Ramsés Noriega | Marc Selwyn Fine Art | 29 January – 14 March

This exhibition of works on paper from 1967 to 1989 traces Ramsés Noriega’s role in the emergence of the Chicano Art Movement. A co-organizer of the 1970 Chicano Moratorium march in East Los Angeles, Noriega channeled his experience as a migrant farm worker and student activist into images that move between satire and spiritual allegory. In Hello! (1967), a tuxedoed skeleton – drawn from the Mexican lotería character El Catrín – grimaces as oranges fall like bombs, linking chemical warfare abroad to pesticide exposure at home. ‘Alongside the Chicana/o struggle for social and political equity was the development of an arts movement that demanded visibility’, curator Rafael Barrientos Martínez says to me. A concurrent presentation at the Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center in San Diego underscores the artist’s ties to the region’s activist history. ‘Equality is a never-ending battle’, Noriega tells me, ‘but we must always have hope’.

Wally Hedrick | Parker Gallery and The Box | 14 February – 4 April

The postwar Bay Area is often remembered for its literary output, yet recent exhibitions have directed renewed attention toward its countercultural artists, who sought out the region for its distance from market pressures. Coincidentally, a two-venue survey of Pasadena-born artist Wally Hedrick aligns with an excellent presentation of work by Jay DeFeo (Hedrick’s former wife), at Marc Selwyn Fine Art; a show of Wallace Berman’s Verifax collages at Michael Kohn Gallery; and an exhibition featuring seven of Bruce Conner’s films at the Marciano Art Foundation – all of which are necessary viewing. A cofounder of Six Gallery (where Allen Ginsberg debuted ‘Howl’ [1955]) and an early antiwar agitator, Hedrick rejected stylistic continuity, moving from junk assemblage to mystical monochromes to polemic signage with ‘improvisational’ freedom. ‘The political issues that were central to his practice are unfortunately very much still with us’, Parker Gallery founder Sam Parker tells me. As Los Angeles remains a site of national friction, Hedrick’s refusal to toe the line models both inward reckoning and political protest.

Cayetano Ferrer | Commonwealth and Council | 31 January – 14 March

After the Los Angeles County Museum of Art demolished its original campus in 2020, a museum devoted to preserving artifacts became a source of useful rubble for Cayetano Ferrer. During pauses in demolition, the artist salvaged granite donor walls, column shards and even a fragment from the peak of the former Ahmanson Building for ‘Object Prosthetics’. Mounted on powder-coated aluminum posts with resin interfaces that resemble both braces and scar tissue, the fragments sit in their assumed original orientation, each on a sliding track. ‘Prosthesis suggests change’, Ferrer says to me. ‘It confers new meaning in a larger assemblage.’ In a city defined by demolition and reinvention, the works hold Los Angeles in suspended reconstruction.

Kunié Sugiura | Moskowitz Bayse | 24 January – 7 March

On the heels of her San Francisco Museum of Modern Art retrospective, ‘X-Ray Island’ emphasizes three enduring themes in Kunié Sugiura’s six-decade practice: photographic process as material, the collapse of photography and painting, the body as a site of impermanence. ‘Body, fragility, nature and time converge’, gallery partner Adam Moskowitz tells me of the recent X-ray works. Pieces like Vertebra (2021), assembled from medical X-rays and paired with painted color fields, transform clinical imagery into something tactile and intimate. ‘Out of a fog I saw a green island containing serenity and beauty’, Sugiura says to me. ‘X-rays render bodies as fragments, uncovering hidden images.’ Guided by what she calls a ‘desire for life’, her work takes photography beyond the visible, into something embodied and interior.

Tacita Dean | Marian Goodman Gallery | 21 February – 25 April

‘I use the word mediums as a political act’, Tacita Dean tells me. Her exhibition spans 16mm and 35mm films, slate drawings, glass works and Polaroids. In one gallery, oxidized green slates bear looping streaks: the result of the artist photographing a total eclipse without looking through a viewfinder. ‘I couldn’t impose an image on it. It had to come from within it’, she adds. Nearby, the 16mm film Sidney Felsen decorates an Envelope (2026) captures the late Gemini G.E.L. cofounder stamping a royalty envelope addressed to one of the many artists for whom he developed prints; the American flags he selects now carry ‘a totally different resonance’. Across film and slate alike, sight is partial, surfaces resist control and images emerge from constraint and uncertainty.

Grigoris Semitecolo | Sea View | 21 February – 28 March

Trained under Yiannis Moralis and aligned with composer Jani Christou, Grigoris Semitecolo belonged to a generation of Greek artists whose work explores alienation, impasse and other existentialist themes under the dictatorship. Best known for collaborations that staged mannequins and architectural fragments in theatrical set-pieces, his first US solo show focuses on lesser-known paintings from the 1970s and ’80s. ‘No other artist of his generation carried these concerns so decisively into a painterly language’, curator Stamatia Dimitrakopoulos tells me. Titled after Miltos Sachtouris’s allegorical poem ‘The Mad Hare’, the exhibition reflects a search for orientation amid instability. In Semitecolo’s canvases, dawn and dusk blur, and uninhabited structures glow faintly – visions poised on the brink.

Francisco Rodríguez | Baert Gallery | 21 February – 28 March

In ‘Private Nightmares’, Santiago-born, London-based Francisco Rodríguez makes his US debut with paintings that evoke a sense of adolescence. Figures drift through cool interiors punctuated by flashes of red, suspended in moments that feel both intimate and unstable. Rodríguez describes this unfolding universe as ‘a long, long novel’ that draws from anime, Renaissance painting and Edo printmaking to capture his experience as a young immigrant in London. ‘What I try to bring into my paintings are universal feelings – loneliness and anxiety, but also love, friendship and rebellion’, he says to me. These dust-toned tableaux read as meditations on remaining grounded without surrendering one’s vulnerability.