Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews

Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews

Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews

Power Index Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR

About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints

10 Exhibitions Not to Miss During L.A. Art Week

From Julia Stoschek’s cinematic takeover of the Variety Arts Theater to the high-voltage visions of Murakami, Quarles and Kahraman, these shows capture a city navigating turbulence not by retreating, but by doubling down on ambition and imagination.

Last year, Los Angeles Art Week unfolded in the wake of the devastating wildfires, and the mood was sober, introspective and distinctly community-focused, with the resilience of L.A.’s artistic ecosystem front and center. This year, the city of stars has weathered a different kind of turbulence. Across the state, thousands rallied against mass deportation in protests that stretched through the summer, while on the art front, several galleries quietly shuttered their second spaces. And yet, if anything, the density and ambition of this week’s programming, timed to Frieze Los Angeles and its ever-expanding constellation of satellite fairs, suggest a city unwilling to dim its lights.

New collector-led boutique fair ENZO joins Chris Sharp’s Post-Fair and the historic poolside Felix at the Roosevelt Hotel, reinforcing how Los Angeles is not just a major art hub but an unusually dynamic one. With the LACMA expansion set to open in April, the city stands on the cusp of another institutional milestone.

This year’s offerings are wide-ranging and genuinely compelling, and Observer took on the unenviable task of narrowing the field to 10 must-see exhibitions. The challenge was compounded by a relentless calendar of openings and the famously unsolvable traffic that greets anyone attempting to cross from Venice Beach to Downtown and back again, but we did it. Here’s what you shouldn’t miss.

Must-See exhibitions in Los Angeles

"What A Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem”

"Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir"

Haegue Yang's "Star-Crossed Rendezvous"

Hayv Kahraman's "Libations"

Christina Quarles's "The Ground Glows Back"

Takashi Murakami's "Hark Back to Ukiyo-e"

Veronica Fernandez, Alejandro García Contreras and Heather Guertin

Tuan Vu's "Ode to Slowness"

Robb Pruitt's Flea Market

Robert Therrien's "This is a Story"

"What A Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem”

Variety Arts Theater; through March 20, 2026

Berlin-based collector Julia Stoschek is widely known not only for assembling one of the world’s first and largest private collections dedicated to video art, film, performance documentation and digital practices, but also for championing these media long before they became central to artistic discourse and institutional programming. This month, her collection makes its U.S. debut with a once-in-a-lifetime cinematic takeover of the iconic Variety Arts Theater, curated by Udo Kittelmann. Titled “What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem,” the exhibition transforms the six-story Venetian-style landmark into an immersive moving-image environment, bringing together works by leading contemporary artists working with video, including Marina Abramović, Cyprien Gaillard, Arthur Jafa and Lu Yang, alongside pivotal moments from the history of cinema by Luis Buñuel, Walt Disney, Alice Guy-Blaché, Winsor McCay and Georges Méliès. The result is an ambitious, at times unsettling and deeply affecting journey through the possibilities of the moving image. By tracing its narrative openness, formal fluidity and technological adaptability, the exhibition underscores how cinema and media-based art have continually expanded the parameters of storytelling and imagination, offering not only reflection but resistance and, at times, a space to envision alternatives to the pressures of the present. As Stoschek acknowledged in a recent interview with Observer, this elasticity is one of the defining strengths of the medium. “Media-based art is connected to that reality. It is the artistic language of our time. It doesn’t just reflect the world—it can help us understand it and even shape the future.”

"Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir"

LACMA; through May 31, 2026

Last October, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced a major gift of more than 130 works of Austrian Expressionism from the family of Otto Kallir, the visionary art dealer and historian who played a crucial role in bringing Austrian and modern European art to international prominence. The collection will be transferred to LACMA over several years, marking the first time Los Angeles will hold a significant group capable of presenting a comprehensive overview of Austrian Expressionism, from its origins at the turn of the 20th Century through the 1920s. Through the end of May, the museum is presenting a focused preview of the gift: a first group of 24 works curated by Timothy O. Benson, ahead of a major exhibition and accompanying scholarly publication planned for 2030. Featuring paintings, drawings and prints, the selection includes LACMA’s first painting by Gustav Klimt, several newly acquired works by Egon Schiele and the visually striking periodical Ver Sacrum, all hallmarks of Viennese Expressionism.

Haegue Yang's "Star-Crossed Rendezvous"

MOCA Grand Avenue; February 24 – August 2, 2026

Haegue Yang’s exhibition takes over the vast galleries of MOCA Grand Avenue with a choreography of ordinary objects transformed into a heightened sensory environment—an immersive, kaleidoscopic interplay of light, color and sound. At its core are two major installations constructed with customized Venetian blinds, a material central to Yang’s practice since the mid-2000s. Designed with adjustable angled slats that filter light and structure spatial relationships, the blinds allow the artist to calibrate and expand the viewer’s perception and movement, producing experiences that are at once hypnotic and disorienting. Suspended, rotated or arranged into labyrinthine partitions, they modulate light and circulation, creating shifting perceptual fields. The structure operates simultaneously as barrier and threshold, evoking political borders, exile and filtered access to information without resorting to overt representation. For Yang, the blinds function both as a sculptural device and a metaphor, tools of visibility and concealment, permeability and obstruction. Created nearly a decade apart, the two works appear as complementary yet unresolved halves of an imperfect whole, foregrounding Yang’s sustained interest in asymmetry and doubling, recurring principles throughout her practice. While her futuristic-looking installations emphasize a multisensory experience, they also oscillate between reality and imagination, between the present and the past. Embedded in their abstract formal language are condensed and often concealed references to historical narratives and figures, forming what the artist has described as an “incubated abstraction,” a porous field in which past, present and future coexist and continually reflect and refract one another.

Hayv Kahraman's "Libations"

Vielmetter Los Angeles; through March 21, 2026

The work in Kahraman’s first Los Angeles exhibition since last year’s devastating fires forced her from her home emerged from a question sharpened by recent events: What does one do when the world collapses? Throughout her practice, Kahraman has explored personal and collective histories of exile, diasporic disorientation and cultural fracture. Her compositions stage enigmatic choreographies of female figures engaged in rhythmic, ritualistic gestures, suspended in liminal spaces that feel at once uneasy and generative. These bodies inhabit a threshold between the physical and the spiritual, a Barzakh, as one painting is titled, where discomfort becomes a site of transformation. The figures function as talismans, invoking protection and relief from calamity. A recurring motif, a magic square, was rendered following instructions from one of the earliest books on Sufi magic by the master al-Būnī. Arabic inscriptions embedded within the swirling surfaces reference the Anqā, a phoenix-like mystical bird that dwells at the edge of the world and is reborn through fire. As in her recent exhibition “Ghost Fires,” these works confront destruction not as an endpoint but as a possibility for catharsis and a prelude to regeneration. As she puts it, "This question kept arising as I was painting: what can I offer, one year after our world was consumed by flames? Enchantment. I felt compelled to dig deep, to recover the imaginal realm, to call back wonder as a mode of survival. I sought to imbue the works with talismans and incantations, to make the unseen present."

Christina Quarles's "The Ground Glows Back"

Hauser & Wirth; through May 3, 2026

Christina Quarles’ new body of work, created in the wake of the wildfires in Altadena, reflects an acute sense of geographical, emotional and corporeal displacement. Psychedelically captivating, the paintings continue the artist’s investigation into a more fluid conception and expression of the body. Quarles’s densely worked surfaces develop and unfold over time, rendering movement within the static image and demanding prolonged contemplation to trace the dynamic bodily and emotional events unfolding across each composition. Embracing identity as something continuously shaped by external forces, her paintings convey the nuanced experience of inhabiting a body and the ways that body is interpreted within shifting social contexts. At its core, her practice contemplates the instability of existence, the limits of resilience and what it means to inhabit multiple realities at once. In this exhibition, her work recalls Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre, with its phenomenological exploration of being-in-itself, being-for-itself and being-for-others and the alienated body. Denser and more frenetic than Quarles’ earlier works, these canvases compress time and place with heightened intensity, presenting bodies as porous, fluid membranes that constantly absorb and integrate external objects and narratives, extending the self prosthetically and linguistically.

Takashi Murakami's "Hark Back to Ukiyo-e"

Perrotin; through March 14, 2026

Takashi Murakami established himself as the first artist to bring the underground culture of manga and anime into the realm of contemporary art, effectively reframing it as a Japanese iteration of Pop Art. Bright, saturated and unapologetically loud, Murakami defined his signature style as “Superflat,” a term that refers both to a visual language, flat planes of color, crisp outlines and cartoon-like imagery, and to a cultural critique collapsing the boundaries between “high” art and “low” culture, from fine art to anime, manga and commercial goods. More recently, Murakami has turned toward a fluid and irreverent dialogue with Japanese art history and the canon of modern Western painting, producing pop reinterpretations that trace lines of influence across centuries. Inspired by a visit to Monet’s Giverny, his latest Los Angeles exhibition at Perrotin explores the relationship between ukiyo-e and Impressionism through 24 new paintings. The show reflects on how Japanese landscape prints, particularly ukiyo-e, or “floating world pictures,” encouraged Impressionists to adopt more subjective and abstract compositional approaches. The exhibition opens with four monumental paintings based on bijinga by Kitagawa Utamaro and Torii Kiyonaga, functioning as an immersive guide to Edo-period aesthetics. A second series traces a visual route from bijinga to Woman with a Parasol – Madame Monet and Her Son (1875) by Claude Monet. The final sections extend the dialogue from ukiyo-e and Monet to contemporary kawaii culture, culminating in early precedents for Murakami’s iconic smiling flowers. Copies of floral prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige appear alongside hollyhock compositions inspired by Rinpa masters Ogata Kōrin and Kenzan.

Veronica Fernandez, Alejandro García Contreras and Heather Guertin

Anat Ebgi; through April 4, 2026

For the most important week of the year, Anat Ebgi presents a powerful trio of exhibitions, each dedicated to a promising artist who has emerged with force in recent years. In one space, the gallery hosts the psychologically charged paintings of Los Angeles-based Veronica Fernandez in her solo debut. Shaped by the vicissitudes of a complicated childhood in New Jersey, marked by periods of homelessness and frequent moves to temporary housing, her work draws on residues of memory that surface as vivid, pressure-filled scenes. Ghostly figures move through dramatically chaotic environments that feel both unstable and intimate. Yet beneath their uncanny tension, the paintings also tap into the fertile imaginative terrain of childhood, allowing emotional narratives to remain open-ended, fluid and continually reshaped. Also making her debut with the gallery is Mexican artist Alejandro Garcia Contreras, whose ceramic cosmologies channel a dense network of symbolic forces. Blending contemporary pop culture with Mexican folklore, ancient myth, occultism and religion, he constructs a syncretic continuum that collapses time and geography. In his elaborately worked vessels and visionary paintings, legends and symbologies from disparate traditions converge to evoke the fundamental energies of existence, life and death, creation and destruction, rebirth within an endless cycle. Last but not least are Heather Guertin’s vibrant abstractions, radiant explorations of color that layer gradients, patterns and textures into immersive fields. Her compositions chart the space where the sensorial and the emotional meet, translating perception into rhythm and chromatic intensity.

Tuan Vu's "Ode to Slowness"

Make Room; through March 28, 2026

Drawing on the flattened pictorial space and decorative looseness of Les Nabis alongside the lyricism of traditional Vietnamese visual culture, Tuan Vu creates intimate, dreamlike compositions of rare poetic intensity. These delicate scenes invite slow contemplation, encouraging the viewer to surrender to lush color and fluid brushwork. Rather than constructing overt narratives, Vu privileges mood: introspection, stillness and a subtle sense of reverie. Color becomes an emotional architecture and the figures, often turned inward, function less as portraits than as vessels for memory, contemplation and poetic escape. Yet beneath their apparent romanticism lies a charged historical undertone. The reference to a French Post-Impressionist movement is not neutral. At the turn of the 20th Century, France controlled Vietnam as part of French Indochina, extracting resources while imposing cultural and artistic models. Vu’s adoption of a French-inflected style becomes a quiet inversion. What once accompanied colonial imposition is retooled to affirm the autonomy and beauty of Vietnamese culture. His serene female figures, surrounded by native flora, embody a strength rooted in composure. In their calm persistence, they suggest that stillness itself can be a form of resistance, a refusal to be defined by external power and an insistence on cultural continuity through grace and presence.

Robb Pruitt's Flea Market

James Fuentes; February 24 (5-8 p.m.) and February 25 (12-8 p.m.)

Since 1999, Robert Pruitt’s Flea Markets have taken place everywhere from New York to London to the Venice Biennale, each one lively, informal and shaped by its moment. Conceived as an event grounded in care and reciprocity, this edition gives back to the Los Angeles art community and the city at large, creating opportunities to support local artists and creative entities throughout the market and directing proceeds to charities of the participants’ choice. This year’s Flea Market is presented in conjunction with artist Berta Fischer’s show (through Mar 28, 2026), featuring three monumental sculptures completed in 2025 alongside six smaller works from 2023, demonstrating the continued development of her ongoing exploration of transparency, color and spatial perception.

Robert Therrien's "This is a Story"

The Broad; through April 5, 2026

The largest exhibition ever dedicated to Robert Therrien’s mesmerizing installations celebrates the depth of his exploration of scale, memory and perception, just miles from the Downtown Los Angeles home and studio where he worked for nearly 30 years beginning in 1990. The exhibition features more than 120 works spanning five decades, many of which, including those created shortly before Therrien’s untimely death in 2019, have never been presented in museum exhibitions and offer new avenues for understanding his practice. Scaled to uncanny proportions, his monumental sculptures of everyday domestic objects oscillate between Minimalist geometry and childhood fantasy. The shift in scale invites viewers to inhabit the work physically, often evoking the perspective of a child navigating an adult world.

We noticed you're using an ad blocker.

We get it: you like to have control of your own internet experience. But advertising revenue helps support our journalism. To read our full stories, please turn off your ad blocker.We'd really appreciate it.

How Do I Whitelist Observer?

Below are steps you can take in order to whitelist Observer.com on your browser:

Click the AdBlock button on your browser and select Don't run on pages on this domain.

For Adblock Plus on Google Chrome:

Click the AdBlock Plus button on your browser and select Enabled on this site.

For Adblock Plus on Firefox:

Click the AdBlock Plus button on your browser and select Disable on Observer.com.

© Observer