# The 12 best gallery shows in Los Angeles in October 2026

> Glenn Ligon and Jack Whitten at Hauser & Wirth, Roy DeCarava at David Zwirner, Tala Madani at David Kordansky, John Baldessari’s sculptures and David Lynch’s photographs: the art exhibitions to see in Los Angeles this month, and when they close.

Los Angeles · Best shows · By On View, updated Oct 3, 2026 · Tags: Los Angeles, LA, Exhibitions, October 2026, Hollywood, Arts District, Galleries, What to see

October is the month to see the Los Angeles season whole. The galleries opened their autumn shows in the middle of September, and almost all of them are still up: the first round closes on October 24, with Tala Madani at David Kordansky, Randy Wray at Karma and Elliott Hundley at Regen Projects, and a second on October 31, with Roy DeCarava at David Zwirner. The longest runs go into the winter, among them Glenn Ligon and Jack Whitten at Hauser & Wirth, John Baldessari at Sprüth Magers and David Lynch at Pace. It is a season heavy with history, from David Smith’s spray paintings to DeCarava’s jazz photographs, and with artists who made their work in this city.

These are the twelve art exhibitions we would cross town for, in the order we would see them, with dates and addresses from our listings and a link to each show’s own page, where the pictures are. A dozen more follow, and the museums, which have LACMA’s Brockman Gallery show and a Getty exhibition of Reggie Burrows Hodges opening this month, are in the questions at the end. For the galleries themselves, see [the 12 best art galleries in Los Angeles](https://onview.so/guides/best-art-galleries-los-angeles).

## 1. Glenn Ligon: *Sit So Your Back Isn’t Against The Door*

- Sep 30, 2026 – Jan 17, 2027 (on view)
- At [Hauser & Wirth, Downtown](https://onview.so/la/hauser-and-wirth-downtown.md), Arts District · 901 East 3rd Street · Tue–Sun 11–6
- The show on On View: https://onview.so/la/hauser-and-wirth-downtown/sit-so-your-back-isnt-against-the-door

![](https://images.onview.so/762d3dff3f5a7668.webp)

The show of the season. In 1999, during a residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Ligon gave children pages from Afrocentric coloring books of the late 1960s and early 1970s, with their drawings of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Malcolm X, and then translated what the children did with them, the scribbles, the wrong colors, the clown make-up on a hero’s face, into large paintings. The Coloring Book paintings have not been seen together in more than twenty-five years, and this is the largest group assembled since the Walker.

With them is a new work in twenty-two parts, Black Panther Coloring Book #1, based on a 1969 primer whose images Ligon covers in black oil stick, leaving the captions. At Hauser & Wirth’s Arts District complex into January, in the same buildings as Jack Whitten.

## 2. Roy DeCarava: *the sound i saw*

- Sep 19 – Oct 31, 2026 (on view)
- At [David Zwirner](https://onview.so/la/david-zwirner.md), Melrose Hill · 606 North Western Avenue · Tue–Sat 10–6
- The show on On View: https://onview.so/la/david-zwirner/the-sound-i-saw

![](https://images.onview.so/e4320cebb2872e34.webp)

More than 130 photographs from the late 1940s to the 1960s, the largest presentation of this body of work since DeCarava first showed it at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1983. He set New York street life beside jazz, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Art Blakey caught mid-performance with a handheld 35mm camera, and printed everything himself, in blacks so deep that the pictures seem to come out of the dark. The gallery’s walls are painted navy to match his darkroom.

Curated by Ebony L. Haynes at Zwirner’s Melrose Hill building, through October 31. Next door, at 616 North Western Avenue, a listening room plays the musicians in the photographs all day until October 24. The Brazilian painter [Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato](https://onview.so/la/david-zwirner/amadeo-luciano-lorenzato), in his first California show, shares the building.

## 3. Tala Madani: *Control X*

- Sep 18 – Oct 24, 2026 (on view)
- At [David Kordansky Gallery](https://onview.so/la/david-kordansky-gallery.md), Mid-City · 5130 West Edgewood Place · Tue–Sat 10–6
- The show on On View: https://onview.so/la/david-kordansky-gallery/control-x

![](https://images.onview.so/f9f9a875dd99389d.webp)

New oil paintings and animations by the Los Angeles painter whose bald, hapless men have been one of the funniest and most unsettling inventions in recent art. The new work turns to myths of creation, and to the thin line between making and destroying; a group of “mountain portraits” paints powerful figures as features of the landscape. The centerpiece is Alphabet City, a stop-motion animation of more than twelve minutes, her longest and most complex film to date, in which letters escape their books and build a world by dominating the people in it, with a soundtrack by the artist Nathaniel Mellors.

Through October 24 at Kordansky’s Mid-City compound. In the other gallery, [Keith Sonnier’s Inside Light](https://onview.so/la/david-kordansky-gallery/inside-light-1968-1970) gathers his first neon works, made between 1968 and 1970.

## 4. Randy Wray: *Hothouse*

- Sep 19 – Oct 24, 2026 (on view)
- At [Karma](https://onview.so/la/karma.md), West Hollywood · 7351 Santa Monica Boulevard · Tue–Sat 10–6
- The show on On View: https://onview.so/la/karma/hothouse

![](https://images.onview.so/d0e53b9819607b73.webp)

Wray calls his studio “a kind of hothouse where I’m growing paintings,” and these new abstractions, made over two years, look grown rather than designed: thick, earthy, green-toned surfaces, burnished in places and scarred in others, in which a cluster of fine lines from one canvas turns up, changed, in the next. Some set a hard edge, a band or a right angle like a windowsill, against his soft organic forms; in others a single raised shape, like a wax seal or a shell, fills the picture. They hover between abstraction and things half recognized: bones, organs, flowers, land seen from the air.

At Karma in West Hollywood through October 24. Alongside it is the São Paulo painter [Felipe Suzuki’s first show with Karma](https://onview.so/la/karma/felipe-suzuki), five luminous still lifes painted from memory. Ann Craven’s moons open on October 29.

## 5. John Baldessari: *Sculptures*

- Sep 11 – Dec 19, 2026 (on view)
- At [Sprüth Magers](https://onview.so/la/spruth-magers.md), Miracle Mile · 5900 Wilshire Boulevard · Tue–Sat 11–6
- The show on On View: https://onview.so/la/spruth-magers/sculptures

![](https://images.onview.so/e92259405dc4c8c8.webp)

Baldessari, who taught half of Los Angeles’s artists and died in 2020, is known for photographs with colored dots over the faces. This show is about the side of him that is least known, the three-dimensional work he made from the mid-1990s to 2018. It restages, for the first time, the pairing he devised in 1997–98 of wallpapers printed with odd objects and large black-and-white photographs hung on top of them, and brings together Beethoven’s Trumpet (with Ear), a giant ear with a horn in it that plays fragments of the late string quartets when you speak into it, a brain under a cloud, an ear-shaped sofa, a camel contemplating a needle and a penguin.

The wit is the same as in the pictures, and so is the seriousness about what an image is. Sprüth Magers opened its Los Angeles gallery with Baldessari ten years ago; this runs through December 19, across Wilshire Boulevard from LACMA.

## 6. David Lynch: *LA*

- Sep 19 – Dec 22, 2026 (on view)
- At [Pace Gallery](https://onview.so/la/pace-gallery.md), La Brea · 1201 South La Brea Avenue · Tue–Sat 10–6
- The show on On View: https://onview.so/la/pace-gallery/la

![](https://images.onview.so/a063636dbb645201.webp)

The first presentation of Lynch’s art in his home city since his death in 2025, and a reminder that he was a photographer and painter before and throughout his life as a filmmaker. Pace shows five series of photographs made between 1979 and 2008: five large color pictures of women’s faces wreathed in smoke, black-and-white nudes, multiple exposures made on a couch, the “Kits”, in which animals are taken apart and laid out like model kits, and views of the buildings of Los Angeles, the city where he made Eraserhead and spent the rest of his life.

LACMA is in the early stages of preparing a Lynch retrospective, which makes this the first look. Through December 23 on South La Brea Avenue, in the building with the permanent James Turrell Skyspace.

## 7. Jack Whitten: *The Numinous*

- Sep 30, 2026 – Jan 10, 2027 (on view)
- At [Hauser & Wirth, Downtown](https://onview.so/la/hauser-and-wirth-downtown.md), Arts District · 901 East 3rd Street · Tue–Sun 11–6
- The show on On View: https://onview.so/la/hauser-and-wirth-downtown/the-numinous

![](https://images.onview.so/c71343dd2ca8b040.webp)

Paintings and works on paper from the 1980s, a decade the gallery calls pivotal and still underexamined, a year after Whitten’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. After a studio fire in 1980 he rebuilt his practice around acrylic as a material to be carved and cast: the Soulspace paintings, with arcs and concentric circles carved into thick paint with tools he made himself, and the Site paintings, whose surfaces were cast from manhole covers, tire treads and metal screens. More than a dozen of the Site works on paper are here, with Spiral: A Dedication to R. Bearden, from 1988.

The title comes from Whitten’s idea of a wonder that lives in matter itself. Through January 10 at Hauser & Wirth downtown, alongside Glenn Ligon; the complex is open on Sundays.

## 8. *Thomas Demand*

- Sep 19 – Nov 7, 2026 (on view)
- At [Matthew Marks Gallery](https://onview.so/la/matthew-marks-gallery.md), West Hollywood · 1062 North Orange Grove Avenue · Tue–Sat 10–6
- The show on On View: https://onview.so/la/matthew-marks-gallery/thomas-demand

![](https://images.onview.so/8c6d7171c6abe691.webp)

Seventeen new photographs. Demand is known for building life-size paper models of real places, photographing them and destroying them; since 2011 he has also photographed other people’s models, and the new pictures are of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century maquettes for opera and ballet sets, kept in museum collections in Vienna, Monaco and Munich and shot through a periscope so that the camera stands on the tiny stage: sets for Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Rheingold, Rossini’s Guillaume Tell and the ballets of Peter Ludwig Hertel. A few photographs of his own paper constructions, a crowded bookshelf and reeds on a pond, are printed directly onto copper.

The show fills both of Matthew Marks’s West Hollywood spaces, on Orange Grove Avenue and around the corner on Santa Monica Boulevard, through November 7.

## 9. Elliott Hundley: *Book of Sand*

- Sep 16 – Oct 24, 2026 (on view)
- At [Regen Projects](https://onview.so/la/regen-projects.md), Hollywood · 6750 Santa Monica Boulevard · Tue–Sat 10–6
- The show on On View: https://onview.so/la/regen-projects/book-of-sand

![](https://images.onview.so/0ca6dc5d8b1766eb.webp)

Hundley’s seventh exhibition with Regen Projects takes its title from Borges’s story of a book with no first or last page, a fair description of his own method. The Los Angeles artist builds paintings, sculptures and tapestries out of thousands of pinned, glued and stitched fragments, photographs, paper, wire, bone and feathers; one large tapestry here includes pieces of his mother’s wedding veil. It follows his survey at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art last year.

Through October 24 in Hollywood. In the viewing rooms, [Silke Otto-Knapp](https://onview.so/la/regen-projects/silke-otto-knapp), who was professor of painting at UCLA and died in 2022, is shown in watercolors and the studies behind them, many for the first time.

## 10. David Smith: *Night Window: David Smith Spray Paintings, 1958–1964*

- Sep 17, 2026 – Jan 16, 2027 (on view)
- At [Hauser & Wirth, West Hollywood](https://onview.so/la/hauser-and-wirth-west-hollywood.md), West Hollywood · 8980 Santa Monica Boulevard · Tue–Sat 11–6
- The show on On View: https://onview.so/la/hauser-and-wirth-west-hollywood/night-window-david-smith-spray-paintings-1958-1964

David Smith is the great American sculptor in welded steel, and the Sprays are what he made at night. Welding on a whitewashed floor left scorched silhouettes where the metal had lain; from 1958 he did it on purpose, laying scraps, tools and offcuts on canvas or paper and spraying industrial enamel over them, so that the objects remain as pale ghosts in fields of color. He showed them in New York in 1959 and kept making them until the year before his death.

They are seldom seen, and a gallery show given entirely to them is rarer still. Through January 16 at Hauser & Wirth’s West Hollywood space, a 1931 car showroom on Santa Monica Boulevard.

## 11. Graciela Iturbide: *White Fence, Los Cholos*

- Sep 12 – Dec 5, 2026 (on view)
- At [ROSEGALLERY](https://onview.so/la/rosegallery.md), Bergamot Station · 2525 Michigan Avenue, Suite B-5B
- The show on On View: https://onview.so/la/rosegallery/white-fence-los-cholos

![](https://images.onview.so/c49ec8560e9e28be.webp)

On May 2, 1986, the Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide spent a day in Boyle Heights for the book A Day in the Life of America, with the young members of White Fence, one of the oldest gangs in East Los Angeles. Several of the women she photographed, Rosario, Lisa and Christina, were Deaf, and in the pictures they sign the name of their neighborhood with pride, in their car and with their babies. Iturbide went back many times over the next thirty years; the show keeps to the pictures of that first day, with a group from Tijuana made in 1989–90.

A piece of the city’s own history, by one of Mexico’s great photographers. Through December 5 at ROSEGALLERY, at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica.

## 12. Charles Dickson: *Select Works, 1965–2026*

- Sep 19 – Oct 31, 2026 (on view)
- At [Parrasch Heijnen Gallery](https://onview.so/la/parrasch-heijnen-gallery.md), Boyle Heights · 1326 South Boyle Avenue
- The show on On View: https://onview.so/la/parrasch-heijnen-gallery/select-works-1965-2026

![](https://images.onview.so/881f2c1b62b9060d.webp)

Six decades of sculpture and assemblage by an artist Los Angeles has taken too long to honor. Dickson, born here in 1947, studied with Charles White at nineteen, worked alongside Noah Purifoy and John Outterbridge, and has been artist-in-residence at the Watts Towers since the late 1960s. He carves and builds in wood, metal, bronze, Styrofoam and acrylic, on the body, the African diaspora and what the gallery calls the politics of beauty.

This is his first show with the gallery, and it is well timed: LACMA opens The Brockman Gallery: Los Angeles, 1967–1990 on October 18, about the Leimert Park gallery where Dickson showed in the 1970s. Through October 31 in Boyle Heights.

## Also worth seeing

- [Keith Sonnier: Inside Light, 1968–1970](https://onview.so/la/david-kordansky-gallery/inside-light-1968-1970.md) at David Kordansky Gallery (on view, Sep 18 – Oct 24, 2026): His earliest works in neon and argon, from single arcs of color to the Ba-O-Ba installations, while Dia Beacon shows him in New York.
- [Seeing Through: Jia Aili’s Parallel Paintings](https://onview.so/la/gagosian/seeing-through-jia-ailis-parallel-paintings.md) at Gagosian (closed, Sep 10 – Oct 10, 2026): Sixteen new works that layer oil on linen with drawing on plexiglass, in Beverly Hills; closes October 10.
- [Oliver Lee Jackson: Form Follows Feeling](https://onview.so/la/lisson-gallery/form-follows-feeling.md) at Lisson Gallery (on view, Sep 18 – Nov 7, 2026): The Oakland artist’s paintings of several decades, with marble and mixed-media sculptures shown in public for the first time.
- [Paul Pfeiffer: Olympia](https://onview.so/la/perrotin/olympia.md) at Perrotin (on view, Sep 18 – Nov 7, 2026): The Coliseum redrawn as a stadium of a million seats, and a carved wooden Justin Bieber, ahead of the 2028 Olympics; in the former Del Mar Theater.
- [(Almost) Every Year: Sixty Years of Printmaking at Gemini G.E.L.](https://onview.so/la/gemini-g-e-l/almost-every-year-sixty-years-of-printmaking-at-gemini-g-e-l.md) at Gemini G.E.L. (on view, Sep 10, 2026 – Jan 8, 2027): About fifty prints, from Albers in 1966 to Analia Saban this year, chosen by Susan Dackerman and Helen Molesworth.
- [Kwame Brathwaite: You and I](https://onview.so/la/philip-martin-gallery/you-and-i.md) at Philip Martin Gallery (on view, Oct 2 – Nov 7, 2026): Newly released photographs from 1961 to 1975 by the photographer of “Black is Beautiful”, among them Stevie Wonder, Miles Davis and Bob Marley.
- [Amol K Patil: The Piled Up Traces](https://onview.so/la/francois-ghebaly/the-piled-up-traces.md) at François Ghebaly (on view, Sep 19 – Oct 31, 2026): Bronzes, kinetic works and drawings on the workers’ housing of Mumbai, in the artist’s first Los Angeles presentation.
- [Teruko Yokoi: A Pacific Line](https://onview.so/la/james-fuentes/a-pacific-line.md) at James Fuentes (on view, Sep 19 – Nov 7, 2026): Sixteen works from 1954 to 2005, the painter’s first solo show in Los Angeles in more than forty years.
- [Narsiso Martinez: Eat Happy](https://onview.so/la/charlie-james-gallery/eat-happy.md) at Charlie James Gallery (on view, Sep 25 – Nov 7, 2026): Farmworkers painted on supermarket grocery bags, in Chinatown, with a group show he chose alongside.
- [Dorothea Rockburne: On the Consideration of the Curve](https://onview.so/la/marc-selwyn-fine-art/on-the-consideration-of-the-curve.md) at Marc Selwyn Fine Art (on view, Sep 17 – Oct 31, 2026): More than fifty years of work built on geometry, mathematics and folded paper, in Beverly Hills.
- [Ynez Johnston: In Search of the Oracle](https://onview.so/la/louis-stern-fine-arts/in-search-of-the-oracle.md) at Louis Stern Fine Arts (on view, Oct 3, 2026 – Jan 9, 2027): Seven decades of creature-filled paintings, prints and sculpture by the California modernist; opened October 3.
- [Kiki Smith: Untethered Journey](https://onview.so/la/jeffrey-deitch/untethered-journey.md) at Jeffrey Deitch (coming up, Oct 30, 2026 – Jan 23, 2027): Her first solo show in Los Angeles in thirty years, with Pace: bronzes of the 1990s and works in wax and papier mâché; opens October 30.

## Frequently asked questions

### Which Los Angeles gallery shows close in October 2026?

Jia Aili at Gagosian closes on October 10. October 24 is the big day: Tala Madani and Keith Sonnier at David Kordansky, Randy Wray and Felipe Suzuki at Karma, Elliott Hundley and Silke Otto-Knapp at Regen Projects, the two shows at Roberts Projects, the three at Luis De Jesus and Xie Lei at François Ghebaly’s Beverly Hills space. October 31 follows: Roy DeCarava and Lorenzato at David Zwirner, Amol K Patil and Ann Leda Shapiro at François Ghebaly, Charles Dickson at Parrasch Heijnen, Dorothea Rockburne at Marc Selwyn, Kwame Brathwaite at Philip Martin and Sarah Miska and Ben Tong at Night Gallery. Thomas Demand, Oliver Lee Jackson and Paul Pfeiffer run to November 7.

### What opens at Los Angeles galleries in late October and November 2026?

Ann Craven’s moon paintings open at Karma on October 29. On October 30 Jeffrey Deitch opens Kiki Smith, presented with Pace, and Barry McGee, with a reception from 6 to 8 pm. Gagosian opens Richard Avedon: Hollywood, more than 120 photographs, on November 4, also from 6 to 8 pm. Sable Elyse Smith opens at Regen Projects on November 6, Thomas Ruff and Frank Walter at David Zwirner on November 13, and Leon Polk Smith at Lisson on November 20.

### What are the best museum shows in Los Angeles in October 2026?

[The Broad](https://onview.so/la/the-broad) has Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind until October 11. The [Hammer Museum](https://onview.so/la/hammer-museum) has [Huguette Caland: A Life in a Few Lines](https://onview.so/la/hammer-museum/a-life-in-a-few-lines) and opens Mavis Pusey on October 11. [LACMA](https://onview.so/la/los-angeles-county-museum-of-art), in its first autumn with the David Geffen Galleries open, opens The Brockman Gallery: Los Angeles, 1967–1990 on October 18. At the [Getty Center](https://onview.so/la/getty-center), Odilon Redon closes on October 18 and Reggie Burrows Hodges opens on October 20. The [Marciano Art Foundation](https://onview.so/la/marciano-art-foundation) has Tacita Dean, [MOCA](https://onview.so/la/moca-grand-avenue) has Alexander Apóstol and its recent acquisitions, and the [Institute of Contemporary Art](https://onview.so/la/institute-of-contemporary-art-los-angeles) has Carl Cheng.

### How do I see the most in one day?

Pick a side of town. For Hollywood and Mid-City, start at David Zwirner in Melrose Hill when it opens at 10, drive to Regen Projects and Lisson in Hollywood, then Karma, Matthew Marks and Hauser & Wirth in West Hollywood, and finish on La Brea and Wilshire with David Kordansky, Pace and Sprüth Magers. For downtown, begin at Hauser & Wirth in the Arts District, which has a restaurant and is open on Sundays, and go on to Night Gallery, François Ghebaly and Parrasch Heijnen, with Chinatown’s galleries on the way back. [The map](https://onview.so/la/map) has every gallery and its hours.

Everything on view in Los Angeles, at every gallery and museum, is on [the list](https://onview.so/la) and [the map](https://onview.so/la/map), with the openings coming up under Events. For the galleries themselves, read [the 12 best art galleries in Los Angeles](https://onview.so/guides/best-art-galleries-los-angeles). The weekly email, under Resources, has each week’s openings and closings.

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Published Oct 3, 2026; the text was last revised on Oct 3, 2026. The addresses, hours and dates are from On View's listings for Los Angeles as of Tuesday, October 13, 2026. This page: https://onview.so/guides/best-gallery-shows-los-angeles-october-2026. All the guides: https://onview.so/guides.md. Every gallery and museum in Los Angeles: https://onview.so/la.md. All of On View: https://onview.so/llms.txt