Join us to celebrate the opening of our exhibitions, ‘Luchita Hurtado. Yo Soy’ and ‘James Jarvaise & Henry Taylor. Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked’ at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles.

The Education Lab: ‘Mentoring Moments’ will provide a space to explore the transformative power of mentors and teachers, responding to the special relationship between Henry Taylor and his mentor James Jarvaise.

The galleries and Education Lab will be open from 7 – 9 pm with music by DJ XL Middleton and cash bars and food for purchase in the courtyard by Manuela, the gallery‘s onsite restaurant.

Entry is free. Please register in advance so we can anticipate visitor numbers.

About ‘Luchita Hurtado. Yo Soy’
Over the course of her eight-decade career, Venezuelan-born, Los Angeles-based artist Luchita Hurtado (1920 – 2020) committed to a lifelong journey of personal and artistic evolution defined by ceaseless experimentation. Though personally connected to a vast network of internationally renowned artists and intellectuals—including Mexican muralists, Surrealists, members of the Dynaton movement, feminists and artists in the Chicano/Latino art scene—Hurtado remained an independent and largely private, but highly prolific, creator.

Opening in June, ‘Yo Soy’ (‘I Am’) will be Hurtado’s first exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles. Including never-before-shown works, this presentation will bring together paintings and drawings from a pivotal moment in the artist’s evolution: Inspired by the surge of feminist activism in LA, Hurtado held her first solo exhibition at the Woman’s Building in 1974, debuting her Linear Language series of expressive, geometric word paintings. In works that were cut up and meticulously resewn, she shared her exploration of pattern, mysticism, the earth and the cosmos.

Accompanying ‘Yo Soy’ will be a selection from the Luchita Hurtado archive, including original exhibition and artwork documentation, as well as ephemera from organizations such as the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists, Womanspace and the Woman’s Building.

About ‘James Jarvaise & Henry Taylor. Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked’
‘Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked’ is the first exhibition to put the work of Henry Taylor in dialogue with that of his teacher James Jarvaise. Composed along loosely thematic lines and consisting largely of paintings, this major installation will span the 1950s to the present, with new works created especially for the show by Taylor, whose interest in landscape, alongside the figure, will be freshly explored.

A California regionalist, who taught generations of students at schools in and around Los Angeles, James Jarvaise (1924 – 2015) gained national acclaim when his abstract landscape paintings were featured in the historic 1959 exhibition ‘Sixteen Americans’ at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. One of today’s most celebrated painters, Henry Taylor credits Jarvaise with having been the first to recognize his talents, as a community college student in the early 1980s: it was Jarvaise who insisted that he take himself seriously as an artist. Taylor accordingly enrolled at CalArts but continued to bring his work to Jarvaise for his valued critiques.

This is the first exhibition of Taylor’s work to take place at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles and represents an idea he has long carried: to pay homage to the artist James Jarvaise who saw something special in him.

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Photographs will be taken at this event for use on the Hauser & Wirth website, social media and in other marketing materials.