On the occasion of the opening of ‘Keith Tyson. The Generative Universe’ at our Downtown Los Angeles gallery, please join us on Saturday 30 May at 11 am for the debut screening of the artist’s documentary, followed by a conversation with Keith Tyson and Curatorial Senior Director Ingrid Schaffner. 

This new documentary, taking its title from the exhibition, ‘The Generative Universe,’ explores the ideas, people, and processes that shape Tyson’s work. Spanning twelve chapters—from cosmology and ecology to chance and consciousness—the film offers a layered portrait of the artist’s evolving practice.  

Following the screening and talk, please join us in the Courtyard for our 10 Year Party, a celebration of our decade in Downtown Los Angeles. Enjoy complimentary biscuits and lemonade by Manuela, Salt & Straw ice cream, exhibition tours, family workshops, and a live salsa set by Sangre Nueva.

‘The Generative Universe’ runs for approximately 25 minutes. The program is free to attend, however, reservations are recommended. Click here to register.

About the exhibition 
British artist Keith Tyson’s first exhibition in the city since 2009. Spanning more than three decades of paintings, sculptures and mixed-media works, the exhibition emerges from Tyson’s foundational conviction that the universe operates as a single generative system—a constantly shifting network in which all forms arise, transform and dissolve. 
 
Originally trained as an engineer, Tyson was an early practitioner of generative art, often approaching creativity as the act of setting parameters within systems he set in motion, allowing a blend of chance, material behavior, mathematics and intuition to shape the outcome. A highlight of the exhibition is Tyson’s early-1990s Artmachine works, in which he programmed a device that generates prompts for him to execute by hand, shifting authorship away from the artist’s own preferences. Other works employ chemical processes, mathematical models, meditative painting, biological structures and handmade electronic devices—inviting viewers to consider the mysterious universal processes through which reality, and our consciousness within it, come into being. 
 
About Keith Tyson 
Keith Tyson was born in 1969 in Ulverston, UK, and lives and works between Oxfordshire and London. Tyson attended the Carlisle College of Art, UK, and received his MA in Alternative Practice from the University of Brighton, UK in 1993. Tyson became the 18th recipient of the Turner Prize in 2002. His work is held in the collections of the Tate Gallery, London, UK; Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art, Los Angeles CA; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; and the South London Gallery Collection, London, UK, amongst others. In May 2022, Thames & Hudson released ‘Iterations and Variations,’ a comprehensive monograph on the artist featuring 400 illustrations and contributions by Michael Archer, Matthew Collings, Ariane Koek, Mark Rappolt and Beatrix Ruf. From May to October 2025, Tyson’s largest solo exhibition to date was held at the Serlachius Museum in Mänttä, Finland. 
 
About Ingrid Schaffner 
Internationally admired as a curator, art critic, writer, and educator with nearly four decades of experience in the field of contemporary art, Schaffner is known for her generative and original scholarship focused on themes of archiving and collecting, photography, feminism, and alternate modernisms. Her 2013 exhibition ‘Jason Rhoades, Four Roads’ was the first American museum presentation of the sculptor’s work and was accompanied by a catalogue publication (Prestel); following its presentation at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, the exhibition traveled to Kunsthalle Bremen and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. Schaffner was the curator of the 57th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2018. where she presented major installations by El Anatsui, Alex Da Corte, Zoe Leonard, Postcommodity and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, among others. From 2020 to 2023, she was the curator at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.