Gagosian is pleased to present LA Invitational, a wide-ranging exhibition of works by Los Angeles–based artists Chris Burden, Frank Gehry, Piero Golia, Mark Grotjahn, Thomas Houseago, Alex Israel, Mike Kelley, Nancy Rubins, Sterling Ruby, Ed Ruscha, Robert Therrien, Jeff Wall, Mary Weatherford, and Jonas Wood. Many works have been made specifically for this exhibition, while others are being shown in New York for the first time.
In the popular imagination, the cultural motor of Los Angeles has always been rooted in Hollywood. The exchange between the movie business and the visual arts, however, has had notable impacts on both worlds—clearly discernible in the works of artists such as Kelley, Ruscha, and Israel. From the 1950s, as the entertainment industry increasingly required industrial, artisanal, and artistic skills such as set painting, animation, modeling, and editing, generations of dedicated visual artists both resisted and participated in Los Angeles’s far-reaching cultural boom during the city’s transformation into one of the world’s most influential industrial, economic, and creative capitals.
The landscape of southern California serves as a catalyst for fantasy, from its modernist architecture to its otherworldly rock formations, trees, coastline, mountains, and hills from which twinkling towns and cities can be viewed in the valleys below. Alex Israel’s Sky Backdrop (2016) depicts Los Angeles’s wide skies in scenographic terms, while Mary Weatherford, showing her first large-scale painting since joining Gagosian, captures the shifting atmosphere of the Pacific coast, evoking the sky and sea in painted layers and glowing, neon light. In Jeff Wall’s Property Line (2015), two surveyors mark a patch of dirt on the outskirts of California City, located about 100 miles outside of Los Angeles, capturing the exact moment at which nature is transformed into property.
Mark Grotjahn’s Untitled (Turkish Forest V Face 43.94) (2012) is the largest example of his iconic “face paintings” to date. The Turkish Forest is a single work comprising eleven paintings; nine were shown together in 2014 at the Punta della Dogana in Venice. Evolving out of Grotjahn’s Butterfly series, Untitled (Turkish Forest V Face 43.94) features a dichromatic scheme of red and blue oil paint, applied layer by layer with a brush and a palette knife, the colors building upon each other to an almost sculptural effect.
