Art-Exhibitions-Past

Showcasing one of the finest collections of 17th-century Chinese paintings in the United States, Alternative Dreams: 17th-Century Chinese Paintings from the Tsao Family Collection presents works by many of the most famous painters of this period, including scholars, officials, and Buddhist monks.

The 17th century witnessed the fall of the Chinese-ruled Ming dynasty (1368–1644) and the founding of the Manchu-ruled Qing dynasty (1644–1911). It was one of the most turbulent...

Picasso’s prodigious output of prints, spanning all seven decades of his career, is characterized by constant experimentation and technical ingenuity. Different printmaking techniques fueled his creative energy, as each method presented distinct means and possibilities for expression.

The stimulus and support Picasso received from his master printers were critical to his exploration of graphic art. His first decades of drypoints and etchings tend toward more conventional applications of technique—but in...

In recent years, the parameters of Islamic art have expanded to include contemporary works by artists from or with roots in the Middle East. Drawing inspiration from their own cultural traditions, these artists use techniques and incorporate imagery and ideas from earlier periods.

Ten years ago, LACMA began to acquire such work within the context of its holdings of Islamic art, understanding that the ultimate success and relevance of this...

In her many photographic projects, Catherine Opie has explored the tension between private desire and the public face. With the O Portfolio, shown at LACMA in its entirety for the first time in a Los Angeles museum, she offers an anatomy of sexual practices that are often obscured from public view. The photographs depict sadomasochistic scenarios derived from her participation in San Francisco’s bondage community.  

The project began...

Prints and photographs share a basic quality: each form involves transferring an image to paper, whether through the impression of an inked plate or the projection of light through film. Japanese Prints and Photographs: Paths Through Modernity opens up the relationship between these media by presenting prints and photographs from Japan that span almost 100 years, from 1917 to the present.

Though modern prints and photographs developed in different directions...

The first retrospective of Agnes Martin’s (1912–2004) work in the United States since 1992, this extensive exhibition covers the full breadth of her practice, revealing her early and little-known experiments with different media and tracing her development from biomorphic abstraction to the mesmerizing grids and striped canvases that became her hallmark.

A seminal artist of the twentieth century and a pioneer of abstraction, Agnes Martin’s visionary aesthetic and reclusive lifestyle...

This exhibition presents three extraordinary objects side-by-side: the ancient Roman Stowe vase, reconstituted during the eighteenth century from fragments (and represented in an etching by 18th-century Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi);  a second version in silver by leading silversmith of the English Regency era Paul Storr (1770-1844), and a 2016 computer-designed, 3D-printed artwork by Michael Eden. Each varies by medium as well as moment in history, allowing the viewer to...

Reigning Men: Fashion in Menswear, 1715–2015 explores the history of men’s fashionable dress from the eighteenth century to the present and re-examines the all-too-frequent equation of “fashion” with “femininity.” 

Beginning with the 18th century, the male aristocrat wore a three-piece suit conspicuous in make and style, and equally as lavish as the opulent dress of his female counterpart. The 19th-century “dandy” made famous a more refined brand of expensive elegance...

For centuries on the Hawaiian Islands, vividly colored feathers gathered from native birds were valuable cultural resources, ornamenting spectacular garments painstakingly constructed by hand. Long cloaks and short capes (‘ahu ‘ula), helmets (mahiole), and leis (lei hulu) bore rainbows of feathers to signify the divinity and power of chiefs (ali‘i), who wore them for spiritual protection and to proclaim their identity and status. These unique valuables also found use as...

Robert Mapplethorpe’s practice as an artist was characterized by inherent dualities. He sought what he called “perfection in form” in everything from acts of sexual fetishism to the elegant contours of flower petals. Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium explores Mapplethorpe's body of work through early drawings, collages, sculptures, and Polaroid photography; materials from his archive; portraits, still lifes, and figure studies; rare color photographs; and two seldom-seen moving image works...

Throughout his life, Morris Graves lived in remote settings, drawing inspiration from the close observation of nature and imbuing his subjects—predominately animals and plants— with poetic and symbolic qualities. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Graves pursued this singular artistic vision, deliberately maintaining his distance, both geographically and conceptually, from the contemporary New York art scene despite the sudden acclaim he received after exhibiting at MoMA in 1942. 

Morris Graves: The...

Among the most important figures to emerge during the 1990s, Los Angeles–based artist Diana Thater creates groundbreaking installations that push the physical, optical, and conceptual boundaries of how moving images are experienced. Depicting a range of natural phenomena—such as the weightless, seamless, underwater world of dolphins; honeybees who communicate through dancing; and the surprising fortitude of animals in Chernobyl in the aftermath of the worst nuclear meltdown ever—her works explore...

Germany’s Weimar Republic, established between the end of World War I and the Nazi rise to power, was a thriving laboratory of art and culture. As the country experienced unprecedented and often tumultuous social, economic, and political upheaval, many artists rejected Expressionism in favor of a new realism to capture this emerging society. Dubbed Neue Sachlichkeit—New Objectivity—its adherents turned a cold eye on the new Germany: its desperate prostitutes...

Noah Purifoy (1917-2004) lived and worked most of his life in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, California. A founding director of the Watts Towers Art Center, his earliest body of sculpture, constructed out of charred debris from the 1965 Watts Rebellion, was the basis for 66 Signs of Neon, a landmark group exhibition about the riots that traveled to nine venues between 1966 and 1969. In line with the...

In recent years, the parameters of Islamic art have expanded to include contemporary works by artists from or with roots in the Middle East. Drawing inspiration from their own cultural traditions, these artists use techniques and incorporate imagery and ideas from earlier periods. LACMA has only recently begun to acquire such work within the context of its holdings of Islamic art, understanding that the ultimate success and relevance of this...

In just 50 years, LACMA has established itself as a world-class museum with one of the strongest encyclopedic collections in the world. The more than 120,000 objects that make up LACMA's holdings are due to the generosity of donors. For the museum's 50th anniversary, that spirit of generosity continues with this exhibition. 

50 for 50 will be the first presentation of a selection of highlights from the recent, historic bequest...

Ed Moses has been a significant figure in contemporary art in Los Angeles since his first solo exhibition at Ferus Gallery in 1958. Since the very beginning, drawing has been central to Moses’s practice. From his large, all-over graphite drawings of roses from the 1960s to his signature diagonal grids of the 1970s and beyond, Moses’s work has always been grounded in graphic experimentation.

The first museum presentation of the...

Larry Sultan: Here and Home is the first retrospective of California photographer Larry Sultan (1946–2009). The exhibition includes more than 200 photographs ranging from Sultan's conceptual and collaborative works of the 1970s to his solo works in the decades following. Sultan never stopped challenging the conventions of photographic documentation, exploring themes of family, home, and façade throughout his career. Five major bodies of work are represented including: Evidence (1977), made collaboratively with Mike...

The first museum presentation of the late Chris Burden’s recently completed monumental performance sculpture, Chris Burden: Ode to Santos Dumont pays homage to ingenuity, optimism, and the persistence of experimentation, failure, and innovation. Inspired by Brazilian-born pioneer aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, widely considered the father of aviation in France, the kinetic airship sculpture was recently completed after a decade of research and work by Burden.

The highly balanced and refined mechanism—modeled...

Drawn entirely from the premier collection of The New-York Historical Society, Nature and the American Vision: The Hudson River School features forty-five outstanding American landscape paintings from the nineteenth-century. Among the artists represented in the exhibition are the heroes of the American landscape movement: Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and Albert Bierstadt, among others. Also included are lesser-known artists, some of whom helped the American landscape achieve recognition through the...

Haunted Screens: German Cinema in the 1920s explores masterworks of German Expressionist cinema. From the stylized fantasy of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (dir. Robert Wiene, 1919) to the chilling murder mystery M (dir. Fritz Lang, 1931), cinema during the liberal Weimar era was innovative in aesthetic, psychological, and technical terms.

Organized by La Cinémathèque française, Paris, the exhibition features over 150 drawings, as well as manuscripts, posters, and set models, the...

The work of German artist Thomas Demand (b. 1964) achieves a disquieting balance between the convincingly real and the strangely artificial. Initially a sculptor, Demand first took up the camera to record his ephemeral paper constructions. In 1993 he began making constructions for the sole purpose of photographing them. Starting with an image culled from the media, Demand builds a full-scale model using colored paper and cardboard, photographs the scene...

Christine Corday:  Protoist Series, Selected Forms is the artist’s first solo presentation at an American museum and the culmination of her work replacing the paintbrush with the heat of a plasma torch. Corday coined the term "protoist" to describe forms in and out of a solid state, and a series of works in which she aims to suspend the moment between sensory perception and  definition.

Corday draws on her diverse studies in...

This exhibition marks the first major retrospective of the work of Pierre Huyghe (b. 1962, Paris). Huyghe creates films, installations, and events that blur fact and fiction, reinvent rituals of social engagement, and use the exhibition model as a site for playful experimentation. Organized thematically, the exhibition covers more than two decades of Huyghe's career, with a focus on cinema as both model and matrix. By filming staged scenarios, Huyghe...