California Light and Space (The 21st Century Version)

David Zwirner is pleased to announce California Light and Space (The 21st Century Version), a group exhibition organized by Helen Molesworth at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. Featuring a selection of artists who make up the city’s distinctive and vibrant arts scene, the presentation considers how the terroir of Los Angeles—to borrow a term from wine connoisseurship that connotes how a specific ecosystem or geography gives wine an indelible “sense of place”—affects the overarching concerns and tendencies of the work being produced there today. LA is frequently identified with the Light and Space artists of the 1960s and 1970s whose work was characterized by industrial materials, highly finished surfaces, and a preoccupation with perception. This show gathers a subsequent generation of artists working in a range of mediums, and suggests that they are also concerned with the specificity of the light and space conditions offered by LA, nestled as it is in a basin demarcated by the Santa Monica, Santa Ana, and San Gabriel Mountains and the Pacific Ocean.

As Molesworth states, like their predecessors, “The new LA artists are deeply embedded in the vernacular quality of the city. They are making work that couldn’t be made anywhere else but in LA. They are less interested in Hollywood and its spectacles than they are invested in the everyday handmade quality of East and South LA, paying close attention to how we live now—from what our homes look like, to LA’s famed magic hour.”