If we take the time to understand their languages, materials can teach us a lot. The best artists wrestle, play, experiment with, and push materials to their extremes, unearthing metaphors and magic.

Alison Croney Moses, *Walnut Pod 4,* 2024. Walnut and milk paint. 14 x 9 x 9 in.

An ambitious, collaborative exhibition co-curated by Boston-based art advisory art_works and Los Angeles-based gallery Abigail Ogilvy, Hard ‘n' Soft explores the contested boundary between rigidity and flexibility in contemporary art, bringing together artists who deliberately subvert the expected properties of their materials.

The artists included are: Brodin; Mishael Coggeshall-Burr; Tallulah Dirnfeld; Yasmine Esfandiary; Cassandra C. Jones; Alison Croney Moses; Wilhelm Neusser; Leigh Suggs; Elspeth Schulze; Katrina Sánchez; Natalia Wróbel; and Kelly Witmer.

Katrina Sánchez, *I’m From Here and There.* Knitted yarn and fiber fill. 70 x 50 (variable) in.

The teams at art_works and Abigail Ogilvy have convened artists whose studios are scattered across the globe in order to provoke a meaningful dialogue—Natalia Wróbel is a Polish-American artist based in San Sebastián, Spain; Wilhelm Neusser is a Cologne-born, Somerville, MA-based painter; Tallulah Dirnfeld is a Los Angeles-based, self-taught painter; and Yasmine Esfandiary is an Iranian artist based in the Hudson Valley, New York, to name just a few of the eight participating artists.

Yasmine Esfandiary, *Untitled,* 2023. Oil, acrylic, oil pastel, spray paint on canvas. 59 x 53 in.

Through bronze rendered weightless, stone veiled in delicacy, fiber assuming geometric precision, and paint dissolving solid form, these works challenge the material hierarchies that have long structured art historical discourse.

Wilhelm Neusser, *Nightglow (2313)*, 2023. Oil on linen. 30 x 22 in.

The exhibition centers on artists who refuse categorical certainty. Rather, the assumed behaviors of media become sites of transformation: rigid materials yield and soften, solid forms turn fluid, soft substances achieve architectural presence.

By inverting our expectations of how materials perform, these artists invite us to reconsider not only the nature of their chosen media, but the perceptual frameworks through which we encounter contemporary art itself.

Elspeth Schulze, *Split Meander (Ivory, Black, Brass)*, 2024. Birch plywood, brass, vinyl paint. 46.25 x 31.9 in.

Take the intricate round pieces by Leigh Suggs. Through painting, handcutting and layering, she reimagines the modernist grid as a site of tension and illusion. The pieces seem to hold themselves together like weavings, oscillating between strength, structure and fragility.

Leigh Suggs Esemplastic Fog I, II, III , 2024, handcut, acrylic on Yupo, 34 x 34 in. below.

Hard ‘n' Soft is being hosted by Brodin Gallery at their Los Angeles space location in West Hollywood during Los Angeles art week and Hollywood Design Walk.

Opening Reception: Thursday, February 26th from 5:00 - 9:00 PM
Show Dates: February 26 – April 9, 2026
Location: Brodin Gallery, 1128 North Highland Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90028
Gallery Hours: Monday–Friday, 10 am–4 pm; Saturday–Sunday by appointment

*Cover image: Tallulah Dirnfeld, I am a Little Soul, Carrying Around a Corpse, 2025. Oil on Canvas. Courtesy of Abigail Ogilvy Gallery.