Michael Kohn Gallery celebrates Li Hei Di, as well as Faris Heizer and their new exhibitions on Thursday, November 2, 2023. An opening art party takes place from 6-8pm. The exhibitions run through January 6, 2024.

Li Hei Di, Unquenchable Laughter, Detail, 2023, oil on linen, 70 7/8 x 59 inches

Li Hei Di

Oscillating Womb featuring the London-based, Chinese artist Li Hei Di opens in Gallery 1 & 2. a solo exhibition by Li Hei Di. In the debut exhibition with the gallery, Li’s aqueous paintings embrace an intimate, counterpoint dance between desire and repression. Translucent, human appendages lurk just below the surface, coming into focus only after processing the atmospheric brushwork and lush colors of the natural phenomena floating above.

Growing up in a conservative family, Li’s expression of their gender and sexuality remains a compelling thematic device in their works. The images Li paints are never fully figurative nor abstract; neither completely opaque nor entirely transparent. Instead, they embody a porous fluidity where marks on the canvas are made and then sacrificed into a new layer. Limbs and other figurative elements twist and construct themselves in loose, biomorphic forms, becoming unlikely, yet bold signifiers of the artist’s erotic imagination. “The figures in my paintings are like ghosts, translucent beings, not solid humans,” Li states in a recent interview.

Faris Heizer

Then in Gallery 3, Faris Heizer: These days featuring new paintings by the Singaporean artist will be on view. This is Heizer’s first solo exhibition in the U.S. In this exhibition, figurative imagined realities are presented in a range of expressive moments of action to contemplative sedentary states. Within Heizer’s emotionally-charged and intriguing canvases, corporeal gesture, light, and perspective narrate stories embedded in domesticity.

His figures, at times painted in exaggerated poses transport commonplace objects and earthly environments into intimate and existential moments. This perspective, achieved both through the framing of pictorial space and cinematic staging of the forms within, thrusts the viewer in striking proximity to the scenes.

On view: November 2, 2023 – January 6, 2024

What: New Exhibitions
Where: Kohn Gallery, 1227 North Highland Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90038
When: Running through January 6, 2024
Website: http://www.kohngallery.com