Winter Exhibitions in LA 2026

The title of the exhibition loosely translates as The Fruits of My Soul, and that title is actually a very good place to start, because everything in this show feels like something that has been slowly grown, carried, and protected before being shared. Portia's paintings come directly from her inner world, especially her dreams. In her culture, dreams are meaningful, they're shared, remembered, and sometimes understood as messages about life, the future, or the spirit world. And for the artist, painting is a way of recording those dreams before they disappear. Her work is shaped by several influences. She draws from Shona spiritual traditions, her Christian faith, and her own lived experience as a woman, a mother, and a daughter. The show focuses strongly on the maternal and matriarchal world. The works acknowledge the emotional labor of protecting others, especially in a world that often feels unsafe. The memory of her grandmother encouraged the sharing and interpretation of her dreams. That passing deeply affected this body of work, and you can feel it in the tenderness and intensity of the paintings. Technically, she combines painting and printmaking. She uses boutique and block printing techniques that involve wax resist along with oil sticks and acrylic paint. Layers are applied, scraped back, and reworked, creating surfaces that feel dense and almost woven together. The artist has spoken about painting as a form of communication with a higher power, and about leaving space for something beyond herself to enter the work. These works can feel overwhelming. There's so much color, movement, and texture, but that sensation is intentional. Standing in front of these paintings, you're meant to feel slightly overwhelmed, seduced, and unsettled, the same way we often feel moving through the contemporary world. Flora is exploring what happens when imagery starts to pile up across history, culture, and the present, and what it feels like to be completely surrounded by it. She's talked about using structure as a way to hold the canvas. The columns in the space help establish a rhythm, giving the paintings a framework so all that movement doesn't become overwhelming. The title of the exhibition comes from an ancient Greco-Roman festival, honoring the god of wine. These celebrations were associated with indulgence, chaos, pleasure, and losing oneself in the crowd. The artist uses that idea as a way to think about our own time, not just partying or decadence in a historical sense, but the modern experience of being flooded with images, advertisements, screens, and cultural noise. She's very aware that most of us don't encounter art history directly anymore. We see it on screens, in cropped images, filtered photos, or quick scrolls online. These works often feel slightly glitched. There's no single focal point telling you where to look. Your eye keeps moving, almost the way it does when you're scrolling endlessly through images. Flora uses the pleasure of paint, color, texture, movement, to talk about how easily meaning can tip into excess, and how beauty can become unstable when there's simply too much of it. This show is about how memory lives in spaces, objects, and bodies. It asks how much of our family history we carry with us, even when we don't fully understand it. The artist was born in Germany to a Greek immigrant family, and much of his work grows out of that in-between experience. The exhibition title, Your Tears Will Dry, comes from a phrase his grandmother used to repeat. It speaks to endurance, to learning how to move forward, even when things are difficult. That idea of inherited resilience anchors the entire show. Many of the figures you see here are members of his family. His grandmother appears more than once, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. But these aren't straightforward portraits. His relatives stand in for broader experiences, especially those of immigrant families across generations. The artist combines traditional painting with collage and transfer techniques. Images are printed and chemically transferred into the canvas, so they become part of the surface rather than sitting on top of it. The show suggests to us that identity isn't fixed to one country or one moment, but built slowly from fragments, repetitions, and care passed down over time. Walking into the gallery, we're met by a painting called Life as a Memory. It's an image of two figures walking together. The couple is there, but emotionally. They feel distant. For the artist, painting is never just about beauty. There's always an emotional cost, a trace of pain embedded in the act of making and remembering. These paintings feel lush, romantic, even idyllic. You're surrounded by flowers, water, shimmering surfaces, paintings that seem to glow and shift as you move through the room. But the longer you spend here, the more you realize it's about what beauty hides. The title of the show comes from Oscar Wilde's novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, a story about youth, vanity, and the desire to stay perfect forever. The artist borrows that idea and translates it into landscapes and gardens. Instead of a portrait, we're looking at nature. Instead of a face, we're looking at flowers, water, and reflections. Many of these works come from a longer series he began after spending time near a lake in Connecticut. That period of isolation and observation changed how he thought about time. He realized that even a lifetime, even a hundred years, isn't enough to fully absorb the experience of being alive. With new objectivity, the artist turns outward. Andy's spoken about becoming uncomfortable with the idea of painting as purely expressive or Rather than using painting to explore his own internal states, he wanted to look at other people to treat the act of observation itself as the subject. These paintings are his attempt to see others as they are, without storytelling, without projection. Most of the figures in the show aren't looking at us. Their eyes are turned away, lowered, or closed off. It creates a subtle but powerful effect. Instead of performing for the viewer, these people seem absorbed in their own inner lives. Technically, these works are oil paintings on linen, built slowly in layers. Andy is meticulous about preparation and surface, and he works with rough brushes rather than delicate ones. Color plays an especially interesting role here. The artist has spoken openly about being colorblind, which forces him to approach color with extra care. In this show, the artist isn't trying to impress or explain. He's looking carefully and letting the work hold its own. And in a moment where images are fast, loud, and endlessly reproduced, that kind of attention feels rare. Thank you for joining me. I'll see you again.