EXHIBITION TEXT

Co-organized by Anat Ebgi, Paul Schimmel, and Stefano Di Paola.

Opening Tuesday, March 23, Anat Ebgi is pleased to present Invasive Species, the finale of a multi-part inaugural exhibition at our new location, 6150 Wilshire Blvd. With new works from 17 artists in a wide-range of media, the exhibition explores multiple perspectives on the human experience—honing equally on the capacity for innovation and creation as well as base instincts of brutality and violence.

The works on view coalesce around a refreshing engagement with 20th century art history including expressionism, conceptual art, surrealism, readymades, mannerism, and craft practices. Themes of abjection, humor, the grotesque, sexuality and our relationship to nature are explored through imagery of apocalyptic landscapes, fissured assholes, erupting volcanoes, blooming gardens, and erotic scenes of tangled limbs.

Paul Schimmel is an independent curator and art historian of contemporary art, formerly the Chief Curator for nine years at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now the Orange County Museum of Art), Chief Curator for 22 years at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, and Founding Partner of Hauser Wirth & Schimmel. Paul has organized and written the catalogue for the exhibition, Sigmar Polke Photoworks: When Pictures Vanish, and contributed to the catalogue of Bruce Nauman’s comprehensive MoMA retrospective in 1995. Most recently, he wrote for the Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton as well as Kazuo Shiraga exhibition at the Amagasaki City Culture Promotion Foundation.

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