Los Angeles, CA — CMAY Gallery is pleased to announce ABSTRACTION VISITED AND REVISITED, an exhibition that brings together four Los Angeles–based painters—David Lloyd, Dena Novak, Gary Paller, and Alex Parrasch—whose practices, though distinct in generation and trajectory, converge in their sustained engagement with abstraction. Organized by Carl Berg and Virginia Anton in their first curatorial collaboration, the exhibition opens on September 20 and remains on view through November 22, 2025.

The curatorial premise of ABSTRACTION VISITED AND REVISITED rests on a deliberate juxtaposition of emerging and established voices within the field of abstraction. The exhibition foregrounds the simultaneity of discovery and rediscovery, acknowledging that the vitality of Los Angeles’s artistic landscape lies not only in its emerging talent but also in the persistence and reinvention of long-standing practitioners. By situating these artists together, the exhibition investigates how abstraction continues to evolve as a language across time, context, and community.

The exhibition features four artists, each of whom trained at a different Los Angeles art school: Gary Paller (UCLA), David Lloyd (CalArts), Dena Novak (Otis), and Alex Parrasch (Claremont Graduate School). Each artist approaches abstraction through a highly individual path, collectively highlighting the breadth of strategies currently shaping this discourse.

David Lloyd’s new body of work marks a radical turn in his long career as a formalist painter. By training generative AI exclusively on his own paintings and sculptures, he feeds the outputs back into a recursive cycle of printing, painting, cutting, collaging, and reprocessing. The result is not mere algorithmic imagery, but fully realized objects that fuse human craft with AI’s uncanny aesthetic—pushing painting forward while reflecting on its enduring allure.

Dena Novak’s paintings emerge as visceral landscapes of internal anatomy, built up through dense layers of oil paint. Her gestural marks and sculpted forms evoke bones, organs, tendons, and muscles, creating works that oscillate between abstraction and bodily imagery, embodying both vulnerability and resilience.

Gary Paller’s recent abstractions layer sweeping circular forms over geometric structures, creating compositions where motion and stillness, structure and fluidity coexist in delicate balance. Rendered in a rich yet muted palette, his works invite slow contemplation, offering shifting associations that reaffirm his signature style as a meditation on perception and discovery.

Alex Parrasch’s paintings combine drawing-like elements rendered primarily in black against muted gray fields. His compositions are expressive and gestural, suggesting hints of representational imagery without ever resolving into fully recognizable forms. This tension between abstraction and suggestion lends the work a charged ambiguity, inviting viewers to linger in the space between perception and imagination.

The exhibition meshes together four distinctive artistic practices, each shaped by a unique artistic journey. As with every group show, Abstraction Visited and Revisited offers the opportunity to encounter different voices in dialogue, allowing viewers to compare, contrast, and reflect on the diverse paths that have led each artist to this moment in their career. Collectively, the works provide insight into four distinct approaches to abstraction, deepening the viewer’s appreciation of the richness and complexity of contemporary painting in Los Angeles.

ABSTRACTION VISITED AND REVISITED functions as both a critical inquiry and a curatorial proposition. It weaves together discovery, reevaluation, and dialogue in a curatorial exercise that situates artists from diverse positions within the Los Angeles art scene, underscoring the continuing vitality of abstraction as a mode of artistic expression.