Art-Exhibitions-Past

In 2010, Matisse's large ceramic, La Gerbe (The Sheaf) was bequeathed to LACMA. Commissioned by Mr. and Mrs. Sidney F. Brody in the early 1950s for the courtyard of their home by A. Quincy Jones, the ceramic reflects the work Matisse had been doing with large, colorful paper cut-outs. Henri Matisse: La Gerbeplaces Matisse’s final commission by the Brodys in context with the paper cut-outs he made at the...

This exhibition focuses on the interaction of political and aesthetic movements in Germany from the 1910s to the early 1920s, and the influence such movements had on the artistic development of Hans Richter (1888–1976); it complements Hans Richter: Encounters, on view in the Resnick Pavilion, May 5–September 2, 2013.

The works of Paul Cézanne, Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky, and Oskar Kokoschka exposed the young Hans Richter to the full...

This selection of works from the Broad and LACMA collections draws on the strengths of both to reflect directions in contemporary art that emerged in the 1980s. The seeds of what would come to be known as the Pictures Generation began here in Los Angeles at CalArts where conceptual artist John Baldessari helped shape the careers of many artists, such as Troy Brauntuch, Matt Mullican, Jack Goldstein and David Salle. Curators...

The museum's collection includes excellent prints by the renowned Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849). Among the museum’s holdings are two of this artist’s most iconic works, popularly known as Red Fuji and The Great Wave. A recent gift from Max Palevsky added to the museum’s collection a complete set of the eight prints from Hokusai’s A Tour of Waterfalls in the Provinces.

In addition to these color woodblock...

Stanley Kubrick was known for exerting complete artistic control over his projects; in doing so, he reconceived the genres in which he worked. The exhibition covers the breadth of Kubrick’s practice, beginning with his early photographs for Look magazine, taken in the 1940s, and continuing with his groundbreaking directorial achievements of the 1950s through the 1990s. His films are represented through a selection of annotated scripts, production photography, lenses and...

The X, Y, and Z Portfolios (published in 1978, 1978, and 1981, respectively) by American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989) summarize Mapplethorpe’s ambitions as a fine-art photographer and contemporary artist, reflecting the tripartite division of his mature work: homosexual sadomasochistic imagery (X); floral still lifes (Y); and nude portraits of African-American men (Z). Mapplethorpe’s work has consistently provoked strong reactions, notably during the so-called Culture Wars of the 1980s. The exhibition...

Michael Heizer’s ambitious, large-scale projects are often difficult to realize and just as difficult to document. Installed in BCAM is Michael Heizer: Actual Size, a series of fifteen individual photographic prints from 1970 of actual size monolithic rocks.  Taken together, Levitated Mass and this installation make a statement that is both sweeping in scope and specific to our time. “We live in a world that’s technological and primordial...

Culling from LACMA’s permanent collection, the exhibition takes as its starting point Gabriel Orozco’s sculpture Lost Line (1993-1996). Orozco describes the piece as “the opposite of a static monument,” in effect a “sculpture as a body in motion.”

Lost Line uses Orozco’s fragile and mutable form as premise to bring together works from the collection, including large-scale sculpture and painting installations, film, photography, and works on paper. The works gathered...

Bodies and Shadows: Caravaggio and His Legacy introduces the work of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), one of the most popular artists of the past, rivaling in fame both Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. The stories of Caravaggio's life are legend, more myth than history, describing traits of personality, including passion and brutality, that came to describe the unique qualities of his work. The exhibition, made up of 56 works...

Ed Ruscha's influence can be seen in graphic design, cinema, architectural theory, and urban history. His art depicts everyday objects – gas stations, street signs, billboards, commercial packaging – yet often triggers philosophical reflection about the relationship between words, things, and ideas. The word “standard” is a case in point: it can be a banner or rallying point, an established level of quality, and an oil company’s brand name. In his...

For more than fifty years, Ken Price, born in 1935 in Los Angeles, California, created remarkable and innovative works that have redefined contemporary sculpture practice. Price procured a cult following among critics and scholars since the 1960s, including Lucy Lippard, who declared in 1966, “It is a fact rather than a value judgment that no one else, on the east or west coast, is working like Kenneth Price.” Price’s work...

Drawing Surrealism explores the significance of drawing and works on paper to surrealist innovation. Long considered the medium of exploration and innovation, drawing was set free from its associations with other media and valued as a predominant means of expression and innovation with the advent of surrealism. Automatic drawings, exquisite cadavers, decalcomania, frottage, and collage, for example, are just a few of the processes invented by surrealists as means to tap into...

Portraiture has always been motivated by two competing and overlapping desires: the desire to record, and the desire to be recorded. Artists Katy Grannan and Charlie White have examined this tension, exploring concepts of identity and subjectivity in a world increasingly dominated by media representations of the ideal self. The Sun and Other Stars presents two bodies of work that map the fragility and resilience of individuality in contemporary Western...

Common Places features three objects from the museum's permanent collection which transform printed works on paper into one-of-a-kind embroideries: a seventeenth-century valance, a cigarette silks quilt, and Alighiero Boetti’s Mappa.

Mappa (1979), is a work conceptualized by Italian artist Alighiero Boetti and embroidered by Afghan women, which takes the geopolitical map as its subject. Beginning in 1971, Boetti’s embroidered world maps were produced serially in Kabul until the Soviet invasion in...

The newest work by renowned Los Angeles artist Sharon Lockhart (United States, born 1964) is a multimedia meditation on the achievements of Israeli dance composer and textile artist Noa Eshkol (Israel, 1924–2007). Since the 1990s, Lockhart has memorialized specific, quotidian moments in particular communities using film and photography. She discovered Eshkol’s groundbreaking work during a 2008 trip to Israel. Eshkol is best known for developing in the 1950s, with architect...

Children of the Plumed Serpent: the Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico follows the historical trajectory of the life and epic stories of the culture-hero and deity, Quetzalcoatl. The exhibition examines the art and material objects of late pre-Columbian and early colonial societies across Mexico to explore Quetzalcoatl’s role as founder and benefactor of the Nahua-, Mixtec-, and Zapotec-dominated kingdoms of southern Mexico. These socially and culturally complex communities successfully...

This exhibition is the first major study of California midcentury modern design. With more than 300 objects—furniture, ceramics, metalwork, fashion and textiles, and industrial and graphic design—the exhibition examines the state’s role in shaping the material culture of the entire country. Organized into four thematic areas, the exhibition aims to elucidate the 1951 quote from émigré Greta Magnusson Grossman that is incorporated into the exhibition’s title: California design “is not...

Maria Nordman is internationally known as one of the most significant artists to emerge from Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s. FILMROOM: SMOKE is one of her earliest artworks, made at the time she left UCLA graduate school.

“Nordman is so often categorized as part of LA’s so-called ‘Light and Space’ movement, but in fact her work comes from a completely different—and appropriately Los Angeles inspired—point of view, demonstrated...

North America represented a place free from European traditions for women Surrealists from the United States and Mexico, and European émigrés. While their male counterparts usually cast women as objects for their delectation, female Surrealists delved into their own subconscious and dreams, creating extraordinary visual images. Their art was primarily about identity: portraits, double portraits, self-referential images, and masquerades that demonstrate their trials and pleasures. The exhibition includes works in...

The Zodiac Project is Ai Weiwei's first major public sculpture. For this monumental new work, Ai has recreated the famous twelve bronze animal heads that once adorned the Zodiac Fountain in Yuan Ming Yuan, the Old Summer Palace, in Beijing. Cast around 1750, the original heads were looted by Anglo-French troops who took part in the destruction of Yuan Ming Yuan in 1860 during the Second Opium War. The heads...

Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World examines the significance of indigenous peoples within the artistic landscape of colonial Latin America. The exhibition offers a comparative view of the two principal viceroyalties of Spanish America—Mexico and Peru—from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Under colonial rule, Amerindians were not a passive or homogenous group but instead commissioned art for their communities and promoted specific images of themselves as a polity...

Edward Kienholz’s Five Car Stud (1969–72) is a powerful work that depicts the hatred many white Americans expressed toward racial minorities and interracial partnerships in the not-too-distant-past; it stands as Kienholz’s major civil rights work. In this horrifying life-size tableau, four automobiles and a pickup truck are arranged on a dirt floor in a dark room with their headlights illuminating a shocking scene: a group of white men exacting...

Monet/Lichtenstein: Rouen Cathedrals presents a group of Monet’s impressionist Rouen Cathedral paintings together with Lichtenstein’s 1969 appropriation of the same subject.

Monet painted thirty views of the Rouen Cathedral from 1892 to 1895 from different viewing positions, all quite close to one another, at different times of day. The series stands as the hallmark of the revolutionary impressionist movement. Over six decades later, Lichtenstein was inspired to paint his Cathedral...

Possible Worlds: Mario Ybarra Jr., Karla Diaz, and Slanguage Studio Select from the Permanent Collections connects a residency site in Watts, California with the LACMA collection and campus.

In collaboration with LACMA and the Watts House Project, an artist-driven urban revitalization project centered around the historic Watts Towers, Ybarra, Diaz, and Slanguage, the artist’s team of collaborators, participated in a residency at the home of longtime residents of Watts, the...