Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present a second iteration of the gallery’s 20th anniversary exhibition on view from June 26th through August 7th, 2021. As Los Angeles re-opens, we are thrilled to continue celebrating this important milestone with our artists, clients, staff, and guests.
 
The gallery’s program was built with the belief that contemporary art has relevance for all audiences. For this reason, equity of representation has always been a guiding principle in our program. It is with great gratitude that we look back on a richly faceted exhibition history resulting from this approach.

In this exhibition, we are honored to present new and historical works by Nick Aguayo, Edgar Arceneaux, Sadie Benning, Ellen Berkenblit, Andrea Bowers, Kim Dingle, Sean Duffy, Nicole Eisenman, Louise Fishman, Charles Gaines, Karl Haendel, Samuel Levi Jones, My Barbarian, Hugo McCloud, Dave McKenzie, Rodney McMillian. Yunhee Min, Mary Reid Kelley, Elizabeth Neel, Ruben Ochoa, Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Nicola Tyson.

Nick Aguayo’s painting comes from his most recent body of works presented at the gallery. Rooted in the process of collage the thick impasto surfaces and textural areas of built-up and removed paint reveal layers of compositions that are both highly orchestrated and intuitively improvised.

Edgar Arceneaux, whose body of work includes sculpture, video, and performance, presents two framed drawings on sheets of muslin, entitled Migrant's Totem I & II, 2017. In these works, markings and erasures create ghostly images evoking time, process, and the movements of migration, all the while capturing the tenuous and segregated realities of the American Dream.

Over the last three decades, Sadie Benning has made work ranging from experimental video and performance to mixed-media wall-mounted works that trouble the distinctions between painting, drawing, sculpture, and photo collage. The material hybridity of Benning’s work speaks to a continued desire to foreground ambiguity as an important aspect of making artworks.

Ellen Berkenblit’s bold paintings are composed of an ever-evolving pictorial calligraphy featuring the profile of long-nosed and screaming women, stripey tigers, flowers, and other motifs. In Berkenblit’s hand, these figures undergo a certain alchemy; their logic is transformed from mundane representation to that of dreams and sensation through wild shifts in scale and color.

Andrea Bowers is an artist and activist based in Los Angeles. Her cross-disciplinary practice includes drawing, video, sculpture, and installation work that foregrounds the experience of the people who dedicate their time and energy to the struggle for gender, racial, environmental, labor, and immigration justice and those who are directly affected by systemic inequality. Her large drawings on cardboard reinterpret historical political graphics, pairing these images created with current slogans to highlight the longitudinal nature of making change.

We are especially thrilled to present Kim Dingle’s eponymous Priss Installation from 1994/1995, in which two baby sculptures standing in their crib joyfully wreak havoc on their toys and surroundings, shattering expected modes of female behavior along the way.

Sean Duffy presents a new sculpture fashioned from records of the Sun Records label. Star Seed is composed of 20 albums pinned in place at the moment they begin to move apart. It imagines Sun Records and its stars as a supernova—or seed pod—just before exploding and disseminating its energy through space.

Nicole Eisenman is known for irreverent and humorous figurative paintings, prints, and sculptures. Their diverse practice, which early on also included installations and video, is rife with art historical references and allusions and often humorously undermines male-centric, misogynist, and homophobic narratives. On view here are two new paintings made for the exhibition capturing two heartbreaking images of the pandemic.

The work of Louise Fishman offers an unwavering exploration of scale, materiality, gesture, and light within the field of abstraction. Her painting Jasper, 2016 is a lustrous and electric composition, exemplary of the artist’s bold and physical tenor honed over the last five decades.

Charles Gaines is a key figure in conceptual art. Over the last 40 years, his artwork and writing have radically questioned the relationships between aesthetic experience, political belief, and the formation of meaning. Gaines’ employs systems and rule-based procedures to produce his work and to explore how we experience and derive meaning from art and how this process is deeply embedded in and influenced by our cultural upbringing.

Karl Haendel’s large, labor-intensive, photorealistic pencil drawings are often presented as interconnected groups that compose large installations. His work uses drawing to discover connections and affinities between seemingly disparate nodes of cultural data, drawing attention to the overlaps between the social, political, and personal.

Sam Levi Jones deconstructs and manipulates books such as encyclopedias and textbooks, to critically explore systems of knowledge and power. Action Over Words, 2021 is composed of deconstructed law books, symbolically dismantling their implicit authority.

Founded in 2000 in Los Angeles, My Barbarian is the umbrella for works collaboratively created by Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and Alexandro Segade. Their collective work uses performance to explore social difficulties; often re-framing Marxist, feminist, and queer theory, pop culture, and classics through playful, campy intervention. On view here are 5 dolls from their 2014 adaptation of Blood on the Cat’s Neck, a play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The dolls are based on members of Fassbinder’s antiteater troupe.

Hugo McCloud connects the world of contemplation and desire where art resides to the practical world of labor where objects are painstakingly made and materials are carried over large distances, often under harsh conditions. On view in the exhibition are several new paintings made from molten commercial plastic bags that are transformed into images of beauty and grace.

Dave McKenzie creates videos, performances, installations, and objects that examine the inner workings of contemporary culture and attempt to understand how it structures our desires and beliefs. McKenzie describes his work as an attempt to produce new situations that may become models for himself or for others. This is often achieved by creating work with familiar forms and images and using this familiarity to create a tension between the experience of the work and the expected experience of the familiar thing.

Rodney McMillian explores the complex and fraught connections between history and contemporary culture, not only as they are expressed in American politics, but also as they are manifest in American modernist art traditions. The work shown here is from a series of works on paper combining mixed media and text to narrate a history of the violence against Black bodies in the name of "science" and of the profit gained from slavery through the present. McMillian holds up the blood-stained land and the often-obscured histories of structural racial violence as a record of one of the many histories of this nation.

Yunhee Min’s series of paintings on glass are intimate studies in the reaction of two materials–transparent glass paired with poured paint. The use of enamel–traditionally used for commercial sign painting–on laminated glass results in intuitively composed paintings that exude a tangible sense of the viscosity of the paint and emphasize the bright saturation of the colors on a reflective surface.

Mary Reid Kelley is well known for her fast-paced, bitingly humorous video works (often made in collaboration with Patrick Kelley) that reinterpret myth and history through a female-centric lens. In this work, we see her enacting a soldier aboard a submarine in a scene culled from her ambitious recent video In The Body of The Sturgeon.

Elizabeth Neel’s large-scale painting on canvas expounds on the language of abstraction in which physical and psychological experiences are externalized through varying methods of application. Using a diverse vocabulary of mark-making tools, including fingers, rags, brushes, mono-printing techniques and rollers, Neel reflects upon the correlative and repetitious cycles of life in her work.

Ruben Ochoa’s painting from 2013 simultaneously references Malevich’s Black Square, Luciano Fontana’s Slashed Canvases, and Michael Heizer’s Double Negative. Rendered on a small area of large, untreated linen, the painting, like Ochoa’s sculptures, emphasizes “inappropriate” or unexpected approaches to foundation materials.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya is a studio photographer, making pictures and portraits of himself, friends, artists, and others that challenge the history of portrait photography, dominant modes of interpreting photographic images, and conventional ideas of artistic authorship. The ambiguity of what you are looking at–the sitters, their reflections, the studio, the black velvet backdrop that renders the surface of the mirror enticingly smudged with remnants of tape and fingerprints–is visually and intellectually exciting, a puzzle of surface, screen, and reflection.

In her paintings and drawings, Nicola Tyson has developed a style that she terms "psycho-figuration” an approach to rendering bodies in dry, thin applications of boldly hued acrylic paint or intensely applied, gestural pencil marks. These morphological figures appear to be in a state of constant transition; indeterminacy forms compelling vitality. Her depictions of humans, plants, and animals have a certain tender humor, revealing the vulnerability and strangeness of the physical body.