Gary Matteson – Early Warnings

OPENING RECEPTION FOR THE ARTIST: NOVEMBER 8, 4:00-7:00PM Dates and times subject to change. Please sign our guest list to receive the latest updates about this exhibition.

Musée du Al is proud to present Early Warnings, an exhibition of paintings by Los Angeles–based artist Gary Matteson from the pivotal years 1988 to 1993. Working at the intersection of fine art and the film industry, Matteson transformed unlikely materials—artificial turf, theatrical velvet, and patterned upholstery fabrics—into surfaces that carried both cultural memory and visual tension. His paintings juxtapose the iconic with the everyday, the heroic with the overlooked, offering images that feel at once grounded in their time and uncannily resonant with ours.

Burning Palm Tree – Oil on canvas with vintage frame

Interspersing quiet depictions of smog-laden streetscapes with jarring portraits of figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Super Barrio, Matteson’s work negotiates between reverence and ambivalence. By framing mundane Los Angeles scenes within decorative floral borders, he draws attention to the fragile boundary between beauty and banality, surface and fracture. These softened yet unsettling juxtapositions remind us that instability often hides beneath first impressions.

Gettysburg Redress – Oil on wood panel

Created against the backdrop of Los Angeles on the cusp of the 1992 Uprising, the works in Early Warnings register a city straining under pressures that would erupt into conflict. They do not predict the present moment so much as echo its underlying dissonances—exposing fault lines of division, displacement, and resilience that were always there … and that remain with us today.

Lawnmower – oil on astroturf

Early Warnings invites us to reconsider how images made more than three decades ago can still alert us to the fractures in our collective landscape.