Housed in a historic theater in Mid-City Los Angeles is Perrotin, a newly-opened contemporary art gallery. The gallery’s inaugural exhibition, a solo showcase of surrealist work by Japanese artist Izumi Kato, is on view until March 23.

Kato’s work mirrors the dual nature of the city of Los Angeles at large, where tar pits exist alongside gleaming buildings and concrete highways border ocean cliffs. He merges the primitive and pop, the natural and the manufactured, the prehistoric and the urban, the future and the past. Kato employs his own hands as tools, but also experiments with modern technology. He works with natural stone and wood as well as manufactured plastic and vinyl.

The resulting figures are simultaneously alien and familiar. While they shine in a rainbow of hues, their abstracted features are still very much human. Despite their strangeness – or maybe even because of it – one can’t help but find a piece of themselves in the creatures’ eternal gaze.

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Izumi Kato's exhibition is on view now through March 23rd.