Many of the near-identical subjects of William Brickel’s Was It Ever Fair. at Michael Kohn Gallery are looking down or away, as though they’ve just heard something that made them blush; their robust cheekbones are sometimes touched by a little red.

William Brickel’s elongated, sometimes contorted, often intense figures, possess an ambiguous beauty that are bluntly modern, nod to 16th-century mannerist styling, and offer a whiff of Paul Cadmus, Lucian Freud or even Egon Schiele. Mostly though they hold your eye with their strong and distinctive presence, crackling with feeling, pulling you in with their mysterious sets and clothes in colors fit for a Prada moodboard.

Freud believed that human instinctive impulses come from subconscious desires, and that art and dreams are the products of transferred desires. In "Green Snake" (1993) directed by Tsui Hark, the use of color and scenery adds a avant-garde aesthetic to this erotic story: the lotus pond transformed by the white snake is often shrouded in mist; when the green snake appears in the pond, When he revealed his true form, all the lotus flowers in the pond flashed with faint will-o'-the-wisps.

In “Oscillating Womb,” Li Hei Di’s new solo show at Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, limbs, torsos, and fauna intermingle, fizzing and crackling in swirls of deep color and luminescent light. In a style that is neither figurative nor abstract, the Chinese, London-based artist captures the ephemerality of desire, encounter, and connection through painting.

In 1972, a year before Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro opened Womanhouse—a watershed feminist Gesamtkunstwerk that was installed inside a derelict Hollywood mansion—Martha Alf (1930–2019), a newly minted MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, had begun work on her so-called cylinder paintings, the subjects of which were toilet-paper rolls.

There is a certain feeling of catharsis present in the works of Ilana Savdie.  As I walked into her show, Radical Contractions, at the Whitney Museum of Art, and the ten-foot paintings towered colossally over me, it felt like my only option was to surrender to their fluorescent pools.

Ascending a dim, narrow staircase—sometimes navigating around artists carrying canvases—and through a weighty metal door, I enter the studio of Li Hei Di (b. 1997). By London standards, her studio feels spacious. Its walls play host to her expansive artworks, many yet unfinished. Ethereal figures appear submerged in shallow waters within these canvases but are only visible when I pause long enough to see them. The figures, bathed in a glow of soft fluorescent lights, are mythical and cinematic at once.

On a plaque at the Watts Towers Art Center, adjacent to the iconic spires built by Simon Rodia, is a quote by the institution’s late co-founder, the renowned artist Noah Purifoy: “Creativity can be an act of living, a way of life, and a formula for doing the right thing.” The phrase, as well as Purifoy himself, has inspired Acts of Living, the sixth iteration of the Hammer Museum’s contemporary art biennial, Made in L.A. — and the first since the UCLA building was expanded this year thanks to a capital campaign that counted Marcy Carsey and Darren Star among its top contributors.