Hurts to Walk

Gattopardo is thrilled to present Jason Yates: Hurts to Walk – Selections from 2015-2025, an exhibition foregrounding a decade of the artist’s dense and deeply considered mode of image-making. This selection of works, brought together for the first time in Los Angeles, offers a concise look into Yates’ discursive, ever evolving practice within the city he has called home for decades. Yates’ monolithic, wall-mounted sculptural works unfurl within the gallery space as chimeras of the American vernacular, substrating a fondness for the familiar. The artist’s sublime perversion of material renders fabric tersely and wood softly, as the Raggedy Ann doll’s impervious gaze looks through us, refusing sentimentality. A pile of cartoonish legs suggests the presence of an unseen crowd, figures who seem to waver between arrival and departure, limp yet insistently there. Buttons, meanwhile, punctuate the compositions like deliberate marks. The arrangement of works places us dizzyingly between the car, the house and the throng of dolls, uncertain in our position as either audience or performer. Hurts to Walk not only surveys the past decade of Yates’ artistic output, but also serves as a prescient syntax of our times.