Exciting new galleries leading a Los Angeles art renaissance

“L.A. is a city of conflicting realities,” says gallerist Jeni Abramson, and she likes it that way. Evolving directly from Don’t Look Projects — the residency and project space Abramson ran alongside Omar Yousif from 2024 through early 2026 — her eponymous gallery establishes a rigorous, intellectually charged platform dedicated to contemporary photography, multimedia and conceptual art. “I’m drawn to artists whose work examines how political, economic and technological systems operate through images, whether that’s an artist working with archives, surveillance, AI, or the accumulated weight of decades spent looking at the world through a lens,” she says. “My own formation, moving between very different political and economic systems, shapes how I read that work.”

The gallery inaugurated this vision with “Remains of the Day,” presenting more than 50 years of work by Michel Auder — capturing unvarnished, intimate fragments of Andy Warhol’s Factory, his marriages to Viva and Cindy Sherman, and decades of well-chronicled and timelessly sensual bohemian life — organized with support from Hamza Walker, Abramson’s neighbor at the nearby kunsthalle the Brick, and an exceptionally talented archive-wrangler.

The gallery’s November-December presentation is “Meat Ghost,” a solo exhibition of new work by research-based multidisciplinary artist Jen Liu.

Shaped by coming of age in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, where underground electronic music offered a vital bridge between fractured systems, Abramson approaches visual culture with a sharp, systems-aware lens. That critical framework finds a natural home in Los Angeles, particularly when it comes to the city’s complex legacy of CalArts conceptualism, the entertainment industry’s image machinery and the city’s enduring subterranean countercultures. Operating outside the speculative frenzy of the ultra-high-end marketplace, Abramson says, “The collectors I work with don’t approach art as an asset class. They collect for deeply personal reasons.”