L.A. Louver Celebrates 50 Years contains two large-scale recent paintings by Los Angeles artist Gajin Fujita. In Angelic Intervention (AI) (2023), Fujita presents two putti, infant cherubim most frequently found in Renaissance and Baroque religious paintings. Tattooed with cherry blossoms and peonies rendered in the traditional Japanese style, the angels reference the multicultural landscape of Los Angeles, Fujita’s home and a major source of inspiration for his work. The angels lounge on ombre clouds, PlayStation controllers in hand, leading viewers to humorously imagine what worldly events gamers intervene upon. The work’s title riffs on the acronym AI (artificial intelligence) and creates a dichotomy between two realms that wield power over humanity—technology and religion.
We Skyscrapin is the first large scale panel painting Gajin Fujita created in 2025. This dynamic painting exemplifies Fujita’s most recent visual innovations: a grid made of gold leaf is overlaid on the background of silver leaf, bifurcating the painting into rectangular sections. Tags from Fujita and his graffiti community peek through the golden bars. In Fujita’s other recent paintings such as Pretty Please…. (2024) and Praying for Forgiveness for Us (2024), cherubic putti are seen praying to the Wood Dragon (the animal sign of the 2024 Lunar New Year) in acts of contrition, while in We Skyscrapin the angel pulls on the dragon’s facial antenna seemingly to stop its fiery ascent. Fujita’s skillful use of paint markers to paint the angel’s fine strands of hair is also noteworthy in demonstrating his close attention to detail.
Since his debut at L.A. Louver in 2001 as part of the Rogue Wave program, Gajin Fujita has been featured in six L.A. Louver solo presentations—including 2023’s blockbuster exhibition Gajin Fujita: True Colors. A native of East Los Angeles, Fujita (b.1972) received his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design, followed by an MFA from the University of Nevada Las Vegas, where he studied with esteemed art critic Dave Hickey. Fujita first established himself on the streets of Los Angeles with graffiti crews KGB and K2S, but his earliest artistic influences were informed by his father, who was a painter, and his mother, a conservator of Asian antiques. Fujita’s singular style pulls equally from Japanese and American cultural symbols and themes to construct a realm of unique aesthetic coexistence. The result of this culmination takes the form of gilded surfaces layered with graffiti tags, traditional East Asian iconography, and contemporary Western motifs.
Fujita’s work has been exhibited extensively and can be found in the permanent collections of the Getty Research Institute, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Hammer Museum, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Toledo Museum of Art, and LACMA, among many others. In 2019, Fujita received an honorary doctorate from Otis College of Art & Design. He was inducted into the National Academy of Design in 2024.
Fujita’s work will additionally be on view in the National Academy of Design exhibition Kinetic Traces from 12 June - 13 September 2025. An opening celebration for the exhibition will be held in New York City tonight, June 12th. For more information and to reserve tickets for the opening, please click here.
