Jessica Diamond and Michael Ross

The phrase “Gold Wholesale Retail” is permanently installed on the marquee of the Jewelry Theatre Building in Downtown Los Angeles. The building opened as the Pantages Downtown Theatre in 1920, operating as a movie theater throughout Hollywood’s “Golden Age.” Shuttered in the late 1970s, it transformed into a wholesale jewelry and gold exchange in 1980. Matinée is located within this setting.

Conceived by the artists in response to Matinée’s location, He Loves Gold brings together seven golden artworks made between 1989 and 2026. Apropos of America’s current “Golden Age,” the works reference Elvis, Popeye, Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette, Gucci, McDonald’s, Old Glory, golden bamboo-style earrings, a gold bar, eighteenth-century French furniture, rubble, and trash. Gold shifts between image, color, and meaning, while the works range in scale from wall-sized paintings to sculptures occupying less than a cubic inch.

The exhibition takes its title from the final three words of Shirley Bassey’s 1964 track "Goldfinger,” the theme song for the James Bond film released the same year. In Ian Fleming’s 1959 novel Goldfinger, on which the film is based, the antagonist Auric Goldfinger is a gold magnate with a penchant for tanning and cheating at golf.

He Loves Gold marks the first time Jessica Diamond and Michael Ross have exhibited together in a two-person exhibition.