CURRENT EXHIBITION

Fritz Chesnut, Unitled, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 82 x 60 inches

Painting All Together (Painting as Is IV)
Curated by Heidi Hahn and Tim Wilson
August 16 – September 27, 2025

Heather Brown
Maddie Butler
Fritz Chesnut
Tomory Dodge
Victoria Fu
Morteza Khakshoor
Tahnee Lonsdale
Caitlin MacQueen
Allison Miller
Aryana Minai
Amir Nikravan
Matt Rich
Ry Rocklen
Allison Schulnik
Jeffrey Stuker
Evan Whale
Andy Woll
Erin Wright
Sung Jik Yang
Liat Yossifor

In collaboration with Heidi Hahn and Tim Wilson, Michael Kohn Gallery is thrilled to present Painting All Together. The group exhibition extends the ongoing dialogue of Painting as Is—a conversation grounded in the belief that painting remains a vital, self-reflexive medium for negotiating material, image, and subjectivity. This fourth installment, centered on artists living and working in Los Angeles, unfolds across five conceptual threads: inscription, object-hood, recollection, event, and projection. These frameworks are neither fixed nor exhaustive; they offer one lens among many for understanding how painting absorbs history while generating new forms and processes. The artists gathered here might belong to multiple modes at once, just as other possible frameworks—painting as language, painting as model, and, of course, painting as is, remain latent within the work. Emerging from a city shaped by climate volatility and pandemic aftermath, the exhibition casts painting as a shared language of persistence: a way of marking time, holding memory, and imagining community. Rather than a prescriptive program, this show asks what it means to paint in proximity; to material, to history, and to each other. Here, painting remains contingent—an ongoing negotiation between presence, perception, and the tactile demands of a world in flux. 

Painting as Inscription
Painting is a durational act—its surfaces bear the imprint of time and touch. In Liat Yossifor’s scored monochromes, layers scraped to near erasure collapse figuration and abstraction, preserving gestures as inscribed memory. Where Yossifor carves inward, Andy Woll builds outward, using a recurrent mountain motif as a scaffold for chromatic improvisation, thick impasto turning repetition into a meditation on time. At the edge of painting and relief, Aryana Minai presses pigment into handmade paper, recalling ruin and ritual, materializing cultural memory through acts of reconstitution and repair. By contrast, Allison Schulnik renders inscription in excess, piling paint into melting anatomies where figure and ground dissolve in a choreography of decay. Within these works, inscription emerges through incision, accumulation, and compression—negotiating material resistance to envision painting not as representation but as something marked, built, and endured.

Painting as Object 

Painting resists its limits—rejecting flatness and pictorial stability for constructed, sculptural form. Beneath industrial processes, Amir Nikravan’s buried drawings harden into matte panels that oscillate between glyph and minimalist object, layering traces of ornament, identity, and erasure beneath restraint. Unlike Nikravan’s smooth compression, Ry Rocklen sanctifies the mundane by casting paper towels, bread, and pizza crust into ceramic grids, turning disposable matter into ritualized monuments of daily life. Pushing object-hood toward fragility, Maddie Butler assembles obsolete printer trays and broken screens into architectures that haunt painting with the ruins of an image economy. Where Butler works with technological detritus, Evan Whale churns the density of Los Angeles into a photochemical stew, layering fragments through repetition and variation until they verge on painting—images reimagined as mutable objects echoing the physicality of what they depict. Across these varied strategies, painting becomes infrastructural—a framework that holds in order to be held. In each, surface is structure, and image is inseparable from the material conditions that shape it. 

Painting as Recollection

Painting unfolds within a space of memory—where material and image trace the contours of loss and return. Built through slow revision and mediated fragments; film stills, music videos, personal recollections, Caitlin MacQueen’s canvases blur figures and interiors into atmospheric fields where presence falters and ambiguities becomes intimate. If MacQueen courts ambiguity, Sung Jik Yang seeks ephemerality, dissolving petals into tonal haze to transform still life into a fleeting interval rather than a fixed tableau. Where Yang’s temporality is intimate and hushed, Tahnee Lonsdale amplifies time into symbolic architecture, pressing totemic silhouettes against luminous fields to stage grief and faith as interlocking forces. Recollection splinters into archetype in Morteza Khakshoor’s glowing male figures, where myth and the mundane collide in dreamlike scenes drawn from obsessive sketching and cinematic memory, their gestures shifting between menace and tenderness. Amid the figures these artists traverse, memory takes on material weight—built from layers, erasures, and ghostly forms. 

Painting as Event
Painting in a mode of instability—where gesture and process create forms in flux. Allison Miller builds paintings through accumulation and removal, tacking on shapes, scraping them back, folding in dirt and pencil, to produce surfaces that feel blunt yet precariously open. Pouring and manipulating acrylic and enamel across flat planes, Fritz Chesnut invokes waves, strata, and tectonics through gravity and control, dissolving the cosmic and the intimate by translating vast natural processes into sensual, optical events. Where Chesnut invokes geological slowness, Tomory Dodge accelerates, fracturing brushwork into a chromatic breakdown, dramatizing the instability of perception itself. Heather Brown pushes improvisation further, layering lines and shapes into structures that seem on the verge of collapse, animated by a restless, provisional energy. Through these various methods, painting emerges as an unfolding event—temporal, unstable, and insistently alive. 

Painting as Projection 

Painting reframed—through the lens of simulation, projection, and mediated perception. In a collaborative work, Victoria Fu and Matt Rich splice dye-printed fabrics and sewn canvas into hybrid forms that oscillate between tactile object and immaterial screen, asserting abstraction’s ability to inhabit both realms. Where this collaboration externalizes fragmentation, Fu’s solo works internalize it, layering photographic shards and digital effects into elastic fields that mimic painting’s haptic rhythms while remaining resolutely virtual. Erin Wright redirects trompe-l’œil toward design’s quiet authority, depicting cabinets with CAD-like exactitude, their banal objects poised between schematic and sensual. Together, these practices reframe painting as interface: a mutable skin where touch meets transmission, where material seduction and digital saturation become strange entanglements rather than opposites. 

 

ABOUT THE CURATORS

Heidi Hahn creates introspective paintings that engage with the female body. Her sumptuously atmospheric and layered application of paint, in conversation with aesthetic traditions, draw the viewer into a psychological space that evokes our attachment to the female form and how that is processed through both a traditional and a contemporary reading. Gestural, fluid, and frequently spectral, Hahn’s works reframe and re-contextualize her subjects, exploring the ambiguous and shifting boundaries between public and private selves. Hahn received her M.F.A. from Yale University in 2014, and was a Professor of Painting and Drawing at Alfred University, NY. She has been the recipient of several awards, residencies, and fellowships, including the Jerome Foundation Grant, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Residency, Madison, ME; and the Fine Arts Work Center Residency, Provincetown, MA, among others. Her work has been collected by Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NL; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; and the Kadist Foundation, Paris, France. Her work has also been reviewed in numerous publications, including The New York Times and Art in America. 

Tim Wilson creates modestly scaled paintings that draw on pre-modernist modes of representation, holding them up as necessary models for seeing today. Echoes of Vermeer, Fantin-Latour, and Vuillard intermingle with the luminous palette of screens, television, and film. Through quiet motifs—stairways, foyers, bedside tables—these works slow perception, creating intimate spaces for contemplation, a meditative loop where history and meaning converge. Wilson received his M.F.A. from Yale University in 2013. He has presented solo exhibitions at Nathalie Karg Gallery in New York, Long Story Short in Paris, and Fahrenheit Madrid in Madrid. His work has appeared in group exhibitions at JDJ, Candice Madey, Jack Hanely, and Harper’s in New York, Cob Gallery and Taymour Grahne Projects in London, and Kadel Willborn in Düsseldorf, among others. Wilson has participated in residencies at The Lighthouse Works, LMCC Process Space, and Shandanken Projects, and his work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New Criterion, Juxtapoz, and The New York Times.


Sharon Ellis, Recent Paintings
June 14 - August 9, 2025

Gallery 1

40th Anniversary Exhibition
February 19 - April 10, 2025

Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Shiwen Wang
The river returns nothing of what it takes
October 26 – December 21, 2024

Gallery 1 & 2

Heidi Hahn,
NOT YOUR WOMAN
April 25 – June 11, 2025

Gallery 1 & 2

Hadi Alijani, The Mutilated Gaze
November 9 – December 21, 2024

Gallery 3

Lita Albuquerque, Earth Skin

September 12 - October 19, 2024
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Chiffon Thomas, Progeny

June 20 - August 17, 2024
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

William Brickel, Was It Ever Fair.

January 20 - March 2, 2024
Gallery 1 & 2

Rosa Loy, Glade

March 9 - April 20, 2024
Gallery 1 & 2

Siji Krishnan, Liminal Spaces

April 26 - June 8, 2024
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Li Hei Di, Oscillating Womb

November 2, 2023 - January 6, 2024
Gallery 1 & 2

Faris Heizer, These days 

November 2, 2023 - January 6, 2024
Gallery 3

COMPOSITION

September 15 - October 21, 2023
Gallery 1 & 2

Salomon Emquies, Complex Systems

July 22 - September 1, 2023
Gallery 3

Martha Alf, Opposites and Contradictions

June 24 - August 26, 2023
Gallery 1 & 2

Ricardo Cabret, Un Nuevo Manglar

May 6 - June 17, 2023
Gallery 1 & 2

Nir Hod, 100 Years Is Not Enough

March 18 - April 29, 2023
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Alicia Adamerovich, This is the time of the hour

January 28 - March 11, 2023
Gallery 1 & 2

Jinbin Chen, Returnees

November 5, 2022 - January 14, 2023
Gallery 3

Alia Ahmad, A Meadow ... from a dream

November 5, 2022 - January 14, 2023
Gallery 1 & 2

Sharon Ellis, New Works on Paper

September 24 - October 29, 2022
Gallery 1

Lita Albuquerque, Project Space

September 24 - October 29, 2022
Gallery 2

Lyrical Cool: A Tribute to Shirley Berman

July 16 - September 10, 2022
Gallery 1 & 2

REPORT: A FILM BY BRUCE CONNER

April 20 - June 18, 2022
Gallery 1

Heidi Hahn, Soft Joy

February 19 - April 16, 2022
Gallery 1 & 2

Ilana Savdie, Entrañadas

November 6, 2021 - February 3, 2022
Gallery 1 & 2

Ed Moses, Edges, Magmas and Waterfalls

September 18 - October 30, 2021
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

101 Years of Still Life: 1920-Present

August 7 - September 11, 2021
Gallery 1 & 2

Joe Goode, 20 Years Later

June 18 - August 7, 2021
Gallery 3

William Brickel, I’d Tell You If I Could

June 11 - July 31, 2021
Gallery 1 & 2

Chiffon Thomas, Antithesis

April 9 - May 21, 2021
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Kate Barbee, Feral Flora

February 5 - March 25, 2021
Gallery 1 & 2

Caroline Kent, A Sudden Appearance of the Sun

November 13, 2020 - January 28, 2021
Gallery 1

Sophia Narrett, Soul Kiss

November 13, 2020 - January 28, 2021
Gallery 2

myselves, Curated by Joshua Friedman

September 11 - November 4, 2020
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Nir Hod, The Life We Left Behind

July 16 - September 2, 2020
Gallery 1 & 2

Jellyfish, Curated by Samantha Glaser-Weiss

January 31 - March 13, 2020
Gallery 1 & 2

Octavio Abúndez, Facts, contradictions, puzzles…

November 9, 2019 - January 16, 2020
Gallery 1 & 2

Enrique Martínez Celaya, The Tears of Things

September 13 - November 1, 2019
Gallery 1 & 2

María Berrío, A Cloud’s Roots

June 1 - August 30, 2019
Gallery 1 & 2

Heidi Hahn, Burn Out in Shredded Heaven

April 6 - May 23, 2019
Gallery 1

Jarvis Boyland, On Hold:

April 6 - May 23, 2019
Gallery 2

Gonzalo Lebrija, Veladuras Nocturnas

January 19 - March 23, 2019
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Rosa Loy, So Near And Yet So Far

November 9, 2018 - January 9, 2019
Gallery 1 & 2

Tony Berlant, Fast Forward

September 22 - November 3, 2019
Gallery 1 & 2

Jess, Secret Compartments

July 21 - September 7, 2019
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Sheets

June 1 - July 14, 2018
Gallery 1 & 2

Mark Innerst, New Paintings

April 6 - May 24, 2018
Gallery 1 & 2

Gesture | Form | Pop | Process

February 27 - March 29, 2018
Gallery 1 & 2

Engender

November 11, 2017 - January 27, 2018
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Chingaderas Sofisticadas

September 16 - November 4, 2017
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Dennis Hopper, The Lost Album

July 8 - September 1, 2017
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Dean Byington, Theory of Machines

May 19 - June 30, 2017
Gallery 1 & 2

Joe Goode, Old Ideas with New Solutions

March 23 - May 13, 2017
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Bruce Conner, LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS

February 9 - March 15, 2017
Gallery 1

Bruce Conner, A MOVIE

November 11, 2016 - February 8, 2017
Gallery 1

John Altoon, Works from the Estate

September 16 - October 29, 2016
Gallery 1 & 2

Ori Gersht, Floating World

July 9 - September 10, 2016
Gallery 1 & 2

Wallace Berman, American Aleph

May 6 - June 25, 2016
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Ryan McGinness, #metadata

March 19 - April 15, 2016
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Dean Levin, XTC

January 16 - February 27, 2016
Gallery 2 & 3

Lita Albuquerque, Embodiment

January 9 - February 27, 2016
Gallery 1

Simmons & Burke, Dutch Masters

November 6 - December 19, 2015
Gallery 1

Object/Space: Robert Ryman + Giorgio Morandi

September 19 - October 31, 2015
Gallery 1

The West Coast Avant-Garde, 1950 - Present

July 18 - September 4, 2015
Gallery 1 & 2

Jess’s Didactic Nickelodeon

June 6 - July 10, 2015
Gallery 3

William Monk, The Cloud is Growing in the Trees

May 29 - July 10, 2015
Gallery 1 & 2

Camille Rose Garcia, Mirror, Black Mirror

April 25 - May 20, 2015
Gallery 3

Tom LaDuke, Candles and Lasers

April 11 - May 20, 2015
Gallery 1 & 2

LAND, AIR, SEE

February 21 - April 2, 2015
Gallery 1 & 2

Troika, Cartography of Control

January 10 - February 12, 2015
Gallery 1 & 2

Eddie Martinez, Nomader

September 12 - October 25, 2014
Gallery 1 & 2

Lita Albuquerque, Light Carries Information

November 15 - December 20, 2014
Gallery 2

Joe Goode, Flat Screen Nature

July 12 - August 29, 2014
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Bruce Conner, CROSSROADS & WORKS ON PAPER

November 8 - December 20, 2014
Gallery 1 & 3

Mark Ryden, The Gay 90s West

May 3 - June 28, 2014
Gallery 1, 2 & 3