April Bey and Kim Dacres
View the exhibition
Blitz Bazawule
curated by Harrison Tenzer in partnership with Elliot Page
View the Virtual Exhibition
Ruler of the Tides
Hues of Affection
Noel W. Anderson
Natalie Jacobs
Past
Los Angeles, CA
The genesis of the series was inspired by Bazawule’s memories of the faded black-and-white photos that lined the walls of his childhood home in Accra, Ghana – images of his family elegantly dressed in their Sunday best that stirred a deep sense of nostalgia, which then grew into a strong desire to bring those moments back to life. Later, while on tour in Morocco, Bazawule stumbled upon a vintage photograph of a woman standing in the very same place as he was at that moment, but 50 years before.
This exhibition is representative of Sasha December’s journey coming into her own in a new place and season of life as this is the first body of work entirely made in her new home in Japan. The work illustrates December as she chronicles the different stages of her life by depicting girls that are meant to be the artist’s avatar. These avatars inhabit multiple spiritual and emotional states with a bold and, at times, bewildered strength and vulnerability.
Hues of Affection debuts a new body of work from artist Hely Omar González. The work investigates the intersection of leisure, familial love and memory through the mediums of oil paint and dye on canvas. González uses photographs he’s taken of his family and loved ones on vacation and in moments of play, intimacy and rest.
Atlanta, GA
A Lotta Bit of Us was an exhibition featuring a new body of work by Maryland-based artist Glenn Hardy Jr. This showcase marked the artist’s debut exhibition in Atlanta, comprised of paintings and multimedia works that center and celebrate Black joy, accomplishment, and leisure.
PEOPLE POWER PLATON was a retrospective exhibition from world-renowned portrait photographer Platon. The display served as an accompaniment to the release of his book, The Defenders: Heroes of the Fight for Global Human Rights, featuring freedom fighters juxtaposed with iconic portraits of public figures such as Adele, Cate Blanchett, Bono, and Elon Musk, among others.
With Stop & Stare, curator Genevieve Gaignard seeks to bring together an eclectic group of talent working across a wide range of disciplines who speak to the revelations that surface beyond first glance, both visually and thematically.
New York City, NY
Jubilee, from artist Ferrari Sheppard, is his second solo exhibition with UTA Artist Space, this time at its pop-up New York City location. He will showcase a collection of new paintings that portray ordinary moments and scenes from daily life.
And the Land Stands Still is a new exhibition from Houston-based artist Will Maxen. The display marks Maxen’s inaugural showcase with the UTA Artist Space and his first-ever showing in New York.
The Invisible Third from artist Erin M. Riley delves into the concealed aspects of self, examining what individuals present to the world, what they see in themselves, and what they hide from and fear confronting.
In this exhibition, viewers are invited into a realm of quiet contemplation, where moments of stillness and reflection unfold through the imagery of the figure suspended in time.
On the heels of two significant institutional exhibitions: A Proof of Being at Guild Hall and The Ten Commandments at Princeton University Museum, UTA Artist Space will present Cox’s first solo exhibition in Atlanta. The exhibition will highlight seminal work from the Whitney Independent Study Program alum’s 30-plus-year career, showcasing the evolution of her robust practice and candid explorations of racial and gender politics. The exhibit will be available for viewing from February 23rd to March 23rd at the UTA Artist Space Atlanta.
Amaryllis’ Garden is artist Mario Joyce’s heartfelt homage to his late great-grandmother and the profound impact her urban oasis in Columbus, Ohio had on him as a child. Joyce would spend nostalgic hours in his grandmother Amaryllis' garden, where she, after whom the exhibition is named, cultivated prize-winning amaryllis flowers. Vintage family photographs from the 1960s and 70s of Amaryllis' backyard sanctuary provide the setting for several of Joyce's new paintings. The works explore conceptualizations of heaven, paradise, darkness and light through the lens of Joyce's upbringing as a young, queer, Black boy growing up between contrasting rural and urban worlds.
On view from January 20 – February 3, 2024, “Infrastructures” brings together the work of CalArts graduates from the MFA 2023 cohort in the Art, Art & Technology, and Photography & Media programs and includes painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and video. The exhibition will close with an event featuring readings, performances, and other time-based works, organized by Greg Jenkins (MFA Film/Video 2023), an artist who runs a curatorial project called the New Arts Foundation.
Feels Like Glitter is the debut solo exhibition by Atlanta-based painter Ariel Dannielle. This is Dannielle’s first solo presentation in her hometown since her show at MOCA GA in 2020. Feels Like Glitter, which draws on the themes of hyperfemininity, human connection and joyful gathering, consists of a series of works that function as her visual journal. Each painting is a living record of Dannielle’s personal experiences, observations, and feelings.
“The Sound of Our Souls” is an exhibition curated by Adora Mba, Founder and Director of ADA Contemporary Art Gallery based in Accra, Ghana. This exhibition is an extension of UTA Artist Space LA’s ongoing mission to provide a platform for paradigm-shifting gallerists who may not have a physical presence in Los Angeles.
“The Wayward Passage” is the first exhibition for artist Antonio Scott Nichols in his hometown of Atlanta. On view from October 27 to November 25, the nine large-scale paintings and three smaller still life paintings comprising “The Wayward Passage” reimagine the Great Migration era in 1920s Atlanta and transport viewers on an Afro-Futuristic journey to Saturn. Layering references from the 1920s–a pinnacle era of Black American artistry–and contemporary references 100 years into the future, Nichols envisions Black Americans escaping to Saturn. The paintings, when viewed in chronological order, capture fragmented moments in this imagined future, juxtaposing the experience of those who went to Saturn with those who stayed on Earth. Inspired by imaginative authors like Octavia Butler, Nichols utilizes fragmented visual storytelling and time as tools, layering historical references, contemporary subjects, and fantastical elements to construct images of Black liberation.
In Elsewheres, curated by Zuzanna Ciolek, artists have been invited to create new realities through alternate views of the past, present and future. Politics, sexuality, religion and race are explored through the varying perspectives and worldviews of the 17 exhibiting artists whose work variably examines art historical tropes, science fiction, Afro-futurist traditions and cultural systems. These often physiologically charged works defy and deconstruct traditional histories, creating new aesthetic narratives and abstract mythologies.
For his first solo presentation, held at UTA Artist Space’s pop-up gallery in Chelsea, Devon Rodriguez reveals a new body of work, nearly two years in the making, that builds on his celebrated Subway Series. Underground is first time he exhibits a piece featuring himself to the public. His largest self-portrait to date, Rodriguez situates among several individuals in one of his most complex and ambitious works to date.
I’m Just Like You has been in the works for over a year and is a continuation of Nicholas Kontaxis’ previous, highly successful show, titled Catch Me, at UTA’s Beverly Hills Artist Space last summer. The 27-year-old artist uses a battalion of unique, idiosyncratic techniques and tools with a variety of media on massive canvases, rendering vibrantly colored works of art that ring with joy and optimism.
Ryan Wilde's Imagine There's No Bunny showcases Wilde's profound exploration of gender performance, the ways in which women use clothing to construct and reflect their identity, and the dynamics surrounding the iconic Playboy Bunny.
In the Wilderness is an exhibition with Baltimore-based curator, professor and interdisciplinary artist James Williams II. Prompted by questions around identity raised by his then five-year-old daughter, Williams’ new body of paintings and wall works explore the anxieties of navigating conversations about racism and discrimination as a Black parent and how media has shaped racial constructs across generations.
In The Shadows is a new exhibition by the Portland-born, Los Angeles-based self-taught multimedia artist, Devon DeJardin. Drawing from biblical stories surrounding temptation, DeJardin’s newest large-scale paintings, sculptures, and mixed media works explore the complexities of human desire and the consequences of our actions, through a host of themes such as temptation, rebellion, forgiveness, and redemption.
An Intricate Binding of Love, Blood, and Sugar feature all new works by artist and professor Lien Truong, whose work blends painting materials, techniques, and philosophies with various cultural histories. Dedicated to her mother, who recently passed, the exhibition brings together two different bodies of recent work, including figurative works and a new series of “cake paintings,” which are on view for the first time with UTA Artist Space in Atlanta.
Mansa Musso is an exhibition of large-scale paintings and mixed-media collage work by Malian-American artist Penda Diakité. Mansa Musso, or She is King, is a celebration of the women who played integral roles in the creation of the Mali Empire. Throughout her practice, Diakité meshes the vibrant colors and patterns of her Malian heritage with influences of her American upbringing as a reflection of her experience as a bicultural Black woman.
"From one shore to another, my name might not be the same" features new paintings by French Malagasy artist Célia Rakotondrainy. Through her art, Rakotondrainy poetically depicts the concept that identity is constantly evolving and dynamically composed of layers that are added, transformed, destroyed, and reformed over time. This body of work is the result of over two and a half years of interdisciplinary collaboration between Rakotondrainy and three women artists, nurturing conversations surrounding complex identities and frustrations over binary perceptions of self.
I Resemble Everyone But Myself, the first solo presentation in Los Angeles by the India-born, San Francisco-based artist Anoushka Mirchandani. The exhibition showcases twelve new figurative and abstract paintings by Mirchandani, examining her experience as an Indian, Immigrant, Other, Woman. The title of the exhibition, an excerpt from late Indian poet AK Ramanujan, deeply resonates with Mirchandani’s work that probes ancestry, personal history, cultural and sociopolitical environments through a diasporic lens, exploring the micro-tensions and identity transformations that are part and parcel of code-switching and assimilation in a foreign land.
Although painting has been integral to his forty-year career as a visual artist, The Eyes Were Always On Us consists of works exclusively made with spray paint, oil sticks, gesso and acrylic on canvas, paper and quilt. Holley credits the solitude and reflection offered during two recent fellowships–The Hambidge Center in North Georgia and the Elaine de Kooning House in East Hampton–as the impetus to return to painting at a large scale. The new works on view at UTA Artist Space are simultaneously improvised and charged with layers of meaning, unmistakable from the assemblage works Holley has created since the 1980s.
Ernie Barnes: Where Music and Soul Live is an important survey of paintings by Ernest Eugene “Ernie” Barnes Jr. (1938-2009) that explores the history and music scene in Los Angeles, where the artist lived for many years. Works in the exhibition include prominent paintings Barnes made between the 1970s and up until 2008, right before his death in 2009. It will include over 30 well-known and also never-before-seen works from his estate and loans from important collectors.
To the Last Page, the first solo presentation of paintings by artist and filmmaker Thelonious Stokes. Stokes is a classically trained oil painter and one of the first African Americans to graduate from the prestigious Florence Academy of Art in Italy. Deeply inspired by the Old Masters encountered in his adopted hometown of Florence, Italy, Stokes is best known for paintings depicting Biblical and historical scenes with symbolic and contemporary references
In Paradise, Hollis will present a new body of work conceived at her studio in Los Angeles. The work meditates on themes found in Alison Rose Jefferson’s “Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites during the Jim Crow Era,” which examines the development of leisure sites and practices in Southern California shaped by Black communities in the early 20th century.
The Past Is The Future And The Future Is Now feature new paintings that continue Ryan Cosbert’s research into people of African descent, but here she explores the travel and movements of the African American community.
Garden of Eve is Harmonia Rosales’ second solo exhibition in Los Angeles and first at UTA Artist Space. Building on past exhibitions, Garden of Eve brings together previously shown and never before seen works to tell the story of creation through the eyes of women and Orishas, deities of the African Diaspora.
James Bester: Fluent represents a new milestone in the artist’s career, introducing paintings into his established practice of ceramic works influenced by “face jugs” brought to America by enslaved people from Africa. The new medium allows him to continue the directness of his work, using harsh lines, distorted figures, and a turbulent sense of motion to depict his upbringing and the inherited knowledge of his family’s struggles
Bird on a Wire is Chloe Chiasson’s first solo exhibition on the West Coast. Featuring multidimensional paintings and sculpture, the exhibition offers an autobiographical take on queer Southern adolescence.
In Mario Joyce: A Stranger’s House That Is Our Own, the artist continues his project of investigating the ways Afro-Atlantic histories have existed in the United States, reassembling American iconography, particularly the American flag, into paintings of staggering psychic presence. In this new body of work, Joyce layers contrasting visuals through collage and painting to explore how African-Americans have often had to construct their own identities.
Fragile World features new work by Carl Hopgood, Samyar Maleki, Ryan Winnen, Jack Winthrop, and Greg Yagolnitzer. Juxtaposing found object and neon sculptures against bold paintings, Fragile World explores themes of identity, masculinity, and our current socio-political climate. Throughout the gallery, Hopgood’s dynamic sculptures bring together word and object, with precariously balanced chairs and other artifacts serving as scaffolding for neon statements of affirmation and hope. Hopgood blurs the lines between digital and physical, past and present, with miniature projections and text bringing life to everyday items.
The dark, too, blooms and sings, is an exhibition featuring new work from the Yale School of Art Photography MFA Class of 2022. Curated by artist and Yale MFA alumna Genevieve Gaignard, the exhibition highlights photography, sculpture, and video from artists Emily Barresi, Dylan Beckman, Amartya De, Anabelle DeClement, Eileen Emond, Ian Kline, Chinaedu Nwadibia, Brian Orozco, Rosa Polin, and Jessica Tang.
High Anxiety is new exhibition of video and audio work from the collection of Barbara Balkin Cottle & Robert Cottle. Featuring work by Bruce Nauman, Cory Arcangel, William E. Jones, Douglas Gordon & Oscar Tuazon, High Anxiety brings together iconic works, many being shown in Los Angeles for the first time. Says writer Carlos Valladares, “Amidst the barrage of images—degraded, censored, banal, outrageous—that assault us every day, Barbara and UTA Artist Space have crafted a zone to contemplate the commotion. You cannot relax. We go through our present lives seeking to control the digital cacophony; here, in a controlled environment, chaos runs rampant. It is our inescapable, messy reality.”
Catch Me is the most ambitious solo exhibition of Nicholas Kontaxis' career to date, featuring an expansive collection of never-before-seen paintings created over the last two years that showcase Nicholas’ stylistic evolution and artistic maturation. While these last two years were primarily defined by restrictions and confinements, Catch Me captures a spirit of freedom and experimentation.
Units of Measure, the first exhibition in Los Angeles by visual artist Mandy El-Sayegh, which explores the artist’s ongoing investigation of the cultural desire to regulate bodies. The installation covers the gallery walls and floors in densely layered materials, including socio-politically charged fragments of newsprint and silkscreened ephemera, overlaid with a skin of translucent latex. The exhibit additionally features paintings on repurposed pieces of linen from the artist’s White Grounds and Net-Grid series’, along with a painted platform roughly the size of a solitary confinement cell.
For his homecoming and first exhibition in Los Angeles in ten years, Aaron Young presents a broad array of video works, installations, and wall works he has created in the last twenty years, including new works and several archival pieces that have not been exhibited in Los Angeles before.
UTA Artist Space and Unit London present a new immersive environment by the celebrated Los Angeles-based artist Enrique Martínez Celaya. The Rose Garden ambitiously brings together new paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, garments, and writing, inviting viewers to consider the self—both its promise and its threat—through the mystical divination of memory.
Hewett’s exhibition presents a series of hybridized portraits, figurative works and landscapes that hover on the boundary between the human and what the artist defines as the humanoid. In this sense, H+ uncovers the juxtaposition between the natural environment we live in and a possible futuristic society.
Conrad Egyir presents Inauguration, an exhibition of all new paintings and drawings, including four monumental paintings that stand seven feet tall. The works build upon the Ghanaian artist’s transnational practice, which deftly blends West African and American sensibilities, iconographies, and styles. Elaborating upon the school motifs found in his past work, Egyir returns to the idea of education as a site of growth, individuality, and success, especially for immigrants.
Maya Seas presents Between Us, an exhibition of new paintings that invoke intimacy and ritual as a means of protection and inner fortitude. Seas’ paintings draw inspiration from her personal experiences and memories: women adorning each other with henna, close figures sharing secrets and inside jokes. Through the closeness and bonds between the figures depicted, the artist examines moments within her own search for a sense of belonging.
Literary Muse is a group exhibition inspired by Black literary novelists, poets, and scholars, curated by Baltimore-based Myrtis Bedolla of Galerie Myrtis. The powerful presentation brings together paintings, photographs, prints, and sculptures by twelve contemporary artists working across the United States: Lavett Ballard, Tawny Chatmon, Wesley Clark, Alfred Conteh, Larry Cook, Morel Doucet, Monica Ikegwu, Ronald Jackson, M. Scott Johnson, Delita Martin, Arvie Smith, and Felandus Thames.
A Moment In Time is a deeply personal solo exhibition by the Grammy-nominated, visionary artist Blitz Bazawule (b. 1982, Accra, Ghana). The exhibition is the first major visual project since the artist co-directed Beyonce’s Black Is King in 2020, and follows the news of Bazawule’s role as director of Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple musical.
"Beyond the Looking Glass" is group exhibition of surrealist takes by women about women. Beyond the Looking Glass is curated by gallery director Zuzanna Ciolek, one of the first members of the UTA Fine Arts team when it was established in 2015. The ambitious exhibition fills all three gallery spaces with bold works by a cross generational group of fourteen woman-identifying artists: Firelei Báez, Tawny Chatmon, Charlotte Colbert, Kim Dacres, Florine Démosthène, Genevieve Gaignard, Sanam Khatibi, Klara Kristalova, Shannon T. Lewis, Jesse Mockrin, GaHee Park, Hiba Schahbaz, Kiki Smith, and Jessica Stoller.
Stormscape is an exhibition of new paintings of land and seascapes accompanied by large-scale sculpture by the Cuban American painter and sculptor Manny Castro. The exhibition narrative centers on a lone figure on a raft at sea, symbolizing the pilgrimage of Cuban exiles and the bravery of all immigrants venturing into the unknown across shores.
Blurring the lines between abstraction and figuration, Ferrari Sheppard creates mid to large-scale paintings depicting cultural figures and friends in the Black community. He incorporates gold leaf, adding a religious iconographical effect throughout his pieces, catching light and accentuating the presence of certain figures in his work. The large acrylic color, charcoal, and velvet on canvas paintings entail a sense of movement through the colors and brushstroke used, allowing the viewer to feel immersed in the painting.
Yashua Klos, a Brooklyn-based Chicago native, created this body of work while living in Los Angeles during the pandemic. His works are full of illusionistic depth and space, appearing to be images of sculptural forms built from wood scraps, crystals and brick. Klos’ figures challenge singular notions of identity, as he often merges his own features with those of his models.
Sites of Memory curated by Essence Harden in her first collaboration with the venue, featuring artists Noel W Anderson, Gideon Appah, Natalie Ball, Pamela Council, Janvia Ellis, Anique Jordan, Lebohang Kganye, Basil Kincaid, John A Rivas, Adee Roberson, and Muzae Sesay.
Liberating Humanity From Within features works from the Estate of Artist Ernie Barnes, and was curated by Ernie Barnes himself prior to his death in 2009 and was never formally presented as an exhibition until now. Barnes is best known for creating some of the twentieth century’s most iconic images of African American life, which include The Sugar Shack (1976), The Graduate (1972) and Portrait of Mrs. Wiggles (1975).
Emergency On Planet Earth: In A Time Close To Now featuring Parker and Clayton Calvert, Manny Castro, Todd DiCiurcio, Daniel Fuller, Iva Gueorguieva, Heather Haynes, Jamiroquai, Glenn Kaino, Jason Nichols and Felipe Griebel, Ellen Page, Rob Reynolds, Toni Scott, Ai Weiwei, and Nathan Wong. Including video, sculpture, painting, and photography, this multi-sensory exhibition will address both the environmental and human impact of our current times.
UTA Artist Space is pleased to announce Arcmanoro Niles’ first solo show on the West Coast, titled I Guess By Now I’m Supposed To Be A Man: I’m Just Trying To Leave Behind Yesterday. Niles debuts a series of seven large-scale paintings that explore personal journeys at various stages of life. Niles additionally presents a series of new small-scale portraits depicting friends and family members, and a number of paintings he has made over the past three years.
Disembodiment, an exhibition featuring six young, emerging Black American Artists, opens Friday, November 22, 6-8PM at UTA Artist Space and will be on view through January 25th. Curated by Mariane Ibrahim Lenhardt, director of Mariane Ibrahim, Disembodiment features Jarvis Boyland, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Jerrell Gibbs, Marcus Jahmal, Clotilde Jiménez and Vaughn Spann, a collection of artists whose work upends established narratives around race and identity in order to reshape the viewer’s understanding of reality.
UTA Artist Space and Carpenters Workshop Gallery are pleased to announce their collaboration on a new group exhibition, Dark Fantasy on view in Beverly Hills from October 11 - November 16, 2019. This exhibition showcases a selection of artists from the Carpenters Workshop Gallery’s influential program, curated by gallery director Ashlee Harrison. This marks the first exhibition of Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Los Angeles, as well as the LA debut of Virgil Abloh’s Acqua Alta series, a new site-specific installation by Studio Drift, a major work by Nacho Carbonell, and the premiere of Reclining Nude, 2019 by Atelier Van Lieshout.
The Hole and UTA Artist Space are pleased to announce Meet Me In The Bathroom: The Art Show, presented by Vans. On view at The Hole gallery in New York from September 4-22, 2019, the exhibition is a visual counterpart to Meet Me In The Bathroom, Lizzy Goodman’s best-selling book that delves into the rock-and-roll revival that emerged from New York City in the 2000s.
UTA Artist Space is pleased to present The Decorator’s Home, a solo exhibition by Marco Castillo, curated by Neville Wakefield. After 26 years as part of the world-renowned Cuban artist collective, Los Carpinteros, this is Castillo’s first show in the U.S. as a solo artist. The Decorator’s Home personifies the vision of a fictional interior designer, tracing their style evolution from the commercial, North American-influenced Modernist design of the 1950s to the revolutionary, Soviet-influenced style of the 1960s and 1970s.
UTA Artist Space and Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean are proud to present DREAMWEAVERS , a group exhibition curated by Nicola Vassell that contemplates the surreal in society against a vigorously shifting 21st century.
UTA Fine Arts is proud to present Cao / Humanity, a new exhibition by the acclaimed Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei. Cao / Humanity, in tandem with two other Los Angeles exhibitions, marks an exciting milestone for both Ai and the city of Los Angeles, where he is exhibiting for the first time.
A leader of the Washington Color Field School that included Morris Louis, Gene Davis and Kenneth Noland (his teacher and mentor), Downing explored formal relationships between space, color and shape. In his series of "Dial," "Grid," and "Dots" paintings he produced poignant abstract images that instill a sense of movement, while also suggesting infinite space based on geometric systems.
ONE SHOT is a group exhibition of select Color Field artists working from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. The gallery’s first exhibition in its new Ai Weiwei-designed Beverly Hills home, includes works by Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Sam Gilliam, Thomas Downing, Gene Davis and Jules Olitski.
Since 2007, Cortright has also been creating short videos with her computer's webcam, performing for herself and then world-wide audiences.
