LOS ANGELES, CA.- SUMMERLOVE SENSATION is an exhibition of youthful love, lust, and longing, distilled, moistened, and telegraphed in the way only Los Angeles is able.
Borrowing its title from the 1974 pop hit by the Bay City Rollers, the exhibition is a dizzying love affair with love itself, featuring pinup girls (Katherina Olschbaur’s Of the Muses, 2025, and Gregor Hildebrandt’s And Again, Rain Falls Gently On Flowers, 2024), suggestive astrological readings (Jean-Michel Othoniel’s Cancer, 2024), an interspecies, floral affair (Isabelle Albuquerque’s to be the wood, to be the water, to be with you, 2025), and a functional telepathic kissing booth (Pilar Zeta’s Telepathic Kiss Portal, 2026). Taken together, the fifteen artists offer a sticky reminder that when the weather is hot and the days are long, there’s nothing better than putting on as little clothing as possible and enjoying that summer love sensation.
The following excerpt is from instruction manual for Telepathic Kiss Portal, 2026, Pilar Zeta’s functional sculpture, which is featured in the exhibition:
Sit down and close your eyes.
Feel the sensation of the spheres and place your body in the perfect center. Let the marble hold your weight. Notice the temperature difference between your body, the stone, and the metallic spheres. Take a slow breath in. Then another.
As your body settles, notice any small shifts in sensation. A tingling. A current moving upward through the body, as if contact with the object were activating some dormant circuitry in the nervous system. Imagine your thoughts radiating outward in concentric waves, touching the polished spheres around you like metallic satellites receiving signal.
Bring to mind the person sitting opposite you. Or the person who is not there. Picture them clearly. Observe what happens in your body as you become part of the piece. The stainless steel spheres function like satellites in a private experiment, reflecting fractured versions of reality back into the room. The pink marble behaves as a grounding agent, soft and sensual, yet carrying memory accumulated over millions of years.
Now imagine sending a single image to the other person. A strong feeling. A sensation. Wait. See if anything arrives back.
Notice whether anticipation begins to alter your breathing. Your skin. The body often detects a signal before the mind understands it. The chair proposes that intimacy may be a form of signal transmission. That anticipation can alter matter.
Open your eyes. Look at the other person without speaking for exactly ten seconds. If reality feels slightly rearranged, the sculpture is functioning correctly.
Congratulations. You just experienced a Telepathic Kiss.
When I was a child, a chainsmoking, stock-broking, Pittsburgian uncle told me boys in Los Angeles take years longer to mature than their east coast counterparts. It wasn’t our fault! The weather, the beaches, the beautiful people in bikinis and daisy dukes made it impossible to focus on serious matters, like wearing suits and getting rich. But what’s wrong with being young and beautiful, chasing other young, beautiful people? What’s better than being young and longing for love?
— excerpted from Out of Body: The Bortz Metzger Memoirs, R. Driblette, editor. Penguin Books Ltd, 2002
ISABELLE ALBUQUERQUE was born in 1981 in Los Angeles, CA, USA, where she lives and works. Isabelle Albuquerque’s formally powerful and psychologically charged sculpture invites multiple, simultaneous readings and perspectives. With a background in performance, Albuquerque uses her own body to investigate the protean nature of identity and to create a cross-temporal conversation that centers the experiences of women and their own connection to desire, sexuality and embodiment.
ALEX ANDERSON was born in 1990 in Seattle, WA, and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA. Anderson's work reflects on what it means to be alive—to inhabit a body, exist within physical limits, and move through time shaped by unseen but deeply felt forces. He is interested in how life takes form under the forces of nature, how experience accumulates, and how energy and time leave lasting marks. Ceramics offer a direct, material way to think through these questions.
Working with primordial organic, abstract geometric, and classical vessel forms, he considers structure, containment, and the relationship between object and image. These forms establish boundaries that allow the surface to function as a site of encounter. He renders images of elemental matter—flesh, metal, sky, fire, and flowers—on these surfaces not as symbols, but as references to the materials and energies that move through bodies and environments, holding tension between inside and outside, stasis and motion.
MUSTAFA ALI CLAYTON was born in 1978, Toronto, CAN, and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA. Clayton’s figures are a meditation on the iconography of Black womanhood and coming-of-age through a personification of endurance, grace, and fortitude. With an interest in utilizing organic and sustainable materials, the artist grounds his work in the natural elements of the earth, weaving in references to history and lineage through a process that spans oil painting, quilting, beading, ceramics, and assemblage.
GREGOR HILDEBRANDT was born in 1974 in Bad Homburg, Germany and lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Gregor Hildebrandt’s signature media are cassette tape and vinyl, which he collages and assembles into apparently minimalist yet latently romantic paintings, sculptures, and installations. Resting in silence behind the glossy surface of his analog aesthetics, which verges on black and white monochrome, music and cinema haunt his practice. Whether pictorial or sculptural, all of his works contain prerecorded materials, which he references in the titles.
SUSUMU KAMIJO was born in 1975 in Nagano, Japan and lives and works in New York, NY, USA. Kamijo’s paintings trace the boundary between representation and abstraction, balancing precision and spontaneity. His whimsical poodle drawings first garnered acclaim in 2014, revealing a visual language shaped by Japanese calligraphy and the gestural traditions of modern painting. Whether depicting poodles, fish, or flowers, Kamijo’s ethereal forms and charged fields of color evoke both ukiyo-e frontality and the meditative sensibilities of modern masters such as Milton Avery and Mark Rothko. Each subject inhabits a tension between control and intuition, structure and emotion.
RAE KLEIN was born in 1995 in Michigan, USA, where she lives and works. Her visual vocabulary isolates references to mankind’s attempts to assert its mastery over the feral world through fear, power, spirituality, or some combination of the three. Each painting serves as a stage set of sorts, the subjects within them akin to Chekhov’s gun, loaded with some impending, yet-to-be-defined action or chaos.
KOAK was born in 1981 in Lansing, MI, USA, and lives and works in San Francisco, CA, USA. Koak’s work portrays the complex duality of identity and human nature through a mastery of the line which extends across drawing, painting and sculpture. Rendered with exquisite technique and effortless mark-making, her emotionally charged figures and landscapes are imbued with a compelling sense of agency and inner life.
ASUKA ANASTACIA OGAWA was born in 1988 in Tokyo, Japan and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA. In Asuka Anastacia Ogawa’s playfully enigmatic paintings, androgynous childlike figures float in intriguing, ambiguous scenes set in sparse color fields, their eyes gazing knowingly into the viewer. They appear to exist in a folkloric or otherworldly realm, but the acts depicted reveal adornments, objects, creatures, and everyday events and customary rites symbolizing disparate aspects of Ogawa’s Japanese and Afro-Brazilian ancestry. Her characters and settings are deeply imbued in sensibilities and knowledge fostered by her own encounters with different cultural beliefs and practices in her mixed heritage and peripatetic upbringing. Ideas of familial storytelling and kinship with the spiritual world are central to her interest in expressing themes related to affection, attachment and spirituality.
KATHERINA OLSCHBAUR was born in 1983 in Bregenz, Lake Constance, Austria and lives and works in New York City, NY, USA. Based in New York, Katherina Olschbaur trained in painting, animation film and stage design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. The Austrian-born artist’s work reflects on connections and conflicts between dichotomous ideas such as systems of order and chaos, creation and destruction, devotion and obsession, and collective and individual unconscious. Exploring diverse themes from historical painting to the culture of nightlife, her influences abound and scatter throughout each work, sliding in and out of meaning as they are detached from their origin. Allegorical in their compositions, Olschbaur’s works do not rely on a singular narrative but rather on nonlinear time, developing from an ongoing process centered in disorder and intuition.
JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL was born in 1964 in Saint-Étienne, France and lives and works in Paris, France. Since the early 1990s, Jean-Michel Othoniel has developed a singular practice centered on glass, exploring its poetic and technical possibilities. Collaborating with master glassblowers in Murano, Firozabad, and Basel, he creates modular beads and bricks, composing jewel-like sculptures that range from intimate to monumental. Exploring what he calls “emotional geometry”, Othoniel’s work and fascination with reflective materials evoke both earthly beauty and cosmic vastness. He has become a major figure in contemporary art through ambitious public commissions, including Le Kiosque des Noctambules for a Paris metro station and Les Belles Danses fountains at the Château de Versailles. Elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 2018, his work is held in major museums and collections worldwide. In 2025, he presented the largest exhibition of his career in Avignon, spanning ten historic sites and 260 works.
ANDREW J. PARK was born in 1996 in Honolulu, HI, USA, and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA. Andrew J. Park’s artistic practice is rooted in his fervent desire to display the human condition while exposing its inherently fallible nature. Nostalgic, liminal imagery is mined from the screens of nineties television and analog gaming. The fallibility of recollection is explored further by the artist’s incorporation of artificial image generation to produce the reference material that informs his compositions. By reimagining vernacular motifs through a mechanical hand that is unfamiliar with these nascent media platforms, the resultant image becomes akin to a half-remembered dream, imbued with uncanniness that is born from the distance between the notional and the actual within an imagined memory.
GAHEE PARK was born in 1985 in Seoul, South Korea and lives and works in Montreal, Canada. Park’s paintings may be realized in the “naive” style that recalls painters like Henri Rousseau, but her subject matter is far from it. Often depicting romantic scenes where the idyll has turned sour, the sexual acts that seem to be transpiring in her paintings are at odds with their quaint settings, where art history’s favorite still life subjects—rotund fruit, cheeses, and bottles, appear on the verge of rolling off the surface of the table: so pitched is the surface, hyper-stylized is her take on forced perspective. And yet, space doesn’t seem to recede in Park’s paintings. It’s cancelled out by the kind of flatness only a laboring love of texture and pattern can produce. Space comes to a halt as Park revels in woodgrain and brocade. Any indication of space comes courtesy of some framed element that seems to replicate the scene, albeit with some slight modification like a game of “Spot the Difference.” A window? A mirror? Another painting? Park revels in these ambiguities as well.
©2006 AYA TAKANO/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy Perrotin.
AYA TAKANO was born in 1976 in Saitama, Japan and currently lives and works in Japan. Renowned for her ethereal, otherworldly imagery, TAKANO has long been recognized as a central figure in the Superflat movement founded by Takashi Murakami. Yet her work transcends aesthetic affiliations: it vibrates with emotional urgency, spiritual depth, and radical tenderness. She invites us on an inner pilgrimage reaching backward into prehistoric time and forward into mythic futures, tracing the pulse of life through DNA strands, fungi, extinct animals, and the luminous bodies of androgynous youth.
HONOR TITUS was born in 1989 in Brooklyn, NY, USA, and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA. Honor Titus’ work examines scenes of leisure, ritual, and social exchange, using figuration and still life to explore how identity is shaped through gesture, setting, and style. Drawing from visual traditions in American painting as well as the histories of fashion, music, and literature, Titus constructs compositions that consider the coded language of appearance and the dynamics of aspiration, belonging, and exclusion. Working primarily in oil, he employs a restrained yet expressive approach to color and surface, allowing atmosphere and detail to carry psychological weight. His paintings often center on moments of quiet tension, with figures poised within interiors or landscapes that suggest both intimacy and distance, inviting sustained looking and reflection.
PILAR ZETA was born in 1986 in Argentina and lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico. Pilar Zeta is an Argentinian multimedia artist based in Mexico City, known for her monumental sculptures, public artworks, and immersive installations. Working at the intersection of philosophy, symbolism, mathematics, and postmodern architecture, she creates spatial environments that explore portals, perception, and archetypal geometry. Her work has been presented at significant cultural sites, including Hall of Visions (2021) during Miami Art Week, Mirror Gate (2023) at the Giza Pyramids for Forever Is Now III, The Observer Effect (2025), an eight-portal installation commissioned by Art Basel, and Mirror Gate II (2026) at Place du Louvre, aligned with I. M. Pei’s iconic glass pyramid. She also collaborated with Coldplay as an art director, earning a Grammy nomination in 2021.
