Autumn Art Highlights: Los Angeles

Some of the best exhibitions and events coming up in Los Angeles
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‘Frank Gehry’, LACMA, 13 September 2015–20 March 2016

This sweeping retrospective, organised by the Centre Pompidou, will celebrate the practice of Los Angeles’s resident architectural legend, Frank Gehry. For more than three decades, Gehry has redefined the scope of contemporary architecture, while also churning out an astonishing number of paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures. These will be on display alongside 65 models and a special presentation of Gehry’s digital design software, CATIA.

‘Matthew Barney: River of Fundament’, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), 13 September 2015–18 January 2016, and ‘Water Castings: Fourteen Pieces’, Regen Projects, 11 September–24 October

With James Turrell retrospectives playing out at LACMA and the Guggenheim, 2014 was the Year of Turrell. 2015 may well be the Year of Barney. Crowds packed the Guggenheim’s theatre last month to watch Matthew Barney’s epic, nine-hour Cremaster (1994–2002) film cycle. The artist’s Los Angeles gallery, Regen Projects, will be hosting an exhibition of Barney’s monumental bronze waster castings concurrently with the artist’s mid-career retrospective at MOCA.

Opening of Maccarone Los Angeles, ‘Alex Hubbard: Basic Perversions,’ 19 September–20 December

New York powerhouse gallery Maccarone, founded by Michele Maccarone in 2001, will open an outpost in downtown Los Angeles this September. Located on Mission Road, not far from the popular exhibition space 356 Mission, the new gallery will feature 15,000 sq ft of outdoor exhibition and event space, two studio spaces, a residence, and a ‘project’ space for other exhibitions. The gallery will open with a show of new work by Alex Hubbard.

Opening of The Broad museum, 20 September

LA’s newest art museum opens 20 September. The hotly anticipated – and controversial – Broad museum will house the vast contemporary collection of real estate scion and art world philanthropist Eli Broad. Many of the works haven’t been seen together since they occupied the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, a Renzo Piano-designed wing of LACMA that opened in 2008. The Broad’s building, designed by star firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, joins Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall across the street as yet another cultural landmark on LA’s architectural acropolis, Bunker Hill. Museum admission will be free for all.

‘UH-OH: Frances Stark, 1991–2015,’ Hammer Museum, 11 October 2015–24 January 2016

Frances Stark has been making news lately, since leaving her post in USC’s graduate art department and prompting her students to follow suit. Stark’s show at the Art Institute of Chicago this summer also drew wide attention and acclaim. This fall the Hammer Museum will present the widest mid-career survey of the artist’s work yet, covering 25 years of multimedia art-making. The self-described ‘badass’ draws from poetry, music, literature, popular culture, and intimate personal experiences to create works that are variously witty, hilarious, guttural, and heart-wrenching.

On 26 and 27 September, the Hammer will also be presenting All the Instruments Agree. Described as ‘an exhibition or a concert’, the programme revels in slippery indeterminacy. It’s a two-day festival featuring artists and musicians who make work at the margins of their field. Featuring Kim Gordon, Genesis P-Orridge, Simone Forti, William Leavitt, Rodney Graham, Adam Linder, Odwalla 88, and more.

Miranda July’s ‘New Society’ at UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, 17 and 18 October

Miranda July does it all. The artist, performer, filmmaker, and writer has presented work at the Cannes Film Festival, two Whitney Biennials, and in the pages of The Paris Review, to name just a few outlets. According to UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, which will host July’s October presentation at the Freud Playhouse, July plans to ‘test the limits of what is possible when given two hours and a room full of strangers.’ What that means isn’t entirely clear, but you won’t want to miss it.

Charles Gaines’s ‘Manifestos 2’ at REDCAT, 9 December

California conceptualist Charles Gaines has been using systems to produce images and performance pieces for several decades. Lately he’s been turning to opera to translate political speeches into song, using an arbitrary system that replaces each letter with a musical note. On 9 December at REDCAT a nine-piece ensemble will perform Malcolm X’s last public speech (1965), as well as Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (1999), by Mohawk activist Taiaiake Alfred, Indocumentalismo Manifesto—an Emerging Socio-Political Ideological Identity (2010) by Raúl Alcaraz and Daniel Carrillo, and the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791), by early French feminist Olympe DeGouges.

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