In a crowded Hauser & Wirth DTLA gallery room, Homi K. Bhabha, Charles Gaines, and Ellen Tani sit in a tight line, helming a curious crowd that manipulates its body around sculptures by Lauren Halsey and Leslie Hewett, one that breathes in close proximity to wall fixtures by artists among the likes of Rashid Johnson and Caroline Kent. The preeminent speakers are poised on the cusp of this crowd to talk about their exhibition which they curated alongside Kate Fowle– RETROaction (part two), a project that harkens back to Gaines’ 1993 exhibition Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism. “People in power create stereotypes to make the world feel safe for themselves,” Bhabha eloquates. “These stereotypes– stick figures, really– make evident the anxiety of power.” RETROaction (part two) explores the schematics of this anxiety by way of investigating marginalization in art as it rang true in the early ‘90s, and how the incidence of that marginalization “has transitioned into a critical space—30 years later—now dominated by the issues of decoloniality,” says Gaines.

The exhibition, while recapitulating some of the art from the original Theater of Refusal, introduces a new iteration of the original by way of 10 new artists who embrace abstraction: Black Art and Reconstitution, selected by Ellen Tani and Gaines. RETROaction understands the past as a motor of change in the present– by upholstering the ways in which the past is articulated and revived, the curators hope to understand history as not a static, dead thing but rather a constant reinvention, an active participant in both the present and the future.

RETROaction (part two) will run until May 5th. It is one of three exhibitions running concurrently at Hauser & Wirth DTLA. In the space adjacent, the gallery houses Jason Rhoades’ DRIVE, which is set to unfold in multiple different iterations over the course of the next year. DRIVE honors the late Rhoades’ fascination with the vehicle as a mode of sculptural expression; a magnificent storyteller, Rhoades was known for his fervent obsession with the car and its seminal role within the worlds for which he was a notorious architect.

DRIVE opens with The Parking Space, which features a series of parked cars all containing various totems of a life lived– the gallery houses a Chevrolet Impala and Caprice, a Ferrari 328 GTS and a Ligier microcar, and projected on the wall, a video of Rhoades circa 1998, driving around Los Angeles and explaining to the camera the importance of the car in his art and in the American romantic imaginary. This summer, the space will turn into The Racetrack, featuring a smattering of half-scale NASCAR-style cars and other items from Rhoades’ The Snowball, which was originally staged in California as a daylong racing event and was destined for the 2000 Venice Biennale. Finally, September will bring The Garage– a series of framed works on paper and a major sculptural installation. 

The ways in which we move through the world– by car, by means of memory, by interpolating time, certainly pervade the works at Hauser & Wirth this season. It is clear that Catherine Goodman, London-based artist whose New Works will mark her inaugural solo exhibition in Los Angeles, takes seriously the psychological architecture of the world and the time that maintains this architecture. New Works, on view until May 5th, 2024, demonstrates Goodman’s understanding of the painterly process as one that “inhabit[s]the moment.” Often working across multiple canvases at once, Goodman’s work has a joyous cerebral tenor; knitting a squirmy bridge across the yawning expanse between the physical life and the sparkplug imagination. In New Works, Goodman pries open the brittle potential of movie stills and injects them with swooping, foreign internality– ‘Night beekeeper II’ (2023), takes its inspiration from the 1973 film ‘The Spirit of the Beehive, and imbues it with a remarkable strangeness. I ask Goodman, whose work seems like it might just extend out of the canvas and entrench itself in the squishy recesses of my mind (something, by the way, that I would welcome), how she knows when her paintings are finished. “How do I stop myself?” she repeats. “When I feel like I’ve been given something. That’s how I know.”