Los Angeles art exhibitions: the best shows to see in February 2025

In the wake of the devastating wildfires that overtook parts of Los Angeles in early January, some exhibit openings were cancelled or postponed to February, but the art community remains resilient and committed to supporting those who have been impacted by loss and displacement at this time. The annual Frieze LA at the Santa Monica airport will take place as planned, along with Felix at the Hollywood Roosevelt, and the LA Art Show downtown, in addition, Parker gallery is opening a new space on Melrose Ave. and L.A. Louver celebrates 50 years in Venice.

Other institutions such as the Hammer Museum, as part of the Mohn Art Collective alongside LACMA and MOCA, have joined the J. Paul Getty Trust in the creation of the $12 million L.A. Arts Community Fire Relief Fund. This initiative will provide support to local artists and arts workers in Los Angeles who have lost homes, studios, or livelihoods due to the recent fires.

Here are the must see shows in February and Freize Week taking place at some of our favourite Los Angeles galleries.

Los Angeles art exhibitions: what to see in February 2025

Frieze LA

Santa Monica Airport from 20-23 February 2025

Frieze LA is back for it’s sixth year to showcase a diverse group of contemporary artists with over 100 galleries from around the world. Highlights include Kukje Gallery, known for presenting works by Damien Hirst and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Victoria Miro, which represents globally renowned artists.

Other presentations from leading galleries include Gagosian, Gladstone, Marian Goodman Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Pace Gallery, White Cube, and David Zwirner. In addition, fourteen galleries will make their Frieze Los Angeles debut, including Southern Guild, Mariane Ibrahim, Linseed, moniquemeloche, Galleria Lorcan O'Neill and Timothy Taylor. The fair also spotlights the thriving Los Angeles gallery scene, with nearly half of the participants operating a space in the city, including foundational galleries such as Blum, Regen Projects, David Kordansky Gallery, and The Box.

Renowned international galleries to look for include Bank, Taka Ishii Gallery, Galerie Max Hetzler, Xavier Hufkens, Kukje Gallery, Victoria Miro, Maureen Paley, kaufmann repetto, Thaddaeus Ropac and Mendes Wood DM.

Showcasing Frieze's commitment to supporting the region's arts ecosystem, this year's lineup features several former Focus participants who have advanced to the Galleries sector of the fair, including Matthew Brown, Sebastian Gladstone, Charlie James, and Nazarian / Curcio.  

The fair will once again feature a curated program of the Art Production Fund’s critically acclaimed public program of site-specific artworks dotted throughout the Santa Monica Airport campus, with activations across the athletic fields and sculptures exhibited throughout the community park, which are free to attend.

Felix LA

Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel from 19-23 February 2025

Back for its seventh year, this contemporary art fair, which takes over several floors at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, including ground floor rooms that spill out into the pool area, was modeled after the intimate hotel fair format popularized in the 1990s, and was intentionally designed to avoid the typical trade show atmosphere.

Felix LA 2025 will showcase over 60 exhibitors from around the world, including galleries from La Habana, Chicago, Lisbon, Turin, Bucharest, Miami, London, Dallas, New York, and Los Angeles. This year’s edition features over 30 first-time exhibitors including ILY2 from Portland, Oregon; COMA, from Chippendale, Australia; and sobering galerie from Paris, France, and welcomes back over 20 galleries from around the world.

The fair experience focuses on connoisseurship, collaboration, and community among collectors, dealers, and artists, and Felix most recently partnered with global retailer Dover Street Market for the 2024 fair. This year, expect to see works from Albertz Benda, New York  and local Megan Mulrooney, West Hollywood to international showings from mother's tankstation, Dublin and London, sobering galerie, Paris and Studioli, Rome.  

As part of the ticketing initiative this year, they have created the Felix Wildfire Fund For Grief x Hope which directly helps victims and aids artists and art workers who have been affected but the LA wildfires.

LA Art Show

Los Angeles Convention Center on from 19-23 February 2025

LA Art Show returns for their 30th anniversary, under the direction of producer and director Kassandra Voyagis, with its ever-expanding global reach expect to see exhibitors from Turkey, Spain, Belgium, Japan, Canada, France, Taiwan, London, Italy, Switzerland and the Netherlands. With over 100 galleries, museums and nonprofits exhibiting, the 2025 edition will feature continued collaborations while welcoming new participants. 

The decision to proceed, in the wake of the tragic fires, was made in support of LA's creative community. ‘As LA’s longest-running art fair, our mission is unequivocal: to champion the artists and galleries that constitute our cultural landscape,’ says Voyagis. ‘This decision stemmed from a resolute commitment to aid in the healing and rebuilding efforts while offering much-needed community support and reprieve.’

LA Artist Robert Vargas will create a massive live mural, “Heroes,” during the Opening Night event as a heartfelt tribute to the first responders who continue to heroically serve the city. The artwork will also be a symbol of hope and perseverance, reflecting Los Angeles’ unwavering spirit in overcoming adversity. Dedicated to cultivating cultural understanding through the arts, LA-based Building Bridges Art Exchange will showcase art from artists who have lost their homes and studios in the fires with all proceeds going to support them. Free entry to the fair will be given to firefighters and their families, and the LA Art Show will donate to a charity involved in the rebuilding efforts, which is currently being explored and yet to be determined.

Alex Israel, Noir

Gagosian Beverly Hills from 6 February to 22 March 2025

Pushed from the original January 9^th opening date due to the fires, a series of new paintings by LA-based artist Alex Israel will be on view at Gagosian in Bevelry Hills. This marks the artists first show in his hometown in nearly a decade. His works frequently draw on pop culture and entertainment while blending in nostalgia and escapism. The new show is showcasing the City of Angels at night, featuring what the artist calls “third-tier monuments.” This body of work highlights institutions that may be familiar to locals andvisitors, including the famed Troubadour music venue, as well as spots filled with lesser-known LA lore, from the unique architecture of gas stations, liquor stores, tattoo parlor facades.

Janna Ireland: Even by Proxy

Hollyhock House, Barnsdall Art Park, until 27 September 2025

Commissioned for the famed Frank Lloyd Wright home perched on a hill in Silver Lake, Hollyhock House’s centennial show features twenty-one photographs by LA-based Janna Ireland that introduce new perspectives on Los Angeles’ only World Heritage site. The photographs highlight the quiet, subtle details of the home and make visible the care and conservation that sustain the site over time.

The title of the exhibition comes from Frank Lloyd Wright’s autobiography, in which he describes the process of realizing Hollyhock House. For Ireland, Wright’s phrase ‘even by proxy’ points to the fraught relationship between client and architect in building the house as well as the ongoing project of preservation.

As Ireland states, ‘I regard the story of Hollyhock House, and how it came to be in spite of the often contentious relationship between heiress Aline Barnsdall and architect Frank Lloyd Wright, as one of the great LA stories. It is a tale of ego and conflicting ambitions, as so many of the best stories are. My photographs are about light and shadow, wood and concrete, and the labor involved in preserving Wright and Barnsdall’s complicated project for future generations.’

This exhibit is presented in partnership with Project Restore and the Julius Shulman Institute at Woodbury University. Janna Ireland (an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Occidental College) is the 2024 recipient of the Julius Shulman Institute Excellence in Photography Award, which is presented to a photographer who honors Shulman’s legacy by challenging the way we look at physical space.

Mr.

PERROTIN, Mid-City, opening 18 February to 22 March 2025

Opening during Frieze week, Mr.’s neo-pop aesthetics spans painting, sculpture, installation, and video. Associated with the superflat movement, he uses manga and anime to portray his personal fantasies. Drawing his themes and motifs from the otaku subculture or fandom, he is more specifically a self-described otaku artist. His cartoonish visions are essentially inhabited by young characters, who are meant to evoke feelings of moe (a Japanese notion relating to the adoration of fictional figures). In typical kawaii style, he sometimes depicts childlike features (round faces, wide eyes, colorful hair) with innocent undertones. In a stark contrast to his characters, there is an underlining wider reflection on solitude, social anxiety, and fear. The chaotic environment of the exhibition echo both Japan’s traumatic loss during World War II and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

Daisy Sheff and Joe Minter

Parker Gallery, Hancock Park, 19 February to 5 April 2025

Parker Gallery is opening a new space on 6700 Melrose in a 1947 building that has been renovated by Formation Association, in collaboration with Mark Haddawy. The building holds two adjacent exhibition spaces, an exterior patio, and an enclosed sculpture garden. The opening will launch with a new body of work by LA-based Daisy Sheff and the very first exhibition on the West Coast by Joe Minter who explores Black contemporary society, probing racial, social, and political injustices and major world events. His exhibition will include recent paintings made between 2022–2024, and sculptures dating back to 1989, installed on the gallery’s outdoor patio. Sheff explores narratives with the history of radical art movements in the San Francisco Bay Area with influences that include the late Roy De Forest and his animated world of dogs. Her new exhibition includes a large-scale assemblage sculpture of her dog and canines traversing through patterned landscapes.

L.A. Louver Celebrates 50 Years

L.A. Louver, Venice, from 15 February to 14 June 2025

The 50th anniversary exhibition encompasses the gallery’s history, from its formation in 1975 to now. As one of the longest-established contemporary art galleries on the West Coast, they have launched more than 660 exhibitions. This presentation appears in all spaces of the gallery, which remains on the same block as the original 1970s location, when Venice Beach was a Bohemian art haven. The building designed by Frederick Fisher & Partners has held hundreds of exhibitions and events; and the artworks that have traveled the world.

This exhibit honors this initial ambition and the pivotal role the gallery has played in establishing L.A. as a global art center. Comprised of work by over 50 artists, the exhibition includes those from the early days of the gallery such as Max Cole, George Herms, Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, Don Suggs, international figures David Hockney, Sui Jianguo, Per Kirkeby, Leon Kossoff, stalwarts of the city’s creative landscape Tony Berlant, John McCracken, Ed Moses, Ken Price, and those living and working in Los Angeles today Rebecca Campbell, Gajin Fujita, Heather Gwen Martin, and Alison Saar.

Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations of Cinema

Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, mid-city, until 13 July 2025

Through more than 110 films spanning 130 years (1894–2024), this body of work highlights the role color has played since the earliest days of film history, both as a tool for technological experimentation and artistic expression. The exhibition investigates the role of color in film, from the technological advancements that made its use possible, to the ways filmmakers use color as a storytelling tool, to its psychological impact on audiences.

Nearly 150 objects from the silent era to the digital age will be on view, including rarely exhibited technology, costumes, props, and film posters. Do not miss the legendary ruby slippers designed by Gilbert Adrian from The Wizard of Oz (1939); a Wonka chocolate bar from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971); a recreation of the stargate corridor from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), among many other gems.

academymuseum.org

Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema

Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, mid-city, until 12 April 2026

Cyberpunk examines the global impact and lasting influence of the science fiction sub-genre cyberpunk on film culture.

Featuring near-future scenarios set in worlds that eerily resemble our own, these films juxtapose technological advances with social disorder, ecological crisis, and urban decay. The exhibition features more than 25 films, including Blade Runner (1982), Tron (1982), Videodrome (1983), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), The Matrix (1999), Sleep Dealer (2008), and Alita: Battle Angel (2019). Also on view are rare collections from the Academy such as the Vid-Phon telecommunication device in its original booth and concept design drawings by visual futurist Syd Mead from Blade Runner; a matte painting from The Running Man; and concept art from Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Located in the museum’s double-height Hurd Gallery, the centerpiece of the exhibition is an immersive media installation where a band of moving images surrounds the gallery space, depicting wastelands, derelict urban settings, and digital landscapes from cyberpunk and futurist films.

Both exhibitions are part of the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide.

academymuseum.org/cyberpunk

My Perfect Self: Yoshitomo Nara

BLUM, mid-city. until 8 March 2025

Curated by Yeewan Koon, Yoshitomo Nara and BLUM are celebrating thirty years since the artists first exhibition in the United States. This solo presentation at will open on 18 January and features eleven new large-scale bronze sculptures, presented for the first time.

This exhibition highlights Nara’s evolving sculptural practice, featuring mid-size heads exuding a quirky strangeness and dark charm that defines the artist’s work. These heads are integral to Nara’s exploration in clay, intertwining ideas and techniques developed since 2011,but also express a poignant return to his roots. The exhibition also includes painting sand drawings that resonate with the sculptures, inviting deeper reflection on his ongoing experimentation throughout a career that gained international acclaim with his seminal work, The Girl with the Knife in Her Hand(1991.)

blum-gallery.com/exhibition

Mariana: Velázquez’s Portrait of a Queen from the Museo Nacional del Prado

Norton Simon, Pasadena, until 24 March 2025

This is an area opportunity to see this exhibition which centres on the nearly life-size portrait of Queen Mariana of Austria (1652–53) by 17th-century Spanish painter Diego Velázquez (1599 –1660), and has only traveled to the U.S. once before when it was presented at The Met in 1989. The Velázquez portrait will also be shown in relationship to the Museum’s paintings by Jusepe de Ribera, Bartolomé-Esteban Murillo, and Francisco de Zurbarán, displayed in an adjacent gallery, providing another unique chance to experience this essential quartet of 17th-century Spanish painters under one roof.

nortonsimon.org

World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project

California African American Museum, Exposition Park, until 2 March 2025

Co-curated by Cameron Shaw, Executive Director, and Yael Lipschutz, independent curator, this exhibition is part of the Getty PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative.

George Washington Carver was a pioneer of plant-based engineering and one of the nation’s earliest proponents of sustainable agriculture. In the early 1900s, he built his 'Jesup Wagon,' a moveable school to share soil and plant samples, equipment, and other agricultural knowledge with farmers. Carver’s then-radical ideas—including organic fertilisers, crop rotation, and plant-based medicines and construction materials—are now recognized as the forerunners of modern conservation. A trained and practicing artist, Carver used sustainable materials such as peanut- and clay-derived dyes and paints in his many weavings and still-life paintings. World Without End explores how contemporary artists and thinkers working today engage with Carver’s ideas and interests. Alongside contemporary artworks by thirty artists and artist collectives, the exhibition includes Carver’s rarely seen paintings, drawings, laboratory equipment, and notebooks.

Both the exhibition and its forthcoming catalogue, which includes previously unpublished material documenting Carver’s life and work at Tuskegee University, reframe and centre Carver’s lasting impact on art and science.

caamuseum.org

Mark Dion: Excavations

LaBrea Tar Pits, until September 2025

Presented as part of Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide, this rare exhibition in the museum section of this LA landmark, focuses on Dion’s time working with scientists as an artist-in-residence at the Tar Pits.

Visually, Excavations appears to be a behind-the-scenes space, displaying new work alongside early museum murals, dioramas, and maquettes of Ice Age mammals from the Tar Pits, which is the world's only active urban excavation site for Ice Age fossils.

If you want to take a deeper dive, the companion Field Guide publication take a whimsical look at the aesthetics of museums and scientific methods, as well as the history and relevance of the La Brea Tar Pits.

tarpits.org/mark-dion-pst

NHM Commons

Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County, Permanent

NHM Commons is a new wing and community hub featuring 75,000 square feet of renovated space, new construction by architect Frederick Fisher, and landscaping by landscape architect Mia Lehrer. A key design element of the new experience is the building’s transparent glass façade which will enable the public to see into the Museum and its collection while offering views of the park from inside. Other highlights include a new landscaped Community Plaza and Museum entrance, a multi-purpose theater, a new LA-focused retail space, and a grab-n-go cafe from South LA Café. Its centerpiece is an expansive Welcome Center that is free to the public, featuring Barbara Carrasco’s landmark 1981 mural 'L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective'; a temporary exhibit dedicated to NHM’s Community Science initiatives, and Gnatalie, and a 75-foot sauropod dinosaur skeleton with distinctive green fossils.

nhm.org/nhm-commons

Plugged In: Art and Electric Light

Norton Simon, Pasadena, until 17 Feb 2025

Presented in the Museum’s lower-level exhibition wing, this show features eight prolific artists who incorporated electric light into their practice to shape and respond to sweeping artistic and social change. These works were produced between 1964 and 1970, and encompass a collection by Walter Askin, Laddie John Dill, Dan Flavin, Robert Irwin, Jess, Robert Rauschenberg, Allen Ruppersberg, and Andy Warhol. This show is concurrent with the Getty-led initiative PST ART: Art & Science Collide.

Robert Rauschenberg’s monumental ‘Green Shirt’ (1965–67) is an intricate marriage of technical skill and artistic vision and a focal point of the exhibit. The sculpture resembles an amalgam of commercial signage, adorned with multicolored neon tubes bent into motifs derived from Rauschenberg’s substantial body of work. Newly added in November, a film series Low Key: The Magic, Wonder and Horror of Light is presented in conjunction with the show.

Lightscape by Doug Aitken

Walt Disney Concert Hall, at Marciano Art Foundation until 15 March 2025

Artist Doug Aitken is collaborating with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, and the Marciano Art Foundation on a multimedia world premier artwork Lightscape at Walt Disney Concert Hall. The modern mythology propelled by music asks the questions, “where are we now?” and “where are we going?” The ‘answers’ play out in is a shapeshifting act of contemporary storytelling that unfolds in various stages: a feature-length film, a multi-screen fine art installation, and a series of live musical performances.

The world premiere of the concert iteration of ‘Lightscape’ caps off the LA Phil’s daylong Noon to Midnight: Field Recordings festival, with Grant Gershon leading the LA Phil New Music Group and the Los Angeles Master Chorale in a hypnotic series of original soundscapes and minimalist compositions to accompany Doug Aitken’s vivid moving images. Following its concert premiere, the work migrates to the Marciano Art Foundation in the form of a multi-screen art exhibition running from with weekly live music activations curated by the LA Phil, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, and Aitken.

Diane von Furstenberg: Woman Before Fashion

Skirball Cultural Center, Brentwood/Bel-Air, until 31 August 2025

This U.S. debut explores the remarkable life and work of fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg's career, from the 1970s to the present day including a selection of items drawn from the DVF archives along with ephemera, fabric swatches, media pieces, and information on her philanthropic work. Garments from Greco-Roman drapery to kimonos, dance uniforms, and fellow designers that explore the connections between these historical pieces and her designs.

New artifacts also shed light on von Furstenberg’s life as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and a war refugee, offering additional perspective on the factors that shaped her life and work, including a spotlight on the designer’s mother Lily Nahmias featuring audio, images and text that explore her experience as a member of the resistance. Skirball Cultural Center President and CEO Jessie Kornberg commented, ‘Jewish connection to garment industries and needlepoint trades spans continents and generations. Past exhibitions like the retrospective on Rudi Gernreich or the textile art of Aram Han Sifuentes celebrated these connections.’

Scientia Sexualis

Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, until 2 March 2025

ICA LA is kicking off it’s fall exhibition, Scientia Sexualis, by showcasing a group survey of contemporary artists whose works take up the fraught relationship between sex and science. Organized by Jennifer Doyle (Professor of English, University of California, Riverside) and Jeanne Vaccaro (Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Museum Studies, University of Kansas), and accompanied by a major scholarly publication (the title from French philosopher Michel Foucault’s landmark text, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976), the exhibition is part of the Getty PST ART: Art & Science Collide.

Intuit Dome

Inglewood, permanent

One of the most exciting art collections to hit Los Angeles can be found at the new home for the LA Clippers in Inglewood. The cutting-edge sports venue recently unveiled the monumental, site-specific, outdoor artworks commissioned for the Intuit Dome which opens to the public this August. The $11 million public art collection features a collection of globally recognised artists, selected by Ruth Berson, former deputy director of curatorial affairs at SFMOMA, who have deep ties to Los Angeles and intertwine their artistic talents with sports.

Glenn Kaino’s massive sculpture Sails, made of painted steel and wood looms in the form of the clipper ships that connected the world via the ocean’s trade routes. In this ship, basketball is the cultural wind that can connect us all.

Michael Massenburg’s mural of printed porcelain enamel on steel panel features figures of basketball, tennis, and soccer players, singers, musicians, and dancers, titled Cultural Playground expresses the artist’s belief that 'the two most profound things that unite people are the arts and sports.'

Jennifer Steinkamp’s digital artwork Swoosh, uses the entire surface of the Intuit Dome, designed by the architectural firm AECOM, with five animations will transform the surface of the dome and light up the sky with geometric panels.

Patrick Martinez’s sculpture Same Boat uses a neon sign to create an image that reproduces a statement by the late Civil Rights leader Whitney M. Young: “We may have all come on different ships but we’re in the same boat now.”

On a wall adjacent to Same Boat, you will find Kyungmi Shin’s stained-glass mosaic with stainless steel tracery, Spring to Life. For this work, Shin drew inspiration from Centinela Springs, the now-vanished water source in South Los Angeles that once supported the Tongva people and the land they cultivated. (If you would like to see more of Shin’s work, the artist has a solo exhibition at Craft Contemporary until 8, September 2024.)

The Dome opening features an exhibition of photographs by Catherine Opie (on loan from MOCA) evoking the experience of community. “We designed Intuit Dome to be a place that brings people together,” said Gillian Zucker, CEO of Halo Sports & Entertainment. “When it came to our public art, we wanted to deliver a collection that is as compelling to people well versed in art as it is to a novice viewer. We are eager to make these unique works, from these amazing artists, available to everyone.”

Mineo Mizuno: Homage to Nature

The Huntington, Pasadena, until 25 May 2029

The Huntington holds a library with British medieval manuscripts, including the 15th-century Ellesmere tome of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; 16 themed gardens with more than 83,000 living plants; an art museum and more.

In the main garden area on the vast grounds, Mineo Mizuno’s sculpture celebrates the beauty of wood in its natural state and emphasises its potential as a reusable and renewable resource. This site-specific work explores the fragility of the Earth’s ecosystem, as well as the destruction of the forest and its potential for regeneration.