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

Collages and calligraphy seem to dominate the art scene this spring with works from filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, and 34 Chinese artists at LACMA, along with a retrospective of photographer Diane Arbus, and British artist George Rouy’s first U.S. solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth.

For uplifting art news after the recent LA fires, The Broad is breaking new ground this month for an expansion for its 10-year anniversary; and over at LACMA, the public can start exploring multiple features including installations of outdoor sculpture, of the new David Geffen Galleries at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Peter Zumthor) starting this summer, as the museum prepares for the April 2026 opening of this new home for its permanent collection.

Here are the best new and continuing shows to see in Los Angeles this April.

Los Angeles Art Exhibitions: what to see in April 2025

Trust Me, Be Careful, I Like Your Shoes

Sean Kelly LA until 3 May 2025

Zipora Fried’s first exhibition in Los Angeles, Trust Me, Be Careful, I Like Your Shoes, brings together four bodies of work, ranging from larger pieces on paper to new scaled drawings, ceramic sculptures, and a monumental hanging drawing. Fried’s mastery of mark-making with pencils is so finely drawn, it appears to be fibers woven into the canvas, and her continued exploration of form, color, and gesture are on display at the gallery’s Highland Ave. location.

Ceremony by Alexandra Grant

John Wolf, Hollywood Hills, until 15 April 2025

Alexandra Grant is currently splitting her time between LA and Berlin, while exploring the power language, symbolism and written texts through painting, drawing, sculpture, and video. For her latest exhibition, Grant invites us into a ceremonial space where art becomes a vessel for intention, reflection, and transformation. Ceremony is explored not as a distant or esoteric act, but as an everyday practice, where the canvas serves as sacred ground for self-contemplation and renewal. By treating the creative process as an offering, her paintings transform into portals for healing—spaces where intention becomes form, and where reflection deepens into practice.

Grant is also the creator of the grantLOVE project, which has raised funds for arts-based non-profits, including Art of Elysium; 18th Street Arts Center, and LAXART, and she cofounded X Artists’ Books, a publishing house for artist-centered books with her partner Keanu Reeves.

Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited

David Zwirner opening 24 April through 21 June 2025

In conjunction with Fraenkel Gallery, David Zwirner will exhibit Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited. Organised by both galleries, the exhibition debuted at David Zwirner New York in September 2022 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s momentous 1972 posthumous retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Recreating the iconic exhibition’s checklist of 113 photographs, underscoring the subversive poignancy of Arbus’s work, this will be the first major survey of her work in Los Angeles since Diane Arbus: Revelations, which was presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art over twenty years ago.

Issy Wood: Wet Reckless

Michael Werner Gallery Beverly Hills until 17 May 2025

An autobiographical exhibition of new paintings by American-born, British painter and musician Issy Wood balances confession and concealment as the artist paints intimate pictures with a self-described “smudgy pointillism.” Wood describes her choice of subjects as, “capital S Seduction, everything shiny, everything pretty, everything beautifully photographed.” The result is essentially pictures of pictures. The works attempt to both create distance from and instill reverence in the depicted subject: a reluctant dialogue with advertising, the internet, and desire itself.

Carolee Schneemann: Video Rocks (1987)

Lisson Gallery from 11 April until 24 May 2025

Hailed as one of the boldest and most influential artists of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Carolee Schneemann’s (1939–2019) first solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery celebrates her six-decade career which challenged societal and artistic conventions by using her own body and diverse media to address issues of sexual expression, gender, politics, and war.

The exhibition focuses on Schneemann’s work two decades into her career, merging her video works with sculpture, alongside a series of drawings, centering on a multimedia installation about a dream with rock-like shapes reminiscent of Monet’s Water Lillies, the artist had while visiting Los Angeles in the summer of 1985. Shown at Lisson for the first time in its entirety, Video Rocks (1987), consists of 180 discs, spread across the floor in a shallow mound. At the top, five video monitors have been arranged in a row with each screen playing staggered filmed scenes that allude to the preceding sculptural landscape — footage of people and animals crossing the rocks.

Bruno Munari

Graye – The Gallery, West Hollywood, until 1 June 2025

This art exhibition celebrates the intersection of light, play, and timeless design. Porro, one of Italy’s most esteemed design brands, is marking its centennial with a luminous tribute to Milan-born painter, sculptor, graphic and product designer, Bruno Munari. This immersive installation, created in collaboration with Corraini Edizioni and Sfelab, brings Munari’s visionary approach to light and simplicity to life. Designed for visitors of all ages, this is a rare chance do see Munari’s Direct Projections and experience his experimental light compositions firsthand. As Los Angeles recovers from recent challenges, this exhibition pays homage to resilience, light, and the transformative power of creativity.

Charles Gaines: Numbers and Trees, the Tanzania Baobabs

Hauser & Wirth, West Hollywood, until 24 May 2025

Pioneering conceptual artist Charles Gaines returns to his hometown of Los Angeles to present a new sequence of his signature Plexiglas works at Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood. This is the most elaborate treatment yet of his ongoing Numbers and Trees series, first conceived by the artist in 1987. Consisting of nine large-scale triptychs and a suite of new watercolor diptychs, all works are based on photographs of baobab trees the artist shot during a trip to Tanzania in 2023. Trees have been a central motif in Gaines’ practice since the 1970s, when he first began plotting their forms through systems of numbered grids in the Walnut Tree Orchard series (1975 – 2014.)

George Rouy: The Bleed, Part II

Hauser & Wirth, Downtown Los Angeles, until 1 June 2025

British artist George Rouy’s first U.S. solo exhibition with the gallery, follows the artist’s recent London presentation. This ‘second chapter’ will feature all new work extending his exploration of human mass, multiplicity and movement. Rouy’s art gives form to a distinctive dynamism that characterizes key experiences of contemporary life—desire and vexation, the urge to connect frustrated by alienation—to address emotional extremities in a globalized, technologically-driven age. The exhibition takes its title from Rouy’s concept of ‘the bleed,’ the ways in which figure and void manifest and interact on the surface of his paintings, resulting in a physical seeping, bleeding and merging.

Fire Relief for Artists: A Benefit Exhibition

Louis Stern, West Hollywood, until Aug 16

Louis Stern Fine Arts has been a fixture in the Los Angeles art scene for over thirty years, and has been invested in the success and resilience of the community. In this spirit, the gallery has launched a benefit exhibition with all proceeds donated in their entirety to the LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund and the ADAA Relief Fund. Featuring works by Edith Bauman, Chris Collins, Gabriele Evertz, Laurie Fendrich. Kymber Holt, Heather Hutchison, Mokha Laget, Mark Leonard. Richard Neutra, Doug Ohlson, Jean-François Spricigo, John Vokoun, and Richard Wilson.

The Anansean world of Robert Colescott

BLUM, mid-city, until 17 May

For this exhibition of paintings and drawings by the late African American fine artist Robert Colescott, curated by Los Angeles-based artist Umar Rashid, who frames this presentation of work—ranging five decades—as an entry point into “the Anansean world of Robert Colescott,” a parallel universe that violates principles of social and natural order, blithely disrupting what once was and then reestablishing it on a new basis.

Line, Form, Qi: Calligraphic Art from the Fondation INK Collection

LACMA from 6 April until 19 October 2025

Line, Form, Qi is curated by Susanna Ferrell, Wynn Resorts Associate Curator of Chinese Art, and Wan Kong, The Mozhai Foundation Assistant Curator of Chinese Art, at LACMA. The exhibition examines experimental works by 34 modern and contemporary calligraphic artists including Fung Ming Chip, Gu Gan, Inoue Yūichi, Lee In, Henri Michaux, Nguyễn Quang Thắng, Qiu Zhijie, Tong Yang-Tze, Wang Dongling, Wei Ligang, and Xu Bing, among others. This is the second in a series of exhibitions of works from LACMA’s Fondation INK Collection, a 400-piece collection of contemporary art in the spirit of ink.

Zheng Chongbin: Golden State

LACMA until 4 January 2026

Also, running at LACMA, and curated by Ferrell, Zheng Chongbin: Golden State, spotlights artist Zheng Chongbin’s explorations of water, light, movement, and California’s natural landscape. This exhibition marks the artist’s largest solo presentation in the U.S. to date and the first major showcase of his work with colored pigments. Where previous presentations have contextualized his practice in the canon of Chinese ink painting alone, this exhibition situates Zheng as a distinctly Californian artist.

Robert Irwin in Los Angeles

Pace, mid-city, opening 5 April until 7 June 2025

Robert Irwin was a foundational figure in the California Light and Space movement, contributing to the arts in Southern California across painting, sculpture, and installation for nearly seven decades. This show sheds light on the most prolific and innovative period of his career.

This collection includes historically significant paintings and sculptures created by Irwin in the 1960s and 1970s—the years that would come to define the Light and Space movement. This includes a rare nine-foot-tall acrylic column that appears like a ripple in space—this sculpture is among the last physical objects that Irwin made before turning toward an entirely ephemeral and installation-based practice in the 1970s. Irwin first exhibited with Pace in 1966 and then mounted over 20 solo shows with the gallery during his lifetime.

Embracing Diasporic Art: Portraits of Joan Agajanian Quinn

ReflectSpace Gallery and PassageWay Gallery, Glendale, until 23 May 2025

As one of the most portrayed figures in contemporary art—painted by Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Hockney, and Ed Ruscha, among others — Joan Agajanian Quinn’s legacy as an arts advocate, journalist (West Coast editor of Interview magazine) and muse is featured in this body of work. Located inside the Glendale Central Library, this exhibition showcases 35 original portraits of Quinn, created by a diverse array of diasporic and immigrant artists who capture her enduring impact on the global art scene. Continuing into the PassageWay Gallery, the exhibition also offers an intimate look into Quinn’s world through personal snapshots with legendary artists.

Rachel Jones: Dark-Pivot

Regen Projects, 5 April until 10 May 2025

London-based artist Rachel Jones’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles with Regen features new paintings which pose fundamental questions about how the body–and traces of its movement–is comprehended differently when pushed beyond its figurative or abstract limits. Powerfully wielding negative space alongside color palettes and motifs drawn from cartoons, Jones recalibrates the psychic motor that drives our perception of bodily forms and traditional landscape painting, carving out new terrains between the real and the imaginary, while continuing her use of the mouth motif, for which she is well known. In her paintings, mouths are a cipher for the body and its psychological interior, grasping at the elusive or opaque qualities of one’s innermost thoughts and emotions. Six large-scale paintings also introduce brick walls, a powerful metaphor for solidity or rigidity that stands in contrast to the malleable complexity of the open mouths.

What remains behind by Helmut Lang

The Schindler House, West Hollywood, until 4 May 2025

Presented by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture this is Lang’s first solo institutional exhibition in Los Angeles at the historic Schindler House – the first slab-cast modernist home by architect Rudloph Schindler. The spare, minimalist setting provides a hallowed backdrop for a series of freestanding sculptures. Stating his preference for materials ‘with a past, elements with irreplaceable presence and with scars and memories of a former purpose,’ Lang’s work is dotted around the hallowed space with the powerful and ghostly presences of collective pasts and unknown futures, addresses the tensions between the public and private self.

Read the full review here

Portraiture Now: Iranian Contemporary

ADVOCARTSY, West Hollywood, until 26 April 2025

This expansive survey included the portraiture practices of 26 artists of Iranian origin. Each artist engages the genre through a unique lens, showcasing the evolution of portraiture from a historical and stylistic genre to a contemporary practice. This exhibition explores the possibilities and range of portraiture through each artist's interpretation of what a person-to-person connection has come to mean in today’s context. Artists include London-based Afsoonto to Oakland-based Ali Dadgar and many others from around the globe.

The Laying of Hands, Manyaku Mashilo's and Taama, Cheick Diallo

Southern Guild, Melrose Hill, until 3 May, 2025

Celebrating one year in Los Angeles, as the only South African gallery with a permanent U.S. presence, with two solo exhibitions from African artists Manyaku Mashilo and Cheick Diallo.

Mashilo’s a new body of large-scale paintings seen in the The Laying of Hands, is the artist first solo exhibit in the U.S. and second with the gallery, that explores the themes of matrilineal connection, ritual, and heritage.

Pioneering Malian designer, sculptor and architect, Cheick Diallo’s Taama is a major retrospective exhibition of functional design and his first solo outting in the U.S. Over the past three-decades, his crafted furniture and sculptural objects have redefined the possibilities for African design with their mix of conceptual ingenuity and centuries-old craftsmanship.

Desert X

Greater Palm Springs, Coachella Valley, 11 May 2025

For the fifth edition of the Desert X international art exhibition at open-air sites across the Coachella Valley, once again curated by Artistic Director Neville Wakefield and Co-curator Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas, the exhibition will reflect on the desert's deep time evolutions, challenging us to glean wisdom from its vast knowledge. Delving deeper into nonlinear narratives of time, it will form a space where ancestral wisdom intertwines and collides with contemporary visions for our collective future. New commissions by artists from around the world will expand upon issues related to indigenous futurism, design activism, colonial power asymmetries, and the role of emerging technologies in our contemporary society.

Already on view, as part of Modernism Week, The Living Pyramid, is a sculpture and environmental intervention by artist and philosopher Agnes Denes at Sunnylands Center & Gardends aka ‘Camp David of the West.’ As one of the most iconic forms of human civilization, Denes uses the pyramid in many of her works. In this case, it’s organic development of nature as it interacts with the structure, creating and cultivating a micro-society of people responsible for its construction, planting, and ongoing care, while addressing water conservation and philosophical questions relating to biological and geological time.

The exhibition is free and includes works ranging from U.S. artists Cannupa Hanska Luger from Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, and New Mexico to New York artist Sarah Meyohas and Alison Saar from Los Angeles. International talent includes Muhannad Shono from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Jose Dávila from Guadalajara, Mexico, and Kimsooja from Seoul, South Korea and Paris, France.

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.

Daisy Sheff and Joe Minter

Parker Gallery, Hancock Park, until 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, until 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

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

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.’

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.