The 12 best art galleries in Los Angeles

Karma is the gallery other galleries watch. Brendan Dugan started it in New York in 2011 as a bookshop and publisher, and it grew into a gallery with an unusual double program: painters in their prime, among them Reggie Burrows Hodges, Woody De Othello, Ann Craven, Maja Ruznic, Nicolas Party and Jonas Wood, and older or overlooked artists whose reputations it has remade, from Gertrude Abercrombie, Milton Avery and Hughie Lee-Smith to Thaddeus Mosley, Peter Bradley, Manoucher Yektai and the Los Angeles painter Norman Zammitt. Its West Hollywood gallery, on Santa Monica Boulevard a few blocks from Matthew Marks, has been showing since the early 2020s, with a bookstore of Karma’s own publications; the gallery also has spaces in Chelsea and in Thomaston, Maine.

Two shows share the gallery until October 24: Randy Wray’s Hothouse, thick, burnished abstract paintings in earthy greens that he worked on over two years, and the São Paulo painter Felipe Suzuki’s first solo show with Karma, five quiet still lifes painted from memory. Ann Craven’s moon paintings follow from October 29, and the Getty Center opens an exhibition of Hodges on October 20.

David Kordansky is the Los Angeles gallery that became an international one without leaving. He opened in Chinatown in 2003, moved to Culver City in 2008 and in 2014 to Mid-City, just off La Brea Avenue, where the gallery now fills a compound of more than 20,000 square feet designed by Kulapat Yantrasast’s firm wHY, with two large exhibition spaces and a garden; a New York gallery followed in 2022. Many of the artists Kordansky showed early are now among the most sought after anywhere: Rashid Johnson, Jonas Wood, Mary Weatherford, Lauren Halsey, Huma Bhabha, Tala Madani, Hilary Pecis, Lucy Bull, Derek Fordjour, Shara Hughes and Sayre Gomez, with Sam Gilliam, Fred Eversley, Betty Woodman, Doyle Lane, Keith Sonnier and Tom of Finland on the historical side.

The two galleries usually hold two shows at once. Until October 24 they are Madani’s Control X, new paintings and animations, including Alphabet City, her longest film yet, and Sonnier’s Inside Light, his earliest neon works, from 1968 to 1970, an expanded version of a show first seen at the New York gallery.

Nothing changed the Los Angeles gallery map as much as Hauser & Wirth’s arrival in 2016. The gallery, founded in Zurich in 1992 by Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth and Ursula Hauser, restored the Globe Mills complex in the Arts District, a former flour mill of about 100,000 square feet with buildings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and filled it with museum-scale galleries, a bookshop, a garden and the restaurant Manuela. It is the one gallery in the city that people visit as they would a museum, and the rare one open on Sundays. The roster includes Mark Bradford, Paul McCarthy and Henry Taylor, all of Los Angeles, with Rashid Johnson, Lorna Simpson, George Condo, Roni Horn, Pipilotti Rist, Glenn Ligon and the estates of Louise Bourgeois, Philip Guston, David Smith and Jack Whitten.

Downtown has two long-running shows this season: Ligon’s Coloring Book paintings, together for the first time in more than twenty-five years, and Whitten’s paintings and works on paper of the 1980s; both run into January. The second space, Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood, opened in 2023 in a 1931 Spanish Colonial Revival car showroom converted by Selldorf Architects, and is showing David Smith’s spray paintings until January 16.

Regen Projects is the gallery that taught Los Angeles what a serious contemporary program looks like. Stuart Regen and Shaun Caley Regen opened it in West Hollywood in 1989; Shaun Caley Regen has run it since Stuart Regen’s death in 1998, and in 2012 moved it to a building by the Los Angeles architect Michael Maltzan at Santa Monica Boulevard and Highland Avenue, the first of the big galleries in what is now Hollywood’s gallery district. It has never opened anywhere else. Its artists include Catherine Opie, Doug Aitken, Matthew Barney, Raymond Pettibon, Liz Larner, Toba Khedoori, Wolfgang Tillmans, Anish Kapoor, Marilyn Minter, Gillian Wearing, Walead Beshty, Kevin Beasley and Andrea Zittel, with the estates of Dan Graham, Lawrence Weiner and Silke Otto-Knapp.

Until October 24 the main gallery has Elliott Hundley’s Book of Sand, his seventh show here, paintings, sculptures and tapestries named for the Borges story of a book without end, and the viewing rooms have watercolors by Otto-Knapp, who was professor of painting at UCLA and died in 2022, many of them shown for the first time. Sable Elyse Smith opens on November 6.

Matthew Marks founded his gallery in New York in 1991 and came to Los Angeles in 2012, with a building that is itself one of the city’s works of art: a windowless white stucco box on Orange Grove Avenue, designed by Peter Zellner, with a forty-foot sculpture by Ellsworth Kelly set across its facade. It opened with a Kelly show, and a second space is around the corner at 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard. The gallery’s list is short and close to canonical: Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Gober, Vija Celmins, Charles Ray, Martin Puryear, Katharina Fritsch, Thomas Demand, Simone Leigh, Laura Owens, Alex Da Corte, Leidy Churchman, Trisha Donnelly and Vincent Fecteau, with Ken Price, Ron Nagle and Anne Truitt.

Both spaces are given to Thomas Demand until November 7: seventeen new photographs, most of them of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century models for opera and ballet sets that he found in museums in Vienna, Monaco and Munich, with a few of his own paper constructions printed directly onto copper.

David Zwirner opened in Los Angeles in 2023, thirty years after his first gallery in SoHo, and chose a block of Western Avenue in East Hollywood that the art world has since learned to call Melrose Hill. Two renovated storefronts came first, at 612 and 616; in May 2024 the gallery added a new three-story building at 606, designed by Selldorf Architects, with a terrace that looks at the Hollywood sign and a bookshop for the best publishing program in the trade. The artists are the New York gallery’s: Yayoi Kusama, Kerry James Marshall, Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans, Gerhard Richter, Wolfgang Tillmans, Lisa Yuskavage and Thomas Ruff, the estates of Ruth Asawa, Alice Neel, Joan Mitchell, Dan Flavin and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and three with deep roots in Los Angeles, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Barbara Kruger and the late Noah Davis.

Until October 31 the main building has more than 130 photographs by Roy DeCarava, the largest showing of the sound i saw since 1983, with a listening room next door, and the first California exhibition of the Brazilian painter Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato. Ruff’s In Series, 1979–2024 opens on November 13.

Monika Sprüth opened her gallery in Cologne in 1983 and Philomene Magers hers in Bonn in 1991; they merged in 1998 and built one of Europe’s most respected programs, with galleries in Berlin, London and New York. Los Angeles came in 2016, in a two-story modernist building by William Pereira’s firm on Wilshire Boulevard, directly across from LACMA. The move made sense, because so many of the gallery’s artists live or lived here: John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Ed Ruscha, Sterling Ruby and Analia Saban, alongside Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Louise Lawler, Rosemarie Trockel, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Demand, George Condo, Anne Imhof, Arthur Jafa and Kara Walker.

The gallery opened on Wilshire with Baldessari, and ten years on it returns to him: Sculptures, through December 19, gathers his three-dimensional work from the mid-1990s to 2018, including Beethoven’s Trumpet (with Ear), which plays the late string quartets when spoken to. George Condo follows in January. With LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries across the street, the two make one visit.

Pace, founded by Arne Glimcher in Boston in 1960, came to Los Angeles in 2022 by joining with Kayne Griffin, the gallery that had built one of the city’s best spaces on South La Brea Avenue: 15,000 square feet on the site of a 1940s auto showroom, with a courtyard and a permanent James Turrell Skyspace. The building suits a gallery whose history is bound up with California Light and Space: Robert Irwin, James Turrell and Mary Corse are all Pace artists, as are David Hockney, Kiki Smith, Tara Donovan, Lee Ufan and Richard Tuttle, with the estates of Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, Mark Rothko and Jean Dubuffet and the Calder Foundation.

Through December 23 the gallery has David Lynch: LA, the first presentation of Lynch’s work in his home city since his death in 2025: five series of photographs made between 1979 and 2008, from women’s faces wreathed in smoke to pictures of the city’s buildings. Pace’s Kiki Smith show opens on October 30 at Jeffrey Deitch, which presents it jointly.

Nicholas Logsdail founded Lisson in London in 1967, and the gallery introduced Minimal and Conceptual art to Britain before building a roster that runs from Anish Kapoor, Tony Cragg, Richard Long and Julian Opie to Marina Abramović, Ai Weiwei, Lee Ufan, Sean Scully, Hiroshi Sugimoto, John Akomfrah, Olga de Amaral and Carmen Herrera, with the estates of Hélio Oiticica and Mira Schendel. It opened in New York in 2016, in Shanghai in 2019 and in Los Angeles in April 2023, in a two-story industrial building with bow-truss ceilings on Sycamore Avenue that had been a nightclub.

The Los Angeles program has made a point of artists the West Coast knows better than the East, Kelly Akashi and Oliver Lee Jackson among them. Jackson’s Form Follows Feeling, his first show here with the gallery, runs to November 7: paintings from several decades with a group of marble and mixed-media sculptures never shown in public before. Leon Polk Smith follows on November 20.

François Ghebaly opened his gallery in Chinatown in 2009, moved to Culver City and, in 2013, to a 12,000-square-foot warehouse on East Washington Boulevard, south of the Arts District, which he shares with other art organizations. It is the gallery of its generation in Los Angeles, the one that found the artists museums are now collecting: Kelly Akashi and Sayre Gomez showed here early, and the list today includes Candice Lin, Christine Sun Kim, Meriem Bennani, Neïl Beloufa, Farah Al Qasimi, Ludovic Nkoth, Kathleen Ryan, Max Hooper Schneider, Genesis Belanger and the estate of Channa Horwitz. The gallery also has a space in New York, on Grand Street, and a small one in Beverly Hills.

Downtown, until October 31, Amol K Patil shows bronzes, kinetic works and drawings on Mumbai’s workers’ housing, his first presentation in Los Angeles, beside six decades of works on paper by Ann Leda Shapiro. The Beverly Hills space, on Camden Drive, down the street from Gagosian, has the painter Xie Lei until October 24. Night Gallery, ten minutes away, is the natural second stop.