The scene began in a Koreatown studio where an artist meticulously recreated a famous gallery in miniature. In that workspace, Jonas Wood installed a pint-sized replica of the Gagosian Beverly Hills gallery, complete with the architecture and corners of the original, and used it to place small-scale canvases until the arrangements felt right. The experiment was practical and obsessive: the miniature gallery served as a rehearsal space for larger works, and the practice paid off when the artist shipped oversized canvases to the real Gagosian for an opening timed with Oscar week. The project culminated in a new body of work focused on tennis court paintings, an ambitious series that reframes sporting landscapes as color-driven stage sets.
Oscar week in Los Angeles has evolved into a cultural crossroads where film, art, fashion, technology, and media collide. The Gagosian Beverly Hills opening on the Thursday before the Academy Awards has become an annual fixture, attracting a rarefied crowd and creating an unusual pressure cooker for gallery presentations. The moment offers artists unprecedented visibility outside traditional art fairs and museum circuits: curators, museum directors, collectors, and celebrities often attend the public vernissage. For Wood, whose last Los Angeles exhibition was years ago, that timing offered a chance to show a cohesive vision of courts from around the world and to place his work into the broader social and celebratory atmosphere that comes with the season.
The miniature, the method, and the paintings
Wood’s model gallery was not a gimmick so much as a tool for studio practice. By arranging scaled paintings inside a controlled replica, he could test visual flow, color interactions, and spatial relationships before committing to monumental canvases. Over months he populated the mock-up with ant-sized works, thinking about how courts read as planes of color and as objects that carry memory and cultural associations. He has long incorporated everyday studio life into his imagery: the hum of television tennis, the rhythm of serves and volley sounds, and the way a monitor in the corner becomes part of a domestic interior. The new paintings isolate the court as a formal device, allowing Wood to explore color theory, flatness, and the intersection of pop imagery and photographic reference.
Gagosian’s Oscar-week tradition and its origins
The Beverly Hills Thursday-night opening was not planned as an institution; it emerged from practical scheduling choices and grew into a signature moment. The tradition traces back to notable early presentations, including a significant Cindy Sherman exhibition that helped establish the Thursday-night rhythm. In the years since, marquee names such as Jeff Koons, Julian Schnabel, Richard Prince, and many others have shown around Oscar week, turning the gallery into an alternative hub for guests who are in town for film industry events. Larry Gagosian himself has described the gallery’s role as placing the art world on a stage that intersects, but does not equal, the vast film industry, likening the gallery to a small but spirited presence amid a much larger Hollywood machine.
What the openings feel like
These vernissages tend to generate a density of visitors and conversations unlike typical gallery nights. Museum directors, gallerists, and collectors converge with actors, musicians, and entertainment executives, producing unpredictable pairings and lively cross-industry exchange. The evenings often overflow into nearby restaurants, and the public nature of the openings means anyone in town can drop by. Over the years, images from those nights have become a vivid time capsule: celebrity appearances at gallery events, opulent dinners, and memorable surprises have all punctuated the exhibitions, underscoring how a single gallery can become a meeting point where several cultural economies collide.
Who showed up for Wood’s opening and why it mattered
At Wood’s latest Beverly Hills opening, the guest list read like a cross-section of Los Angeles cultural life. Fellow artists such as Mungo Thomson and Sayre Gomez came to support the show, while major institutional figures, including LACMA director Michael Govan and Whitney director Scott Rothkopf, circulated through the rooms. Collectors and dealers were present as well, with visitors like Benedikt and Lauren Taschen accompanied by artists including Albert Oehlen, and gallerists and advisors from across the city. Celebrity attendees and public figures also appeared: there were moments when guests such as Kendall Jenner were escorted in, and names from film and music—ranging from directors and producers to rock stars—moved through the crowd, sharpening the event’s hybrid character.
Dinner, rituals, and the after-hours scene
Traditionally the post-opening meal has been held at Mr Chow, a ritual that ties the gallery night to Beverly Hills dining culture. For this opening, the party migrated to Spago to host a larger group and to evoke a different strain of Los Angeles hospitality. The shift underscored the show’s scale and the gallery’s desire to accommodate a broad mix of guests. The restaurant scene that night mixed longtime art-world regulars with newer faces from film and music; chefs and hosts spread dishes while conversations ranged from studio routines to collecting practices. The evening remained anchored to the goal of centering the artwork, even as the social energy made the whole thing feel like one of the season’s most magnetic rendezvous.
Ultimately, the Gagosian Oscar-week opening functions as a kind of cultural amplifier: it elevates a focused exhibition while inviting an audience that extends well beyond the usual gallery-goers. For Jonas Wood, the process from a miniature rehearsal room to a marquee Beverly Hills show demonstrated how deliberate studio experiments can translate into public spectacle. The week offers exposure, debate, and visibility, and it reinforces an older truth about Los Angeles: the city is a place where worlds intersect, and for a few electric nights each year, those intersections are on full view.
