1.

At the Edge of the Sun at Jeffrey Deitch 

At the Edge of the Sun at Jeffrey Deitch is a 12-person group show organized by the artists themselves. Diana Yesenia Alvarado, Michael Alvarez, Mario Ayala, Karla Ekaterine Canseco, rafa esparza, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., Ozzie Juarez, Maria Maea, Jaime Muñoz, Guadalupe Rosales, Gabriela Ruiz, and Shizu Saldamando present a variety of work including video, photography painting, installation, sculpture, and more. These artists are both friends and collaborators, having been in community with one another for over a decade.

Over the last year, the artists met regularly to collaborate on the development of the exhibition, which reflects both their individual practices and their shared vision. The resulting works explore themes such as California landscapes, surveillance, youth culture, nightlife, and more. The exhibition will be accompanied by a book including interviews with the artists and an introductory essay by Dr. Rose Salseda.

On view: February 24–May 4, 2024 | Open map

2.

RETROaction (part two) at Hauser & Wirth 

Curated by Homi K. Bhabha, Kate Fowle, Charles Gaines, and Ellen Tani, RETROaction (part two) at Hauser & Wirth looks back to Gaines’s 1993 exhibition The Theatre of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Culture. Featuring the work of thirteen artists, RETROaction (part two) continues the same theoretical investigation thirty years later in order to understand its resonances today. 

Gaines, Lorna Simpson, and Gary Simmons, who participated in the original The Theatre of Refusal, present works from the early 1990s. The ten additional artists, selected by Ellen Tani and Gaines, embrace abstraction and materiality in their artistic practice. The exhibition takes its name from Bhabha’s idea of “retroaction” and pinpoints a critical moment of transition in the 1990s and present-day concerns such as racial violence, the climate catastrophe, and migration and displacement.

On view: February 27–May 5, 2024 | Open map

3.

Marjorie Norman Schwarz at 12.26

Stills is Marjorie Norman Schwarz’s first exhibition at 12.26’s Los Angeles location. Schwarz presents nine paintings of seemingly mundane subject matter including animals, parks, and bars. The artist drew inspiration from a variety of sources, including her phone, polaroids found scattered across her home, and daily interactions such as her cat perched on the window. 

This stunning body of work is a move away from her regular abstraction and a step towards figuration as a tool for reinterpretation. Despite this departure, her familiar snapshots of daily life, presented as small-scale oil on linen works, feature atmospheric and complex surfaces typical of her earlier paintings.

On view: February 24–April 6, 2024 | Open map

Community as a New Framework 

In a recent Los Angeles Times article by Julissa James, photographed by Samantha Helou Hernandez at The New Jalisco Bar, the author highlighted the practice of the twelve artists who collaborated on At the Edge of the Sun at Jeffrey Deitch. According to James, “These artists are peers. Their individual practices inspire and sharpen each other in subtle and overt ways. But they’re also homies.” The exhibition serves as an opportunity for the artists, who work “in community with one another,” to reject outside forces and create their own narrative.

In the article, artist rafa esparza noted that there is a “frenzy to carry on the Latinx show,” calling it a “kind of tokenism.” According to esparza, the group reclaimed their agency and took over the project themselves. The result, according to James, lays the ground for a “new framework of what a show like this can do […].”