Play

Morán Morán is pleased to present PLAY, a group show that features new and historical works by Adam Alessi, John Baldessari, Claire Chambless, Elizabeth Jaeger, Nevine Mahmoud, Robert Mapplethorpe, Nihura Montiel, Raúl de Nieves, Lauren Quin, William Schaeuble, and Alake Shilling.

Play is a paradox. It is at once a frivolous activity and a profound psychological tool, a space of both unrestrained possibility and structured engagement. This exhibition explores the multifaceted nature of play: as a coping mechanism, as a framework for contemporary hyperreality, and as an essential element of human resilience. Indeed, the artworks in this exhibition highlight play’s therapeutic dimension, demonstrating how creative acts, performative gestures, and interactive experiences allow for a processing of inner and outer unrest. Here, play is positioned as an active process, one that enables artists and viewers alike to explore the complexities of contemporary life without the paralyzing weight of reality’s demands.

Yet, within this fluidity, there remains the potential for subversion. Play, after all, is also a site of rebellion, a way to resist imposed structures and reclaim autonomy. Artists have long used play as a means of disruption—whether through humor, absurdity, or the deliberate dismantling of established norms. The artworks here invite us to reconsider the power of play, not as a passive retreat but as an active force.

“Creative impulses are the stuff of playing. And on the basis of playing is built the whole of human’s experiential existence. No longer are we either introvert or extrovert. We experience life in the area of transitional phenomena, in the exciting interweave of subjectivity and objective observation, and in an area that is intermediate between the inner reality of the individual and the shared reality of the world that is external to individuals.”

– D.W. Winnicott, Playing & Reality, 1971

This exhibition, then, is not simply an exploration of play as a concept, but an invitation to experience it as a methodology that encourages a dynamic form of engagement—one that mirrors the essence of play itself. In doing so, it reaffirms Winnicott’s insight: play is not a luxury but a necessity, a means through which we navigate the chaos of our world and, perhaps, begin to imagine new ways forward.

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Adam Alessi (b. 1994, Camarillo, CA) creates paintings that fuse traditional influences with a contemporary sense of unease. His work draws from illuminated manuscripts, early Renaissance painting, and theatrical traditions while incorporating the visual language of horror films and surrealist distortion. Characterized by luminous oil textures and intricate compositions, his paintings unfold in warped, claustrophobic spaces that heighten their tension. Through these unsettling tableaux, Alessi examines themes of anxiety, self-consciousness, and performance, placing his figures in ambiguous narratives that blur the line between past and present, real and imagined. His deep engagement with historical techniques is evident in his painterly approach, as well as in his inventive use of perspective and symbolism, which he reinterprets through a distinctly contemporary lens. Adam Alessi lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at Barbati Gallery, Venice; C L E A R I N G, Brussels and New York; and Smart Objects, Los Angeles.

John Baldessari (b. 1921, National City, CA — d. 2020, Los Angeles, CA) lived and worked in Venice, California. Selected solo exhibitions include Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Atchugarry, Maldonado, Uruguay (2025), Fundación Malba–Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2024), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2020), Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach (2019), Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2017), Städel Museum, Frankfurt (2015), Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow (2013), Fondazione Prada, Milan (2010), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2011) and Tate Modern, London (2009), which traveled to Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona (2010), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2010), and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2010–2011). Selected group exhibitions include the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009) at which he was honored with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, Whitney Biennial (2009, 1983), Documenta VII (1982), Documenta V (1972) and the Carnegie International (1985–86).

Claire Chambless (b.1989 Houston, TX) lives and works in Los Angeles. She is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture. Her most recent research centers on the ways haunting and cultural melancholia are sublimated into ecstatic experiences, ranging from the religious to the psychedelic. Chambless received her BA at Davidson College and her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts. Her work is included in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; LACMA, Los Angeles, CA; and the Bunker, Palm Beach. Her work has been featured in Artforum online, Artillery, LA Weekly, The Art Newspaper, Cultured Magazine, WhiteWall, Galerie, among others. Her work is currently on view at the Bo Bartlett Center at Columbus State University. Recent projects include a 2024 solo exhibition at Carlye Packer, Los Angeles; and a special project with Art Production Fund for Frieze LA 2025. Forthcoming exhibitions include a solo exhibition at Morán Morán, Los Angeles, CA in September of 2025.

Elizabeth Jaeger (1988, San Francisco, CA) lives and works in New York. Jaeger’s dissonant yet poetic sculptures inhabit the space in between ontological categories –– her subtle visual inflections resist definition and embrace the rich mystery and murkiness of our shared reality.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Capsule Shanghai, Shanghai; Mennour, Paris and Klemm’s, Berlin. Her work has been included in group shows at Whitney Museum, New York; Museum Sprengel, Hanover; MoMA Ps1, New York; Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen; Callie’s, Berlin; White Space, Beijing; Lisson Gallery, New York; Sculpture Center, New York; Capsule Venice, Venice; Silke Lindner, New York; Winter Street Gallery, Martha’s Vineyard; and Clima, Milan.

Nevine Mahmoud (b. 1988, London, UK) lives and works in Los Angeles. Past solo and two person exhibitions include Babe at Soft Opening at Paul Soto, Los Angeles (2024); Collapse at Soft Opening at CFA, Milan (2023) with Maren Karlson; in mass and feeling at Soft Opening, London (2022); MATRIX 188 at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut (2022); the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Art Park, Los Angeles (2021); foreplay II at M+B, Los Angeles (2021); bella donna at Nina Johnson, Miami (2019); belly room at Soft Opening, London (2019); f o r e p l a y at M+B, Los Angeles (2017) and The Poet, The Critic and The Missing at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2016). Selected group exhibitions include Rayon Jouets at Hangar Y, Meudon (2024); Cremona Art Week at Museo Archeologico San Lorenzo, Cremona (2024); Solid Projections at Larder, Los Angeles (2023); perfectly round, as we left them at the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro in Milan (2021); Romancing the Mirror at MOCA Jacksonville, Florida (2020); Holly Coulis, Nevine Mahmoud & Christina Ramberg at Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong (2019); The Artist is Present, curated by Maurizio Cattelan, at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai (2018); Dreamers Awake: Women Artists After Surrealism at White Cube, London (2017); MADEMOISELLE at the Centre Régional D’art Contemporain Occitanie in Sète (2018); This is Presence at Ballroom Marfa (2016) and The Lasting Concept at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (2018). Her work is held in the permanent collection of Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis and MOCA, Los Angeles.

Robert Mapplethorpe (b. 1946, Queens, NY — d. 1989, Boston, MA) lived and worked in New York. He is one of the most widely recognized American photographers of the 20th century, known best for his stylized images, including portraiture, nudes, and still life. After studying drawing, painting, and sculpture at Pratt Institute in the mid-60s, he began experimenting with various materials and assemblage, later incorporating Polaroid prints into his collages. During the 70s, Mapplethorpe became primarily focused on photography, using a medium-format camera, increasingly interested in documenting New York’s subculture scene, as well as the friends, artists, musicians, and various people he was acquainted with. Throughout the early and mid-80s, he produced a wide collection of images that simultaneously challenged and exemplified classical aesthetics, while introducing different techniques and formats, including large Polaroids, photogravure, Cibachrome, platinum, and dye transfer prints. Exhibitions of his work in the late 80s, often controversial in content, sparked debates about public funding for the arts, censorship, First Amendment rights, and broadly, what defines art. His work continues to be the subject of numerous gallery and institutional exhibitions, and is included in the public collections of major museums throughout the world, such as the Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA, and the Getty Museum.

Nihura Montiel’s (b. 1988, Tijuana, MX) lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work stems from an obsession with details and a concern for the economics of time and materiality. Her practice is characterized by the cross-cut of precision and speed. These charcoals on canvas are Montiel’s very own “dry” paintings. Despite being classically trained in oils, she carves an idiosyncratic path and renders the details in her unique format. Montiel’s objects function as signifiers pointing the viewer in all sorts of directions. While they contain their own latent matter and contingencies, each composition is resolutely opened out toward the viewer rather than being self contained or veiled by secrecy. The closer you get to these compositions and the longer you behold their contents, a sense of the uncanny or else pure disgust emerges. Cute surrenders to menace, comfort to repulsion. Montiel received her BFA from Roski School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA. She has exhibited at In Lieu; Los Angeles, CA; Mrs.Gallery, Maspeth, NY; Carlye Packer, Los Angeles, CA; Padre Gallery, New York, NY; Château du Marais, Le Marais, FR and Amor Services, Los Angeles, CA.

Raúl de Nieves (b. 1983, Michoacán, Mexico) lives and works in New York, NY. De Nieves has had residencies at Cassawabi, Oaxaca; ICA, Philadelphia; NY Clock Tower; and H.B.C. Berlin; among others. Institutional solo exhibitions include The Treasure House of Memory, ICA Boston, Boston, MA (2021); Eternal Return & the Obsidian Heart, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Miami, FL (2021); Reemerge the Zero Begins Your Life, Eternal is Your Light, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2020); and Fina, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (2019). Major recent group exhibitions include The Musical Brain, The High Line, New York, NY (2021); Comunidades Visibles: The Materiality of Migration, Albright-Knox Northland, Buffalo, New York (2021); Glow Like That, K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong (2019); A Queen Within: Adorned Archetypes, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA (2018); On Site, Swiss Institute, New York, NY (2018); Fly Into the Sun, Watermill Center, New York, NY (2017); The Whitney Biennial, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2017); and Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York, NY (2015). De Nieves’s work is in the permanent collections of Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Boston, MA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA.

Lauren Quin (b. 1992, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT, and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions, including her first US museum show, My Hellmouth, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS (2023), which was accompanied by a dedicated monograph; and Sagittal Fours, Pond Society, Shanghai, China (2022), among others. Recent group exhibitions include PRESENT ’23: Building the Scantland Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH (2023); Calling on the Past: Selections from the Collection, Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, IL (2023); and Selected Works from the Collection of Elizabeth Margulies, The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, Miami, FL (2022). Her work is held in numerous public collections including the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Long Museum, Shanghai, China; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Smart Museum, Chicago, IL; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China.

William Schaeuble (b. 1999, Des Moines, IA) is an American painter whose work focuses on telling stories of his personal life in connection to the broader world of contemporary culture, art history and the great outdoors. His works are semi-autobiographical, filled with figures, animals, knick knacks, lovers, enemies, locations and themes that all come from the artist’s personal life. Schaeuble grew up in Iowa and graduated from The School Of The Art Institute of Chicago in 2022. He now lives and works in Iowa. He has exhibited at Povos Gallery (Chicago), The Hole (NYC) and Anna Zorina Gallery (NYC).

Alake Shilling (b. 1993, Los Angeles, CA) is a painter and sculptor of creatures, in a gelatinous rainbow style in debt to Lisa Frank as much as Peter Saul, bearing carefully coded emotions and driving rich narratives about companionship, risk and reward. In 2018, she presented the final exhibition at 356 Mission, an important artist-run space in Los Angeles, and her work is held in the permanent collection of the Hammer Museum, where it was showcased in the 2019 exhibition Dirty Protest. Shilling will participate in Made in L.A. 2025, the seventh iteration of the Hammer’s biennial exhibition highlighting the practices of artists working throughout the greater Los Angeles area.