of race, perception and the experience of navigating a world that often marginalizes and obscures Black individuals. The installation immerses viewers in a darkened space where their only guide is a flashlight, transforming their movement into an act of discovery. A layered soundtrack, blending city sounds and music rooted in African American traditions, envelops the experience, heightening sensory awareness while posing questions about visibility, access and exclusion.
In the same week, Hauser & Wirth will also debut a solo presentation by highly sought-after British painter George Rouy, following his gallery debut at Frieze London last October. In this second chapter of his series “Bleed II,” Rouy continues his visceral exploration of human mass, multiplicity and movement. His large-scale paintings, charged with a raw, expressive energy, evoke the inner turmoil of a psyche stretched between physical and digital realms. Expanding on his concept of ‘the bleed,’ Rouy captures the tension where figure and empty space coexist—a push and pull where matter and energy blur, blend and merge into one another.
Joseph Beuys’ “In Defense of Nature” at the Broad, through March 23
While the Broad in Los Angeles may be best known for its flashier holdings—Jeff Koons’ balloon sculptures, Andy Warhol’s pop icons and Basquiat’s raw, streetwise masterpieces— the museum is shifting focus to the ascetic yet no less provocatively revolutionary practice of German artist Joseph Beuys. In over 400 works from the Broad collection, the exhibition highlights Beuys’s lifelong belief in art as a tool for societal transformation, centering on his commitment to environmental justice and his radical critique of capitalist systems of overproduction and overconsumption—issues that remain urgently relevant as the world faces the escalating consequences of ecological imbalance.
The show includes some of Beuys’ most iconic multiples, such as Felt Suit (1970) and Sled (1969), each transformed from ordinary objects into shamanic talismans, imbued with ritualistic power and inviting deeper sensitivity toward both the natural environment and social inequities. Ever blurring the line between art and life, Beuys famously declared that “every human being is an artist,” asserting that every creative act holds the potential to ignite political and social change.
Extending Beuys’s legacy beyond the gallery, the Broad has launched a reforestation project inspired by his legendary act of urban renewal and ecological awareness, 7000 Oaks. Originally begun at documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany, in 1982—where Beuys and volunteers planted 7,000 oak trees across the city—this project now finds new life in Los Angeles. Partnering with North East Trees, the Broad will plant 100 California native oak trees in Elysian Park’s Chávez Ridge area. The initiative transforms the exhibition into an act of environmental stewardship—one that feels all the more urgent right now
Tau Lewis at David Zwirner, through March 29
There is something profoundly totemic in the way Jamaican-Canadian artist Tau Lewis approaches her practice, hand-sewing and assembling colossal masks of anthropomorphic figures that channel the power to invoke ancestral memory and wisdom. For her debut show with David Zwirner, “Spiritual Level,” Lewis presents five monumental sculptures alongside a circular quilt, all meticulously crafted from salvaged textiles and found materials. Through these works, she delves into ancestral mythologies, weaving together a vast constellation of references that range from Caribbean Sea folklore and traditions to techno and dub music, novels and studies of religion and spirituality. First conceived for her 2024/2025 solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the enigmatic sculptures are displayed here in radial symmetry, arranged within a charged, ritualistic circle that pulses with energy. The formation evokes what Lewis calls “The Last Transmission”—a concept that underscores the embodiment and transference of knowledge across generations.
Tschabalala Self and Nina Chanel Abney at Jeffrey Deitch, through April 5
No pairing could be more fitting than Tschabalala Self and Nina Chanel Abney, two of the most celebrated contemporary Black women artists, both of whom share a playful, collage-driven aesthetic and a commitment to representing Black bodies in their work. Yet, beyond their formal approaches, both artists push deeper, raising existential and identitarian questions about self-representation, identity and belief systems in today’s chaotic world.
In “Dream Girl” at Jeffrey Deitch, Tschabalala Self presents a new series of sculptures and paintings that continue her confrontation with societal dynamics, conventions and stereotypes—interrogating how these forces shape the idea of a constructed self and the formation of femininity. Self’s distinct style, which fuses hand painting with elaborate fabric collages, remains deeply anchored in the Black quilting and storytelling traditions that have long served as vessels of self-expression and cultural preservation. In this new body of work, she confronts the concept of the Self as both a psychological and emotional construction, producing mixed media paintings that, in her words, exist “within liminal spaces which speak to psychological, emotional and spiritual aspects of personhood.”
Nina Chanel Abney, meanwhile, delves even more profoundly into the spiritual dimension in her new series at the gallery, probing the human need for guidance in a world upended by uncertainty. Her seemingly playful, cartoonish characters mask a sharp interrogation of the thin boundary between sacred and secular. Through them, she critiques the commodification of belief while celebrating resilience, humor and adaptability—the qualities that carry people through life’s chaos as they navigate, as she suggests, by simply “winging it” without a clear guide or point of reference.
Issy Wood at Michael Werner Gallery, through April 5
Drawing from the endless flux of banal yet functional objects that surround daily life, Issy Wood’s moody, dark canvases offer cinematic glimpses of body gestures and fragments of humanity, all enveloped in a dusty pall that imbues them with mystery and impending tragedy. Shadows obscure each object within these frames, reframing and transmuting them to reveal their inevitable obsolescence—relics of neglect and material memories dissolving into oblivion. Yet, Wood chooses to memorialize these overlooked fragments of ordinary life, honoring them as pieces of the greater composition of meaning we attribute to existence.
In “Wet Reckless,” her latest show at longtime dealer Michael Werner in LA, Wood turns her attention to the seductive power of minimal details in remediated images—fragments that, despite their endless circulation, still trigger desires and obsessions by speaking directly to the psyche. “Capital S Seduction, everything shiny, everything pretty, everything beautifully photographed,” Wood explains, describing her subjects and the visual strategies that make them so captivating. By deconstructing these strategies, she exposes the latent ugliness beneath the sheen of consumer culture: objects of advertisement and consumption, dazzling but soulless, appear blurred and distorted, trapped in a diminished “Wet Reckless” state. The term, borrowed from California law to describe a reduced drunk-driving charge, becomes a metaphor for a disoriented existence.
Claire Tabouret at Night Gallery, through March 29
Diaphanous yet confrontational, like apparitions surfacing from the subconscious, the female figures in Claire Tabouret’s paintings pulse with an intense psychological charge. The artist excavates the vast emotional and existential nuances of womanhood, spanning ages and oscillating between personal and social space. Tabouret’s signature layering technique—combining bold strokes, drips and thinned washes—conveys the stratified nature of reality, where material existence collides with a rich inner world of sensation, emotion and psychological response.
Her latest exhibition takes its title from Mike Oldfield’s 1983 song Moonlight Shadow, in which he sings, “The trees that whisper in the evening / Carried away by a moonlight shadow / Sing the song of sorrow and grieving / Carried away by a moonlight shadow,” and draws inspiration from that elusive state between sleep and wakefulness, consciousness and unconsciousness. In these poetic and dreamlike images, Tabouret probes the mechanisms of subjectivity, tracing the fluidities and transformations that occur as time and life erode and reshape the self. The works become meditations on loss—of memory, form and identity—capturing what slips away in the slow, inevitable progression of time.
Nate Lewis at Vielmetter, through March 29
What makes Nate Lewis’s art so singular and original is, first of all, his background. A graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, he worked as a critical-care nurse for nine years before finding the courage during the pandemic to leave that chapter of his life behind and plunge fully into art. This medical background deeply informs his visual language, which draws inspiration from the aesthetic qualities of diagnostic images—where subtle shifts in shades, shapes and textures can signal changes in a patient’s condition. These visual cues, crucial in medicine but rarely explored by artists, have become a rich vocabulary through which Lewis investigates human nature.
Lewis’s technique, seen in his solo exhibition at Vielmetter LA, is both surgical and tactile. He approaches his works on paper with a precision that echoes his clinical training, treating the surface as a sensory field where touch is paramount. By cutting, scoring and layering, he transforms paper—often considered a fragile and flat medium—into vibrant, sculptural bas-reliefs. The unexpected textures he creates resonate with the music and heartbeat that accompany his creative process. “Interacting with images is an act of care,” Lewis explains. “I explore and question the subject’s history, mirroring the abilities of diagnostic lenses in my language of seeing and listening. The textures and patterns I create resonate with the rhythms and sounds I listen to.”
This rhythmic, bodily energy infuses his figures, often portrayed as dancers and capoeiristas in motion—bodies animated by the spontaneous, ecstatic surrender to music. A video installation in the show amplifies this rhythm of life, depicting miniature paper-doll capoeiristas dancing together to Ben LaMar Gay’s Any Train We Can Catch, manipulated by Lewis’s friend and training partner, Professor Peixe Boi, who brings nearly two decades of capoeira experience to the collaboration.
El Royale by Loyal Gallery, through March 1
Every year, the Stockholm-based gallery Loyal, known for its sharp eye for spotting emerging talent, brings a curated group show to El Royale, one of L.A.’s most storied buildings. Opening its doors for the occasion, the El Royale—erected in 1929, a year marked by both progress and profound loss for the city—stands as a symbol of resilience and imagination. This year’s exhibition, “El Royale III,” which opens today (Feb. 18), echoes that layered history while gesturing toward possible futures, presenting works by twenty-five artists—gateways, frames and mirrors reflecting the intricate journey from past to present, from then to now. The lineup includes well-known names who have risen up from L.A.’s art scene in recent years, including Mario Ayala, Tidawhitney Lek, Zoé Blue M. and Alex McAdoo, among others.
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