Exciting Los Angeles gallery openings to visit this month

Spring has sprung and so have a brand new crop of art openings throughout Los Angeles. From Midcity to the Arts District, these openings offer new works across all types of media, spanning painting to screen printing to stained glass sculpture.

A gallery can be a perfect excuse to get out or can even be a quick addition to spice up a date night. Here are some of the most exciting highlights from the L.A. art scene to see this April.

“Love You” – Cara Benedetto at Night Gallery

(April 2 – May 7)

Anyone familiar with stan culture will recognize the terrors of internet virality explored in Cara Benedetto’s “Love You.” Social media fan culture stands at the forefront of the show, a series of mixed media works that satirize, honor and unpack the parasocial relationship between celebrities and their deadly droves of loving fans. Benedetto’s favorite celebrities, including Mariah Carey, Angelina Jolie and “Euphoria”’s Zendaya and Hunter Schafer, are featured as blurred, uncanny versions of themselves in her pieces. 

These weird distorted figures, created utilizing canvas prints copied several times over and outlined with oil paint, recall the impossibly faultless version of celebrities built up by their fans only to be expediently destroyed at the earliest sign of a human flaw. Combining image and text to evoke Instagram captions or advertising copy, Benedetto’s work plays like a horror comedy poking fun at the dystopian nature of the public’s relationship with our icons. It is a relationship poisoned by the toxic and deafening echo chamber of the internet.

“The Understudies” — Em Kettner at François Ghebaly

(April 2 – May 7)

In her sophomore exhibition at François Ghebaly, Em Kettner finds inspiration in the most unlikely of subjects: snails. At first glance, the undeniable quirk of Kettner’s “The Understudies” may lead one to write the works off as trivial, or even worse, “cute.” However, beneath each piece’s quaint veneer lies an absurdist comedy pondering the violence of observation.

Kettner stages images featuring eager-eyed doctors subjecting snails to surgery before an audience of spectators on the surface of miniscule 2 by 2 inch ceramic tiles. As with most art pieces, these works are best experienced in-person. Pictures hardly do the tiny sketches justice, as the miniscule size of each tile forces the viewer to lean in and create an intimacy with the vignettes they observe. 

Within each scene, the theatrical operations taking place question the roles that society forces the viewer to portray during everyday life as performer and audience member. Especially on social media, everyone becomes the snail melting under scalding spotlights, the doctor subjecting it to such invasive attention or the audience simply sitting back and enjoying the struggle. 

“Magic, Mystery & Legerdemain” — Derek Fordjour at David Kordansky 

(March 26 – May 7)

To enter Derek Fordjour’s brilliant “Magic, Mystery & Legerdemain” is to come under the illusionary influence of a magic show. Magic informs Fourdjour’s work as a prism through which to look at Black diasporic relationships with the past. 

The routine of a magic trick echoes the repetition of Black cultural traditions throughout history, depicted in the installation and sculptural collage pieces through images of jazz performance, cotillions and Carnival parades. Newspaper appears as a motif in the show, both materially and as a metaphor for history itself. It is spliced, painted and reconfigured into the paintings’ figures suggesting that identity is constructed from our ancestors and the cultural histories that precede us. 

Don’t forget to catch the live magic performance by Kenrick “ICE” McDonald repeating daily at 2 p.m., Tuesdays through Saturdays, in the gallery space until the culmination of the show on May 7th.

“Recent Sculpture” — Group Show at Matthew Brown Los Angeles (April 2 – May 7)

Matthew Brown LA’s “Recent Sculpture” presents 12 provocative works which represent exciting developments in the world of contemporary sculpture. Canadian artist Fin Simonetti contributes a highlight of the show through “Gusset 5,” a menacing yet delicate stained glass bear trap cast in baby blues and dark amber. One of the most enjoyable aspects of the show comes from its variety of material and expression. In stark contrast to the grim glitter of “Gusset 5” are Patricia Ayres’ sculptures, two towering columns of stained pantyhose, recalling disembodied sections of the human form bound by constricting straps of elastic. The works of “Recent Sculpture” span from humorous to haunting, all that must be seen to be truly understood.

“West Coast Paintings” — Melissa Brown at Anat Ebgi Gallery (April 2 – May 7)

In her first L.A. solo exhibition, Melissa Brown portrays the world’s current state as a bad acid trip, a perspective many agree with. Wildfires, wind turbines and iPhones are painted in psychedelic gradients of millennial pink and acid green. Yet, beneath the surface of the works’ vibrant colors wails a pain seen only during the show’s more abstract moments. 

In “Huntington Portal,” an unique coral-like skeleton stands in a surreal, tiffany blue garden. However, upon closer inspection, a distraught, miserable face appears in this sculpture’s negative space, mouth agape almost in the midst of a scream. Brown combines screen printing, airbrush and oil paints to present this vision of the West Coast that, through its disturbed detachment from reality, hits a little too close to home.