Art-Exhibitions-Past

Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1700-1915 celebrates the museum's groundbreaking acquisition of a major collection of European men's, women's, and children's garments and accessories. The exhibition tells the story of fashion's aesthetic and technical development from the Age of Enlightenment to World War I. It examines sweeping changes in fashionable dress spanning a period of over two hundred years, and evolutions in luxurious textiles, exacting tailoring techniques, and lush...

For the last twenty years, Steve Wolfe has created objects and drawings that investigate intersections among material culture, intellectual history, and personal and collective memory. Wolfe’s art represents objects of cultural mass dissemination—books and records. His painted objects employ the tradition of trompe l’oeil, and often literally fool the eye on first inspection.

Indebted to Pop Art, Wolfe’s work manifests an updated approach to craft. and an almost erotic representation...

While Blinky Palermo’s reputation as one of the foremost post-war abstract painters is well established in Europe, his work is rarely seen in North America. Beginning its yearlong tour at LACMA, this is the first comprehensive retrospective of the work of this German artist in the United States.

The exhibition provides an in-depth examination of the evolution of Palermo’s aesthetic, illustrating the significance of his contribution to post-war art. It...

Olmec civilization, which began sometime around 1400 BC, was centered in the Gulf Coast states of Veracruz and Tabasco. Olmec architects and artists produced the earliest monumental structures and sculptures in Mexico, including enormous basalt portrait heads of their rulers. The colossal sculptures in the exhibition weigh between 7 and 10 tons each.

The exhibition also includes small-scale jadeite objects that embody the symbolism of sacred and secular authority among...

Eye for the Sensual: Selections from the Resnick Collectionpresents a selection of European paintings and sculptures from the renowned collection of Stewart and Lynda Resnick.

While particularly famous for its important eighteenth-century French paintings—including works by François Boucher, Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun, Jean-Honoré Fragonard—the Resnick collection also includes a variety of other European works by artists including Peter Paul Rubens, Francesco Guardi and Henri Lehman, as well as a rare religious...

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art features recent work by the internationally renowned and LA-based photographer Catherine Opie. The show’s primary focus is high-school football, a subject that allowed Opie to explore issues of masculinity, community, and national identity. Over the last three years, Opie photographed football games and players in seven states across America. Atmospheric cues locate each regional site, while gestures and gazes reveal the adolescent players’...

Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins celebrates LACMA's 2007 acquisition of Eakins's great sporting painting, Wrestlers, 1899. The exhibition will examine the work in a broad thematic context, providing a rare opportunity to consider the history of sporting images in the oeuvre of this icon of American nineteenth-century art. While his rowing paintings and swimming images were each the focus of special exhibitions, no show has ever...

Reinvented and passed on by each generation, myths, legends, and fables have continued to fascinate artists into the modern era. Many of the operatic works of Richard Wagner are deeply rooted in the German and Nordic traditions of folk tales and legends, Goethe drew upon German folklore for his description of the Walpurgisnacht, and the Brothers Grimm drew upon folk traditions in their retelling of popular fairy tales. This exhibition...

John Baldessari is one of the most influential American artists working today. This long overdue retrospective will feature more than 150 works spanning the artist's career from 1962 to the present day, and include works on canvas, photography, videos and artist's books. Baldessari's text and image paintings from the mid-1960s are widely recognized as among the earliest examples of Conceptual Art, while his 1980s photo compositions derived from film stills rank...

The work of South African artist Robin Rhode originates from his physical interactions with drawings executed on walls on the streets of Johannesburg or, most recently, in his studio in Berlin, where he is now based. The resulting works include performances, wall drawings, photograph compositions, objects, video animations, and film. In developing his process Rhode was first "inspired by a high school initiation rite whereby young pupils were unwillingly taken...

From the colonial period to the present, Americans have been inventing characters and plots, settings and situations to give meaning to our everyday lives. American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915 includes seventy-five paintings, from before the Revolution to the start of World War I, that tell these stories in scenes of family life and courting, work and leisure, comic mishaps and disasters. These daily experiences were all subject to...

This exhibition examines the legacy of India’s divine heroes and heroines in contemporary South Asian culture through the comic book genre. Indian superheroes and their archenemies are visualized from ancient archetypes that have long been depicted in traditional painting and sculpture, and are deeply ingrained in India’s historical imagination. In the twenty-first century new incarnations of ancient Indian gods and goddesses are made manifest as modern superheroes brought to Earth...

Luis Meléndez (1716–1780) was the greatest still life painter of eighteenth-century Spain and ranks as one of the greatest painters of the genre in all Europe. Overshadowed for centuries by the great Goya, Meléndez’s paintings have received attention by scholars and appreciation by collectors only in the last few decades. The exhibition includes more than twenty paintings, grouped with relevant works from abroad.

"From the Spoon to the City": Objects by Architects from LACMA's Collection will present a cross section of LACMA's twentieth-century design collection, highlighting furniture and objects designed by architects. When Italian architect Ernesto Rogers famously declared that he wanted to design everything from "a spoon to a city," he articulated the desire of many architects to design both buildings and their contents. In some cases, this meant design for specific...

Classical Frieze is a film and selection of photographs from Eleanor Antin's recent work (2000–2009) recreating the ancient world through the screen of 19th-century neo-classical painting. The installation of her work coincides with the current special exhibition Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples.

"Pompeii and the Roman Villa illustrates how the Trojan War and the death and wandering of the great...

Pompeii and the Roman Villa focuses on the breadth and richness of cultural and artistic life in this region. The exhibition, organized by the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., includes works of art from the imperial villa at Oplontis and from aristocratic villas such as the Villa San Marco at Stabiae and the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, as well as works from the opulent houses of the urban elite in...

LACMA and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) will present the first major museum exhibition in the United States to focus on contemporary art from South Korea. The exhibition features work by a generation of artists who have emerged since the mid-1980s—some well-known and others on the brink of recognition—working on the cutting edge of international art trends and within a distinctly Korean context. Featuring site-specific installations as well...

A figure of international stature whose work includes sculpture, installation, and design, Franz West appears in his most comprehensive form to date in this retrospective exhibition, with objects ranging from early interactive works from the 1970s to large installations comprised of bright aluminum and epoxy objects that dramatize their surroundings with bold colors and oversize scale. For the past three decades, West has played a critical role in contributing to...

Commissioned by Dia Art Foundation and curated by Lynne Cooke,Francis Alÿs: Fabiola was first installed at the Hispanic Society of America in northern Manhattan from September 2007 to April 2008. Francis Alÿs, a Belgian artist who relocated to Mexico City in the early 1990s, has assembled a significant collection of nearly identical paintings and other depictions of fourth-century Saint Fabiola over the last two decades. All of these are...

A Story of Photography will present highlights of LACMA's newly acquired Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection. The collection of more than 3,500 photographs forms one of the finest existing groups of masterworks from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The exhibition, opening on October 5, will show over seventy seminal photographs by Ansel Adams, Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, W.H. Fox Talbot, and Edward Weston. Announced on August 11...

Who defines an avant-garde? African art inspired the early twentieth-century avant-gardes of cubism, Dada, and surrealism. But Africa has always had its own pioneers who keep artistic expression fresh and original. Yoruba philosopher Olabiyi Yai writes that tradition implies innovation. The tension between the two has ensured the dynamism of most African arts, and artists tend to work within genres while defying their boundaries.

This exhibition includes the works of...

The Cheech Marin collection is notable for classic examples of Chicano art produced from the inception of the Chicano movement to the present, with a concentration in painting from the 1980s and 90s. This exhibition includes a number of widely exhibited works by such first-generation Chicano artists as Carlos Almaraz, Margaret Garcia, Gilbert “Magu” Luján, Frank Romero, John Valadez, and Patssi Valdez, whose artistic careers began during the Chicano civil rights movement in...

The Etsuko and Joe Price Collection is world-renowned for its collection of Japanese paintings of the Edo Period (1615–1868) featuring screens, hanging scrolls, and fan-format paintings. The Price Collection reflects the eclectic diversity of a remarkably creative span in Japan's history of visual art and is highlighted by some of the finest examples of the distinctive and compelling renderings of animal life by Ito Jakuchu (1716–1800), an artist who caught...

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) was among the founders of German expressionism, and one of the most original printmakers of the twentieth century. A selection of more than forty prints and fifteen books shows his progression from Jugendstil (the German equivalent to art nouveau) to expressionism, and demonstrates his fascination with the contrast of the natural and the artificial that is so endemic to modern life. Kirchner and his colleagues in...