Platform: Los Angeles. A Viewing Room Featuring. Los Angeles Galleries. May 1–29, 2020
April 27, 2020—We are pleased to announce Platform: Los Angeles, a viewing room featuring thirteen Los Angeles-based galleries, hosted on David Zwirner Online. This is the third edition of the Platform series, which David Zwirner introduced in March in response to the global health crisis. The first two editions, Platform: New York and Platform: London, showcasing peers from the cities’ gallery communities, will remain on view through May 15. All three city editions, featuring 37 international galleries, will be on view simultaneously on David Zwirner Online beginning May 1.
The participants in Platform: Los Angeles represent a cross section of colleagues, friends, and peers in the city’s gallery community: Château Shatto, Commonwealth and Council, François Ghebaly, Hannah Hoffman, Jenny’s, Kristina Kite, Night Gallery, Nonaka-Hill, O-Town House, Park View / Paul Soto, Parker Gallery, The Pit, and Wilding Cran Gallery. Each gallery will feature a focused presentation of works by a single artist. In some cases, galleries are presenting artists who were intended to be the subjects of spring exhibitions or whose shows were cut short by closures earlier this year. Platform: Los Angeles will be on view on davidzwirner.com from May 1 to May 29, 2020.
Platform emerged from conversations between gallery directors about the challenges facing all galleries in this current moment. With physical galleries temporarily closed, the art community has increasingly turned to digital spaces to share the work of artists and to engage audiences all over the world. Recognizing that not all galleries have the resources, technological infrastructure, or audiences to launch standalone viewing rooms, David Zwirner launched Platform, which uses the gallery’s existing online framework to host presentations by galleries in our community.
Platform: Los Angeles will include:
Château Shatto, presenting works by Parker Ito (b. 1986), a Los Angeles-based artist. A solo show of Ito’s new work opened at the gallery in February but was cut short due to temporary closures across the city. In this exhibition, like previous presentations, Ito has developed an installation language that undergirds the individual works. Most recently, this has taken the form of an interconnected circuit of self-propagating sculptures, paintings, videos, and connective cords and chains—a pulsing, physical representation of an artist mediated by and through digital and physical networks.
Commonwealth and Council, presenting works by Patrick Staff (b. 1987, United Kingdom), a Los Angeles-based artist whose work explores the politicization of the body throughout history and in our contemporary late-capitalist moment, citing the queer body as a model for resistance. Staff has had recent solo exhibitions at Serpentine Galleries, London; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among other institutions, and was featured in Made in L.A. 2018 at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
François Ghebaly, presenting works by Candice Lin (b. 1979), a Los Angeles-based artist who works with installation, drawing, video, sculpture, and living materials, and processes like mold, mushrooms, bacteria, fermentation, and stains. Her practice deals with the politics of representation and issues of race, gender, and sexuality through the histories of colonialism and diaspora. Her work has been shown in institutional and biennial contexts worldwide. A major traveling exhibition of new works will open at the Times Museum, Guangzhou, China. Lin will also exhibit in Prospect.5, New Orleans and open a solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and the Harvard Carpenter Center for Visual Arts in 2021.
Hannah Hoffman, presenting works by Raphaela Simon (b. 1986), a Berlin-based artist whose layered oil paintings and life-size soft sculptures evoke an inventory of the ordinary. While altogether representational, Simon’s paintings and sculptures are shot through with a powerful conceptual undercurrent that associatively transforms her objects and characters into visual totems of memory and nostalgia. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Michael Werner Gallery, London, and Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin. Her next show with Hannah Hoffman is scheduled for 2021.
Jenny’s, presenting works by Andrei Koschmieder (b. 1980, Frankfurt), a New York-based artist whose sculptural painting hybrids are a fusion of paper, inkjet dye, spray paint, and epoxy resin. Koschmieder’s labor-intensive faux readymades hold a deeply handmade quality that is rare in a digitized and techno-fabricated world. This series of works—sly reproductions of Rimowa luggage—was featured in Koschmieder’s debut solo exhibition at Jenny’s in 2019. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include Economy | Class | Experience, Galerie Mezzanin, Geneva; Snaked & Afraid (with Curie Choi), LISZT, Berlin; and Andrei Koschmieder, Robert Gober, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Kristina Kite, presenting new works by Nancy Lupo (b. 1983), a Los Angeles-based artist whose complex installations include intricate networks of materials, objects, and spaces. Lupo has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Antenna Space, Shanghai; Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, France; and Swiss Institute, New York, and her work was featured in Made in L.A. 2018 at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. The gallery’s spring exhibition, now postponed, was meant to feature Lupo’s new work.
Night Gallery, presenting new works by Christine Wang (b. 1985), a San Francisco-based painter known for satirical works that, through combinations of text and image, reflect the confusion and ambivalence of the contemporary individual amid a barrage of information. A virtuosic painter, Wang continues an ongoing series of meme paintings, in which the artist stunningly re-creates hilarious, arcane images found on social media with an unexpected reverence for light and color that hearkens to the Impressionists.
Nonaka-Hill, presenting works by Tadaaki Kuwayama (b. 1932, Nagoya), a New York-based artist. Kuwayama, who immigrated to the United States in 1958, evolved aspects of his Nihonga (Japanese painting) training to produce reductive geometric abstract works, contributing to the rise of American Minimalism. Over six decades, the artist’s pursuit of pure art has taken the form of discrete, serial, and spatially transformative artworks. During the current pandemic, the artist is preparing for a solo exhibition at the Mies van der Rohe Haus in Berlin, which is scheduled to open in July.
O-Town House, presenting works by Owen Fu (b. 1989, Shanghai), a Los Angeles-based artist. After studying philosophy, Fu studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. A solo show of Fu’s new paintings that opened at O-Town House in February was cut short due to the gallery’s temporary closure; new works from the artist’s studio will be presented here.
Park View / Paul Soto, presenting new works by Kate Spencer Stewart (b. 1984), a Los Angeles-based artist. Moving in and out of focus, her paintings pull at the edges of the baroque with apparitions, folds, and continuous lines that convey an expansive relationship to time—decades, centuries, infinity—and sensation. Her newest paintings contain fields of abstraction suggesting a primordial world, without life, at a moment of genesis. Their atmospheric qualities conjure elements of metamorphosis, with matter emerging and evaporating like a phantasm through the tools of painting. These works are presented as a preview to Stewart’s exhibition that was scheduled for April and will now open in the fall.
Parker Gallery, presenting works by Franklin Williams (b. 1940, Ogden, Utah), an artist based in Petaluma, California. A critical yet underrepresented Bay Area figure whose work defies the parameters of the Funk, Nut, Visionary, and Pattern & Decoration movements, Williams has maintained an idiosyncratic approach to art making since the early 1960s. He creates intricately constructed sculptures, paintings, and works on paper using a range of techniques and processes, including stitching yarn and crochet thread directly into his supports. Influenced by household craft traditions and historical styles of ornament, Williams’s deeply personal work—rich with material and conceptual experimentation—addresses elemental themes of sexuality and desire, fantasy and reality, and life and death.
The Pit, presenting works by Bella Foster (b. 1975), an artist based in Grass Valley, California. Foster’s intimate and playful works reflect on the relationships, places, and moments that are dear to her. Her application of watery layers of paint creates dreamlike images where art-historical references, subcultural iconography, people, and places coexist outside of time, creating a psychological space for the viewer. Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at The Pit, Los Angeles; Canada, New York; and Art Since the Summer of 69, New York, among other galleries.
Wilding Cran Gallery, presenting works by Karon Davis (b. 1977), a Los Angeles-based artist. Davis’s practice encompasses installation, sculpture, film, photography, and performance, drawing on elements of theatricality and mythology, and exploring issues of humanity. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Rubell Museum, Miami; and Brooklyn Museum, New York, among other institutions. She is a co-founder of the Underground Museum, Los Angeles.
Sales from this online exhibition will be managed directly by the participating galleries.
In the coming weeks, David Zwirner Online will announce the next edition of Platform, coinciding with an expanded program of online-only exhibitions.
