Leslie Shows

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 31st, 2-5 pm

Exhibition Dates: October 31st, 2026 - December 5th, 2026

GGLA is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Leslie Shows. Where Shows’ previous paintings often used aluminum substrates or glass, her new works on canvas combine watercolor techniques with collage, sand and metallic surface elements to depict dynamics of change, illumination and ruptures of thought, cultures, and earth processes. Rough smudges and tenuous collage are layered on paint soaked canvas, with bursts of color seeming to emerge from the substrate itself. Areas of blank canvas proliferate like a connective tissue of unknowing, the images simultaneously becoming and becoming undone. The longer we linger with the works, the more the imagery both coalesces and dissolves.

Composing from photographic references of glass lenses, minerals, sheets and scraps of paint, inkblots, sketches and other studio ephemera re-rendered in paint, Shows leans into the tensions of artifice, illusion and materiality, her visual synthesis courting the edge of collapse. In a painting titled “Comes forth a coil, develops an hour” a tectonic form balances the temporal register of offhand gestures with the weight of primordial timescales. In “Assembly”, dark forms made of crushed schist seem supported by weightless blue verticals. The paintings suggest emergent, animistic intelligence: landscapes that are also beings, plants that consume light and generate songs. They are visions that appear with force- vegetable, mineral, machine- and grapple with their own materiality, like an insistent and mysterious tool in a dream. In these constructions, Shows explores the ways paintings can represent while also embodying their own evolution.