Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to announce Matthew Lax as Associate Director. Based in New York, Lax will focus on maintaining and expanding client relationships with the gallery’s East Coast audience, while also working closely with our New York based artists. He will continue the gallery’s commitment to world-class art fair presentations and expand the gallery’s visibility across new platforms.

Lax draws from over six years with the gallery and a decade-long experience living in Los Angeles. In this time, he has closely worked with many of the artists who are foundational to Vielmetter’s program. An accomplished filmmaker and writer himself, Lax previously held positions at Princeton University Art Museum, MASS MoCA, and several other galleries, alongside organizing independent curatorial projects.

Lax has long demonstrated a passion for the arts and interdisciplinary community engagement, and is excited to continue championing the rigorous work for which Vielmetter is known.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to announce the recent acquisition of Mary Kelly’s Calculus by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN.

Mary Kelly’s conceptual works and pedagogical practice have played an influential role in shaping the discourses of feminism and postmodernism. Through her large-scale narrative installations, Kelly fuses together the personal and the political and investigates how identity and subjectivity are formed. Calculus is the most recent in a three-part series of works, together with Cicatrix and Lacunae, that comprise a larger project titled Addendum, which premiered in 2024 at the Whitney Biennial. The series meditates on the process of aging, drawing attention to unacknowledged and difficult to articulate gaps and losses that accrue with the passage of time. Cicatrix meticulously records the artist’s post-surgical mammography, Lacunae juxtaposes Kelly’s personal calendars with the ages of her deceased friends, and Calculus features over a decade of handwritten notations of Kelly’s blood pressure and pulse measurements. The occasional exclamation is written in red pen in the margins when the data shows alarming fluctuations, and an ominous round scorch mark in the center of the paper progresses throughout the series until it nearly obfuscates the written information, not unlike the progression of an eclipse.

In this work, Kelly has returned to autobiographical narrative and an examination of the intimate artefacts of daily life that made her seminal work, Post-Partum Document (1973-79), so provocative when it was first exhibited.

We want to sincerely thank Executive Director Mary Ceruti and Chief Curator Henriette Huldisch at the Walker Art Center for supporting this significant acquisition.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to announce the promotion of Olivia Gauthier to Gallery Director. Since joining the gallery in 2018, Gauthier has played a critical role in liaising with the gallery’s artists and in expanding the gallery’s program by introducing new artists such as Mario Joyce, Shanna Waddell, and Nate Lewis. In her new role, Gauthier will continue to work closely with the gallery’s artists across exhibitions, art fairs, and special projects, as well as developing collector relationships.

In her previous roles as Artist Liaison and Associate Director, Gauthier successfully managed and coordinated notable museum exhibitions, including Whitney Bedford’s The Window at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art; Hayv Kahraman’s Look Me in the Eyes at ICA San Francisco and the Frye Art Museum; and Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage at the Frist Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Phillips Collection. She has also been instrumental in facilitating significant acquisitions of gallery artists’ works by prestigious institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; UCI Art Museum; Lucas Museum of Narrative Art; and the Blanton Museum.

Susanne Vielmetter remarks, “Olivia Gauthier has demonstrated a thoughtful and enthusiastic support of our artists over the years, both in helping them make solid decisions on a day-to-day basis and ensuring that their exhibitions at the gallery are successful and well planned. I am thrilled to offer her the opportunity to now take on a more significant role in shaping our program and artist roster and to participate in building the gallery’s legacy”.

In addition to her work at the gallery, Gauthier is an accomplished arts writer, having contributed essays and reviews to publications including CARLA, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, and Art in America.

Gauthier’s appointment as Director reinforces Vielmetter Los Angeles’ commitment to cultivating meaningful artistic dialogues and expanding the gallery’s influence in contemporary art in Los Angeles and beyond.

Vielmetter Los Angeles is delighted to announce the acquisition of Tâm Văn Trần’s If Not For Your Love ll by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

If Not For Your Love ll (2024) is a stoneware sculpture in the shape of a divination jar. Two scenes of colliding characters and forms play out on opposing sides of the vessel. One side depicts a tumultuous seascape filled with vibrant aquatic and airborne organisms, while the other side features an ambling horse in luminous shades of blue and red against a dusky landscape. Scattered among and between these characters are rectangles, lines, and starbursts of thick glaze that alternatingly divide and connect the dynamic creatures.

The chaotic landscapes evoke exhilaration, danger, and beauty – some of the animals bare ferocious teeth and wide, determined eyes, while others cower and camouflage with the surrounding flora. The kaleidoscopic ceramic glaze conjures the disorienting and bewildering experience of migration, something Trần identifies with intimately. The scenes illustrate the chaos of escaping home to an unfamiliar land, the shift from daylight to dusk, the spaces between land, sky, and sea. The characters exist within a compressed space of interconnected relationships, not dissimilar to life in a fish tank or the complexities of a household dynamic. In If Not For Your Love ll, Trần continues his exploration of abstraction, collage and the language of painting, while playfully introducing cartoon-like elements and figures to his raucous compositions.

We want to express our gratitude to the Curatorial Department at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for supporting this significant acquisition.