Los Angeles gallery openings to catch this February


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Photo from Gonzalez Jr's exhibit -- piece shows pictures of four men.
Gonzalez Jr’s interesting and incredibly constructed exhibit, found at Matthew Brown’s gallery, highlights his tie to the South Central community and provides commentary on the late-stage capitalist society. (Alex Fulmer | Daily Trojan)

Strolling through the countless art galleries of Los Angeles, it’s easy to be struck by stunning new perspectives of the world at large yet find yourself even more astonished by the unexplored layers of L.A. you never even knew you were missing. 

If you’re looking to experience the art of L.A. without paying museum admission prices, a day of gallery-hopping is a great excuse to bust out of the Fryft zone and waste a Saturday. With new shows by modern legends and rising stars from USC and across the nation, here are a few of the month’s most promising openings to catch before they’re gone.

Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.: “There Was There” – Matthew Brown Los Angeles (Feb. 12 – Mar. 19)

In “There Was There’s” 30 odd pieces, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr. visualizes the cultural exchange between residents of the South Central community and the physical environment in which they live and work. A native Angeleno, Gonzalez’s work fills Matthew Brown Los Angeles’s Mid-City location but appears recognizable to the area outside the gallery’s front doors. 

Multimedia pieces range from sculptures poking fun at coin-operated rides often found outside of a local grocery store to oversized paintings that become the walls of the gallery itself, fit with vibrant signage for beauty salons. In his satiric yet profound first solo show, Gonzalez comments on the nature of late-stage capitalism’s advertisement-congested world as it appears on the ground through the eyes of the people living within it.

Zoe Alameda: “rest my head on a pile of tacks” – Gayle and Ed Roski Gallery (Feb. 25 – Mar. 9)

In this debut solo exhibition at the Gayle and Ed Roski Gallery on USC’s campus, Zoe Alameda, a junior majoring in fine arts, contemplates the distorted perspective of a generational cohort growing up looking at the world for the very first time through the lens of an iPhone. Through paintings, installations and sculpture work, Alameda superimposes internet artifacts, such as anime characters and Instagram screenshots, over jagged landscapes of a world stumbling towards dystopia. As terrifying as it is awe-inspiring, “rest my head on a pile of tacks” juxtaposes the looming digital existence that threatens to swallow our species whole with the reality of the declining earth we are doomed to leave behind.

Dominique Fung: “Coastal Navigation” – Nicodim Gallery (Feb. 12 – Mar. 19)

Through 10 paintings, Dominique Fung’s “Coastal Navigation” at Nicodim Gallery forms a path from sea to land and back again. The Brooklyn-based painter casts objects, such as terracotta bulls and jade pagodas, underwater — out of space and time from their habitual environments on land. 

Just as rising waters from climate change are politically regarded as a work of fantasy, the seawater of Fung’s golden, celadon and lapis ocean floor reflects and rearranges these traces of man until they are personified to dream-like proportions. In “Traverse Through,” Gatsby-like eyes embellish a fringed lampshade come to life, casting an all-knowing light upon the shadowy ocean floor. Fung’s surreal “Coastal Navigation” presents a journey that is at once, both timeless and deathly immediate, magical and melancholic, and one not to be missed.

Arantza Peña Popo: “The World is Looking for You” – Junior High L.A. (Feb. 11- Mar. 6)

“The World is Looking for You” sees Arantza Peña Popo, a junior majoring in journalism, interweaving three disparate narratives threaded together by the joint exploration of what it is to exist within the dark of night. In adapting the “zine” style to a gallery exhibition, the viewer is brought in close to interact intimately with Peña Popo’s characters and their stories. While the works themselves are physically small, the narrative they express explodes far beyond their traditional rectangular confines, capturing the swells of emotion released by night’s blurring of the line between danger and security in dreamy peaches, pinks and magentas. 

Group Show: “Luncheon on the Grass” – Jeffrey Deitch (Feb. 19 – Apr. 23)

“Luncheon on the Grass” at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Mid-City enters a conversation started over 150 years ago by Édouard Manet’s iconoclast masterpiece “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe,” considered by many to be the first modernist painting. The show includes works from icons such as Diane Arbus, Jeff Koons and Kehinde Wiley, in addition to rising stars such as Ariana Papademetropoulos, Salman Toor and Dominique Fung. The multimedia exhibition interrogates Manet’s mysterious original depicting two men seated in conversation accompanied at a picnic by a nude woman who peers deeply over her shoulder into the unrelenting eyes of the ever-intrusive viewer. These contemporary works deconstruct the painting’s complex and controversial legacy and update the discourse  Manet started for the social media savvy, postmodern viewer of the present. 

Editor’s note: Arantza Peña Popo currently serves on the Daily Trojan masthead as features editor.