At Los Angeles Galleries, Savoring the Waning Days of Summer

‘Social Abstraction’

Through Aug. 30. Gagosian Gallery, 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills

Kahlil Robert Irving’s “Cement_Section [The Guardian … Could Be …] Laying new PIPE,” 2023-24, glazed and unglazed ceramic, decals, lusters and colored enamel. Kahlil Robert Irving and Gagosian; Photo by Josh White

Many artists dealing with race in their work have, in recent years, used representational language — often figurative — to set out forceful identitarian positions. “Social Abstraction,” a two-part exhibition in Beverly Hills and Hong Kong, curated by the Gagosian director Antwaun Sargent, assembles 13 Black American artists whose work allows for less prescriptive readings through more ambiguous forms, while still embodying the artists’ individual racialized perspectives.

Several artists fuse together rough-and-ready found materials with exquisite preciousness: Eric N. Mack delicately stitches a silk Christian Lacroix scarf with strips from a cotton apron and Irish linen; Kahlil Robert Irving covers his small ceramic sculptures with photographic decals and gold and silver luster glaze; Alteronce Gumby inserts polished pieces of agate and bismuth into panels of shattered glass.

Eric N. Mack’s “There Is No Other Way,” 2022, silk and wool scarves, cotton apron, Irish linen, polyester, felt and wool. Eric N. Mack, Morán Morán and Gagosian; Photo by Jeff McLane

Gagosian Beverly Hills is not a particularly difficult space in which to hang art, but the impact of works in this exhibition depends largely on their placement — and, boringly, on their scale.

Large works easily project self-assurance and gravitas, while decent smaller pieces, such as Kevin Beasley’s series of intimate paintings, made from fluffy raw cotton and colored resin, or Devin B. Johnson’s single brown painting, get lost. Even Allana Clarke’s “Witness Me” — a sculpture made of black latex hair bonding glue, nearly six feet tall — is diminished by the big white wall it’s leaning against.

It may be obvious to note that Rick Lowe’s collage-based abstraction owes a lot — too much — to that of Mark Bradford. However, in this company, opposite Mack’s confection of fabrics, and around a corner from Cameron Welch’s “The Golden Thread” — an astonishing mixed-media mosaic — it finds new affiliations. It is fitting that such an exhibition should open unexpected avenues of meaning rather than just reinforce things we already know.