Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to announce the acquisition of Dave McKenzie's "Listed under accessories," 2022 by The Whitney Museum of American Art!

Dave McKenzie's two-channel video, Listed under accessories, was included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Quiet as It's Kept, curated by Adrienne Edwards and David Breslin and was acquired by the museum for the permanent collection.

The New Museum presents "Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined" running from March 2 through June 4, 2023 a major solo exhibition of the work of Wangechi Mutu.

Representing the full breadth of her practice, the presentation will encompass painting, collage, drawing, sculpture, film, and performance. Mutu first gained acclaim for her collage-based practice exploring camouflage, transformation, and mutation. She extends these strategies to her work across various media, developing hybrid, fantastical forms that fuse mythical and folkloric narratives with layered sociohistorical references. “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined” will trace connections between recent developments in the artist’s sculptural practice and her decades-long exploration of the legacies of colonialism, globalization, and African and diasporic cultural traditions. At once culturally specific and transnational in scope, Mutu’s work grapples with contemporary realities, while proffering new models for a radically changed future informed by feminism, Afrofuturism, and interspecies symbiosis.

Join Rodney McMillian and artist Jacob Mason-Macklin in a moderated conversation organized by The Studio Museum in Harlem on February 27th at 1:00pm EST. Discussing the exhibition It’s time for me to go: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2021–22, they will consider the possibilities of experimentation within and parallels between contemporary painting and sculpture.

The dialogue will follow presentations by each artist and conclude with an audience Q&A. 

Live CART captioning and ASL interpretation will be provided.

Click here to register

Art Production Fund’s ‘Now Playing’ brings together a series of artworks that shine a light on the often-overlooked elements of everyday life in Los Angeles; the vehicles, street food, sports, aircraft, construction sites and deeper histories that blend into the background. The artists featured in ‘Now Playing’ provide a lens through which we can see these quotidian details anew; ever present but unseen, that make Los Angeles a city both complex and beloved. ‘Now Playing’ receives support from Art of Recovery, an initiative of the City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs. Participating artists in ‘Now Playing’ include Autumn Breon, Chris Burden, Jose Dávila, Basil Kincaid, Divya Mehra, Ruben Ochoa, Alake Shilling and Jennifer West.

Ruben Ochoa pays tribute to the street vendor community, connecting his personal narrative to his art making. 

At Frieze Los Angeles 2023, Stanya Kahn will create the newest iteration of the R.U.in.ART Commission: an annual initiative that invites a Californian artist to realize a commission in the Ruinart lounge at Frieze Los Angeles.

Kahn’s commission, titled Understory, takes the form of an installation in which elements of the natural world frame paintings and sculptures depicting lone animals in imagined wilds. Drawing on her 2022 exhibition at Vielmetter Los Angeles, Forest for the Trees, the installation references forms of life that dwell between the forest floor and the canopy.

"The characters in the Mutu cinematic universe are a sexually assertive, menacing and athletic bunch. They leap, twist and spring, often backwards and in heels, like Ginger Rogers. The retrospective is titled Intertwined and, sure enough, her figures are constantly putting down roots or bursting free of them, moulting and germinating in a frenzy of tangled growth."

By Ariella Budick - 15 March 2023

"Paul Mpagi Sepuya crafts pictures that feel as intimate and warm as they do formal and intellectual. His photos do what art does best: Offer an immediate jolt of both recognition and disorientation, and point toward a singular perspective — a voice, a vision. I’m tempted to say they are arresting images, or captivating, but then the involuntary connotations of those adjectives don’t seem to fit; better to say that Sepuya creates images that hold you. Images that give pause and invite reflection — not so much like looking in a mirror but very much like catching someone else, someone you care for, gazing into the mirror."

By Justin Torres - 15 March 2023

"Like Braithwaite, Sepuya, Gaignard, and McMillian work against photography’s extractive legacy, in which white men used their cameras to further harmful stereotypes, expand their colonial prospects, and otherwise reinforce systems of power. Instead­­, they sustain photography’s parallel legacy as a mechanism of collective agency and liberation."

By Erin O'Leary - March 2023

"Hybrid creatures populate both the artist’s extravagant collages and startling sculptures, variously merging human and animal (or plant), alien and earthling, and female and male into assertive female-leaning beings. An interest in fusing opposites is suggested in the show’s title, “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined,” taken from a 2003 watercolor collage of two dance club habitués — young, scantily clad women with the heads of wild African dogs on the second floor."

By Roberta Smith - March 2023

"This humorously paired presentation includes glazed ceramic sculptures by Arlene Shechet and graphite figurative drawings by Nicola Tyson. Shechet’s gravity-defying sculptures seem to contort, tilt, bend and melt. They appear to be set in motion even while static. Her work embraces the duality of clay which is malleable yet holds still, and fragile yet strong, conveying the humor and pathos of bodily existence. Tyson describes her work as “psycho-figuration” because her misshapen figures have unexpected proportions. These amusingly freakish, androgynous figures are beyond gender identification, yet they have an obstinate individuality even without detailed faces."

By Lita Barrie - February 2023

"“It’s Time” is an exhibition of works by Kwesi Botchway, Genevieve Gaignard, Rodney McMillan, Wangechi Mutu, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya in conversation with works by legendary New York-based photographer Kwame Brathwaite. Anchored by Brathwaite’s influential images, the exhibition creates a cross-generational dialogue that posits an exploration of the photographer’s influence and the continuing investigation of portraiture and representation of the Black body by artists today."

By Mousse Magazine Staff - 18 February 2023

"Kirk is specifically taken with the story of Minerva—goddess of wisdom—and her pet owl, who symbolizes knowledge acquired through trial and error; cultivating wisdom through the process of making mistakes. His neon orange sunsets and sci-fi skyscraper vistas, painted with Gorilla Glue and spray paint, function as markers of time, change, and spirituality."

By Jennifer Piejko - 17 February 2023

"As part of the Frieze Projects programme at Frieze Los Angeles, Ochoa is resurrecting the CLASS: C van, exhibiting ‘Las Tortillas’, a series of bronze tortilla sculptures that pay homage to both the food and his family’s history as tortilla purveyors. In parallel, working in partnership with the fair, Revolution Carts – maker of the first hot food vending cart approved by the LA County Department of Health – and local street vendor advocacy groups, Ochoa will design the graphics for a custom ‘street legal’ food vending cart, which will be unveiled and donated to a local vendor at the fair. As well as directly benefitting this community, the gesture is intended to raise awareness of the history, contributions and ongoing ‘hustle’ of Los Angeles’ street vendors, whose economic and cultural impact on the city is, Ochoa says, unrecognized and undervalued."

By Patricia Escarcega - 15 February 2023

"Now, for the first time since 2005, Ochoa is opening the doors of his storied and rather rusty van to the public again, parking it on the tarmac of the Santa Monica airport for the run of Frieze Los Angeles there (Feb. 16-19). Its engine is shot, so this time the van, known as “Class: C” (after the standard type of driver’s license needed to operate it), will be towed into place."

By Jori Finkel - 13 February 2023