Gallop's picks for Los Angeles galleries, October 30–November 5, 2026: 4 shows worth the trip, plus 4 openings and 4 last chances, each with a note from Gallop's editors.
Aaron Morse sets his paintings and works on paper in wide open spaces, from the American West of Morse's upbringing to the Sierra Nevada, where the artist sketches and hikes. The works are built from gradated washes of color, expressive brushwork and stippling.
Three photographic assemblages, two of them mural-scale, combine images of European palaces and churches, West African slave-trade sites and African American icons from Gray's archive. Biographical photographs and ephemera trace his parallel careers in commercial photography and art, which he long kept separate.
Raos applies bright color with hard-edged precision to canvases of varied shapes and sizes. One painting renders a Wonder Bread package, which the gallery links to the artist's childhood reliant on low-cost food outlet stores.
Paintings large and small, built from sources like coloring-book pages, tire commercials and Christian self-help guides, hang alongside resin sculptures of kielbasas and a steak. The ruby resin steak sits on a white ceramic plate that doubles as a communion wafer.
Historical and recent sculptures of the body use bronze, papier mâché, beeswax, polyester resin, and fiberglass. In Moon on Crutches (2002), a single body is suspended amid a tangle of linear structures.
Drawings, tagging, and assemblage sculpture form McGee’s artistic vocabulary. The gallery occupies the former RCA Victor west coast recording studio, where Miles Davis, Elvis, and the Beach Boys recorded.
The exhibition takes up dating, desire, avoidance, sex, and companionship. A large-scale three-panel tapestry depicts Black men dressed in vivid pink Western wear growing out of a sexy tropical landscape.
Farah Al Qasimi's second solo exhibition with the gallery opens ahead of a forthcoming institutional solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The show brings together 15 new photographs alongside vinyl interventions.
The exhibition draws on more than sixty years of Charles Dickson's experimental work with material. Dickson studied under Charles White at age 19 and later worked alongside Noah Purifoy, John Outterbridge and Cecil Fergerson.
In eight works, Desir combines bodies, creatures, machines and symbols into figures the curator calls armored and exposed. In Field Resonator 4, thorned horns rise from a crown atop a resonator, heads rest on the thorns, and Timberland boots form a tripod base.
Domínguez brings together paintings, vessels, and a site-specific installation centered on recurring floral-arrangement motifs. According to the gallery, the arrangements connect craft, artifice, and cultural memory.
Bronze casts, kinetic sculpture and drawings by Patil fill a theatrical installation that the gallery says addresses class and caste-based exploitation. One kinetic piece lowers a bulb into a small bronze mass of dirt and limbs and lifts it out again.
Everything else on view: every gallery show in Los Angeles.
Gallop's picks for the week of October 30: Aaron Morse at Philip Martin Gallery (Downtown); Todd Gray at The Brick (Hollywood); Kristopher Raos at As Is (Downtown); Adam Beris at Ochi (Hollywood). Each comes with a short note on what's in the show.
Opening the week of October 30: Kiki Smith at Jeffrey Deitch (Hollywood); Barry McGee at Jeffrey Deitch (Hollywood); April Bey at Vielmetter (Downtown); Farah Al Qasimi at François Ghebaly (West Hollywood).
Last chance the week of October 30: Charles Dickson at Parrasch Heijnen, until Saturday Oct 31; Emmanuel Louisnord Desir at Sebastian Gladstone, until Saturday Oct 31; Salvador Dominguez at de boer, until Saturday Oct 31; Amol K. Patil at François Ghebaly, until Saturday Oct 31.
Gallop's editors go through every show on view in Los Angeles each week and pick a handful worth the trip, with a note on each. The same picks go out in Gallop's weekly email every Thursday, and every show is on the Gallop map with the gallery's address and hours.
Gallop's picks for Los Angeles, every Thursday.
