LOS ANGELES, CA.- David Zwirner is presenting California Light and Space (The 21st Century Version), a group exhibition organized by Helen Molesworth at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. Featuring a selection of artists who make up the city’s distinctive and vibrant arts scene, the presentation considers how the terroir of Los Angeles—to borrow a term from wine connoisseurship that connotes how a specific ecosystem or geography gives wine an indelible “sense of place”—affects the overarching concerns and tendencies of the work being produced there today.
LA is frequently identified with the Light and Space artists of the 1960s and 1970s whose work was characterized by industrial materials, highly finished surfaces, and a preoccupation with perception. This show gathers a subsequent generation of artists working in a range of mediums, and suggests that they are also concerned with the specificity of the light and space conditions offered by LA, nestled as it is in a basin demarcated by the Santa Monica, Santa Ana, and San Gabriel Mountains and the Pacific Ocean.
Molesworth states:
“If, in the 1960s, LA artists made minimalist works exploring acts of perception that came to be called ‘light and space,’ then today’s LA artists are deeply embedded in the vernacular quality of the city. Their version of space is bound up with the handmade quality of the city’s built environment. They refer more to the tradition of hand painted store windows, and the murals that grace our surface streets, than the billboards on the Sunset Strip.”
California Light and Space (The 21st Century Version) includes Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Sonia Boyajian, Noah Davis, rafa esparza, Jennifer Guidi, Lauren Halsey, EJ Hill, Thomas Houseago, Manuel López, Rodney McMillian, Mr. Wash, Catherine Opie, Hilary Pecis, Lari Pittman, Jason Rhoades, Cauleen Smith, and Lily Stockman.
The artists traverse the geographies of El Sereno and Compton Creek, probe the histories of the Chavez Ravine and Hollywood Boulevard, and depict the city’s striking flora and endlessly variable skies in cloud studies, sunscapes, and moonscapes. Working in painting, sculpture, photography, clay, drawing, and installation, these artists realize their untold versions of Los Angeles for our present moment.
