Titled for and inspired by the 1991 film beloved for its playfully satiric and unabashedly romantic foray into the land of Los Angeles swimming pools, Hollywood ‘machers,’ earthquakes, freeways and extravagant sunsets, Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood will present the group exhibition L.A. Story. Co-organized by Ingrid Schaffner, senior curatorial director, and Mike Davis, senior director, in dialogue with the film’s writer and star Steve Martin, this exhibition brings together a cross-generational array of works by artists whose depictions of Los Angeles reverberate with the movie’s celebration of a place unlike any other.
The movie L.A. Story endures as Martin’s love letter to Los Angeles, where he lived for many years and continues to work on projects today. Fittingly, Hauser & Wirth’s exhibition suggests a loosely cinematic narrative echoing that of the film in which Martin plays ‘wacky weekend weatherman’ Harris K. Telemacher, a TV personality searching for love and the meaning of life amid LA’s continuous sprawl. Famously clichéd as devoid of both culture and even weather itself, the Los Angeles that Harris traverses is nevertheless replete with wonders. These include bona fide art treasures he revels in so that we the film’s viewers may, too: When Harris roller-skates through the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the petals of painted Van Gogh sunflowers wave as he passes; when he expounds on the sensual figurative elements, he alone detects in a definitively abstract red Color Field painting by Helen Frankenthaler, that we can almost see them ourselves.
“I’m thrilled that ‘L.A. Story’ is the focus of so many wonderful artists and a wonderful gallery, Hauser & Wirth, which is just across the street from the Troubadour, where I first stepped foot on Santa Monica Blvd., which began my L.A. sojourn,” says Steve Martin.
Visitors to the gallery will sense another of the many subplots of the exhibition in the mix of artists whose works are on view. Kevin Appel, Hilary Pecis, Jennifer Rochlin, Henry Taylor and Lesley Vance and others constitute a cohort creating new L.A. stories today, contributing to the profile of a city that has achieved the reputation of a global contemporary art epicenter since the making of the movie L.A. Story at the dawn of the 1990s.
Will you be checking out Hauser & Wirth’s new exhibition L.A. Story?
