Top 10 Must-See Shows in Los Angeles This April

🎨 Featured Art Exhibitions in Los Angeles: Visionary Artists Reinvent Reality

Los Angeles continues to thrive as a cultural capital, where its diverse art scene presents bold perspectives, untold stories, and immersive visuals that challenge the way we perceive the world. This season, several standout exhibitions bring together artists whose lives and work explore spirituality, identity, history, and social transformation — often through deeply personal and radical lenses. Here is a guide to some of the most compelling shows currently on view in the city.

🌀 Madam X: The Spiral Universe
📍 The Philosophical Research Society | Through April 19

Shrouded in mystery, Madam X has spent over half a century crafting a spiritual cosmos inspired by Hinduism, Kabbalah, and Rosicrucianism. Her intricate works, often diagrammatic and meditative, blend mysticism with design. The exhibition features geometric drawings and spiritual symbols alongside sculpture, offering a rare glimpse into a deeply private artist’s visionary universe.

🎨 The Universe Stops Existing When I Close My Eyes
📍 Spy Projects | Through April 28

Fourteen artists — inspired by a live model drawing session — create a stunning group show that transcends a single experience. Curated by Leslie Fram, this exhibit showcases a dazzling array of mediums, such as sculpture, tapestry, photography, and figurative drawing. Each piece showcases personal interpretations of the same subject, speaking to the diversity of artistic imagination.

🇬🇧 Nick Taggart: From Camden Town to Tinseltown, 1976–1983
📍 Megan Mulrooney | April 5–May 1

British émigré Nick Taggart turned his fascination with Los Angeles’ paradoxes—sunshine and smog, celebrity and alienation—into meticulous watercolors and drawings after his move in the 1970s. His detailed portraits and scenes of urban life mix British artistic sensitivity with an outsider’s view of California’s electric culture.

🧵 Ramekon O’Arwisters: HOUSE OF
📍 Craft Contemporary | Through May 4

Ramekon O’Arwisters’s tactile sculptures of ceramic shards, zip ties, and textiles explore the intersections of race, sexuality, and memory. Drawing on African American quilting traditions and the raw vulnerability of BDSM aesthetics, his work powerfully challenges conventional hierarchies and materials in art.

🕷️ The Anansean World of Robert Colescott
📍 Blum | April 5–May 17

Late American painter Robert Colescott merged cartoonish satire with piercing critiques of racial dynamics and history. Curated by fellow visual storyteller Umar Rashid, this show draws on the trickster Ananse from African folklore. It positions Colescott’s bold canvases within a lineage of provocative visual disruptors, navigating histories both real and reimagined.

🧵 Step and Repeat
📍 Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery | Through May 18

More than 40 southern California artists respond to the 1970s Pattern and Decoration movement, which reclaimed the decorative, the feminine, and the handmade from high-art dismissal. This expansive group exhibition presents contemporary reinterpretations through Indigenous art, ceramics, textiles, and abstraction — honoring textile craft while also subverting its colonial and gendered histories.

💡 Robert Irwin in Los Angeles
📍 Pace | April 5–June 7

This retrospective explores a pivotal decade in Robert Irwin’s journey from object-based art into spatial and perceptual installations. Irwin, a founder of the Light and Space movement, created work that teases vision itself: painted aluminum discs that appear to float, and towering acrylic columns that dissolve into their surroundings. His minimal but transformative works still resonate deeply with modes of contemporary experiential art.

🏛️ L.A. Louver Celebrates 50 Years
📍 L.A. Louver, Venice | Through June 14

From its beachfront origins to its continued influence today, L.A. Louver has been a hinge for artistic innovation on the West Coast. This anniversary exhibition features over 50 artists—both celebrated and emerging—highlighting the gallery’s tremendous role in shaping contemporary art in LA and beyond. Expect works from legends like Ed Moses and Alison Saar to newcomers carving new paths.

📖 Carole Caroompas: Heathcliff and the Femme Fatale Go on Tour
📍 Laguna Art Museum | Through July 13

Carole Caroompas’s visually arresting reinterpretation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights replaces its brooding antihero with a leather-clad rock star, who embarks on a mythic journey with the “Femme Fatale.” Bursting with punk energy and feminist critique, her collaged, embroidered canvases deconstruct romantic tropes and inject historical narrative with wild imagination.

🖌️ Don Bachardy: A Life in Portraits
📍 The Huntington | April 12–August