13ThingsLA: May 28

Thresholds for your art calendar

Wendell Gladstone, Rock With You, 2025. Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 in (Courtesy of Nazarian Curcio)

Your go-to weekly guide to the best art in Los Angeles. In this edition: All the liminality and surrealism that’s fit to print! Please enjoy a strange and wonderful exhibition at The Landing, reviewed; and a flurry of new shows along a continuum of thresholds to surrealism opening at Nazarian Curcio, Albertz Benda, Sprüth Magers, Karma, CalState LA, Track 16, KP Projects, Wilding Cran, and CLEARING. Plus it’s Bergamot Station’s all-campus open house, a meaningful chat with the Photographic Arts Council, and The Armory’s annual benefit auction party.

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Feature

Wendell Gladstone, Passion Premonition, 2025. Acrylic on canvas, 59 x 71 in (Courtesy of Nazarian Curcio)

Wendell Gladstone: Lover’s Knot, and JJ Manford: Jacaranda June open Saturday, May 31, 5-7pm at Nazarian Curcio. The pale figures in Gladstone’s paintings enact narrative tableaux of therapy-session metaphors and perversions of the balcony scene, giving desire that is both devotional and aggressive in love triangles riddled with sexual tension and sultry, eccentric undercurrents. Yet somehow the architectural settings are the most mesmerizing aspects—serpentine paths the eye takes across balconies and windows; the glossy pixels of bricks and tiles; curling tendrils, tangled roots, and iron filigrees mingling with the figures’ tresses; and other, expressively mannerist exaggerations. All of it done in a curious palette of peach and peashoot, feeling translucent and also dangerous somehow, both breezy and anxious. In the main gallery, large-scale oil stick works by JJ Manford render iconic pieces of architecture and design within well-loved and lived-in interiors that speak to the optical charm and sun-drenched warmth of life’s all-over jumble that happens even when your house is basically a museum. On view in Hollywood through June 28; nazariancurcio.com. —SND

JJ Manford, Frank Gehry's Wosk Residence with Niki de Saint Phalle and Betty Parsons, 2025. Oil stick, oil pastel, and flashe on burlap over canvas, 78 x 120 in (Courtesy of Nazarian Curcio)

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