For the third year in a row, Hollywood Reporter She handed Hollywood’s most famous award to a group of esteemed Los Angeles artists and asked them to reinvent it. As happens every year, the resulting statue will have Cedric Gibbons – the original Oscar artist who first created the statue in 1928 – turning in his grave.
Previous Oscar art files gave us Kenny Scharf launching the little golden man into deep space, Caron Davis recasting him as an ancient Egyptian god, and Austin Weiner turning him into a mischievous postal art project. This year’s class is no less wild. Among the most notable pieces: glazed ceramic candlesticks evoking an oil lamp from the Bible, and a mirrored Cupid doll titled This is the spinal tapan Oscar in a wheelchair and a golden statuette sharing a still life with a loaded gun. Idolatry is not like that.
Because these works deserve more than just some spread in a magazine, we’re taking the portfolio off the page for the third time—following previous outings at Deitch and AF Projects—with an exhibition at Megan Mulroney Gallery in West Hollywood, March 12-21.
See you at the show.
Eddie Rocha and Francesca Gabbiani
Ruscha (Ed’s son) and Gabbiani, one of the power couples of the Los Angeles art world, usually do their own thing: he paints 3D brush paintings and performs psychedelic techno under the name Secret Circuit; She creates delicate collages that examine the SoCal landscape. But they’ve recently found a groove working together, recently with Apostleswhich has opened Wilding Cran Gallery’s new Melrose Hill space. For this portfolio, they channeled that collaborative energy into an Oscar statuette (see previous page), pairing its silhouette with cacti—those spiky SoCal roadside compositions that spend years building toward a single, stunning, towering flower. “The final act of Cactus feels like a climax rather than an end,” Gabbiani says. “The Oscars always give us that feeling too — an annual flourish in our creative community before we start over.”
Nikki Green
Green’s cerebral ceramic works have made it to the New Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, and the Museum of Art in São Paulo, with pieces in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the LACMA Museum. It’s not a leap to expect this re-imagining of an Oscar to be multi-layered. Her contribution are miniature candelabra that confuse the anatomy of the original statue – Oscar here is an androgynous bisexual cradling double brewing vessels in place of a sword, surrounded by esoteric symbolism. “I was thinking of beeswax as gold, a biblical substance — oil lamps in the Tabernacle,” Green says. “As a lamp with candles, this shape will ideally accumulate more and more beeswax, becoming more and more gold over time.”
Greta Waller
Before Waller landed her major solo booths at Frieze Los Angeles with her gorgeous paintings depicting melting ice, sparkling cherries and sparkling cityscapes, she spent a decade working as an emergency medicine specialist while raising three sons. Multitasking is an understatement. For this portfolio, I started by thinking about all the Oscars that have been lost, damaged, or disappeared over the years — including Whoopi Goldberg’s award, which was lifted in 2002 while being shipped for cleaning and turned up in an airport dumpster. “I was putting these two fake figurines that I had — one of which was broken — on top of each other in an ice bath surrounded by clams,” she says. In reference to Titanicyou name it Wait Jack.
Ario toh djogo
Toh Djojo creates spray-painted black paintings that depict Los Angeles iconography, UFO culture, and art history through a cinematic haze. His contribution here is a canvas called The world is a stageThe Hollywood sign hovers under the watchful, shining eye. “I’ve been exploring the visual language of comics and graphic design,” he says, and using it to engage with “Hollywood as a constructed spectacle, addressing the illusion it presents alongside the pressures and suffering associated with award culture, while hinting at the dark forces and hidden narratives that exist beneath its glamorous façade.”
E. Parker
“I was inspired by cursed things, so I painted this cursed painting of an Oscar in a wheelchair,” Parker says. Parker, a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, has used a wheelchair since he was diagnosed with hemiplegia after an accident when he was 19—and he has been exploring exclusion in artworks ever since: flags that dangle and twist, void-shaped sculptures that suggest spaces designed to keep people with disabilities out, and performances that recast the body as a site of resistance. Oscar, who is in a wheelchair, focuses on what Parker calls “the alarming lack of wheelchair users in Hollywood.”
Salomon Huerta
Salomon Huerta grew up in the Boyle Heights projects, and his paintings—Los Angeles swimming pools, modern homes, gang members from his childhood—have made it into the Whitney Biennial, the Los Angeles Music Biennial, and the Gagosian. But most of his personal works may be his Daily ritual Series: Spare, quietly disturbing canvases that juxtapose his father’s gun with everyday objects—a Tecate, a frying pan, a pair of peaches—each of which is a memory of the gun that had been sitting on the bedroom table as if it were just another piece of furniture. And for his Oscar-winning film, the coveted Hollywood award gets the same treatment. “People might find the Oscar statuette colliding with my father’s gun shocking or in poor taste,” he says. “But I ask people to think about what is more shocking or truly dangerous: the potential violence involved in the items in this panel or how many films nominated this year center around gun violence?”
Kelly Lamb
Lamb’s contribution to this portfolio is a blown glass and mirror Cupid/Baby doll bearing her title This is the spinal tap – a nod to Rob Reiner’s classic mockumentary about artists who believe their own hype a little too much. Stare at it long enough and you’ll see yourself staring back. “The absurdity and spectacle of the art world,” is how Lamb describes what she was trying to capture. She knows this world well. Her multidisciplinary practice includes sculpture, photography, video, ceramics, furniture and product design, with shows at MOCA, the New Museum, Art Basel and the Armory Fair.
Daniel T. Gaitor Lomac
Gator-Lomac’s multimedia practice ranges from action paintings made with paint-soaked dodgeballs to long-form performances, and his recent solo show at Night Gallery, “You Can Hate Me Now,” crammed the American psyche into a room filled with star-spangled cowboy hats, gold ashtrays, helium balloons, and plastic car bumpers hanging from the rafters. For this portfolio, the NXTHVN fellow, whose works are in the Hammer Museum’s permanent collection, stripped the objects down: a piece of brick wrapped in gold, secured in a black plastic bag. It’s a sharp little commentary on the moment when Uprising films are leading the nominations. “Sometimes you pick up a brick,” Gaitor-Lomack says. “Sometimes you catch a golden brick.”
Eric Medel
Medel creates embroidery paintings on denim using an industrial sewing machine, and his subjects are generally not related to cinema – they are the workers who keep me going. The film industry in Los Angeles, and the city itself. For this wallet, he sewed a worker who beats while an Oscar helps keep the window open for him. “I wanted to pay tribute to the people who work behind the scenes, both in the industry and simply keeping this city going,” he says.
Francis Stark
L.A. legend Stark is the type of artist who turns her sex life into paintings, her online affairs into animated films and her pop-up shop into a full-fledged lifestyle moment — complete with her conspiracy theory coat and her own Banfarmacon perfume. Provocateur is basically her job title. So when she was asked to reimagine the Oscar statuette, she returned to a much less glamorous former life. “Believe it or not, I once worked as a photo editor at an agency that supplied paparazzi photos to tabloids, and I was baffled when I discovered that my boss — a true brute — was a voting member of the Academy,” she says. The result: a perfume bottle fused with an Oscar-shaped candle, the golden tip of which slowly melts. Magritte with Hollywood hangovers.
Charles Arnoldi
Charles “Chuck” Arnoldi won the LACMA Young Talent Award in 1969 and has been reinventing abstract painting and sculpture ever since – through work at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), the Metropolitan Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), as well as his role in the legendary 1972 film Documenta V. He also had a seminal role in popular culture history when Dennis Hopper cast Bob Dylan to play a version of himself in the 1990 film. The fire caught fire. More recently, he has been bending rebar into sculpture and collaborating with British fashion house Alexander McQueen. For this portfolio, he did something he almost never does: “I don’t really think about the Oscars, and I don’t do token work,” he says. “But there’s a human quality to this statue precisely because it has legs and these morphing human forms. I guess you could say this is a commentary on the chaos that accompanies the Oscars race every year.”
Jessie Homer French
Homer French, now 86, arrived at this portfolio the old-fashioned way: through her late husband’s subscription. Robin French — the mega-agent who represented everyone from Elizabeth Taylor to Marlon Brando before becoming head of production at Paramount — left behind, among other things, THR account. While leafing through the Oscars issue last year, Homer French was inspired enough to draw an Oscar lying among King Clone creosote, an 11,700-year-old plant considered one of the oldest living organisms on Earth. “It’s old, so I thought about what’s old and what lasts,” she says. “Gold lasts, but do the Oscars last?” At her point in life — with her landscapes shown at the Venice Biennale, at Hammer’s Made in Los Angeles Biennale and now in the pages of her late husband’s favorite magazine — she’s earned the right to ask.
Alex Becerra
Becerra had barely earned his degree from Otis College of Art and Design before appearing on the cover of a magazine Modern painters And in culturedYoung Artists Portfolio. Since then, he’s been considered an illustrator — capturing jazz icons, heroes of his Mexican heritage, his wife and his signature bearded face — while also curating gonzo solo shows featuring live music, DJs and a fake Mercedes that’s half musical instrument, half sculpture. His Oscar contribution is “Ozkar”: a three-dimensional figure sculpted from clay and built with the same thick oil paint that characterizes his paintings – a statue, in other words, fit for sitting. “The award goes to the exemplary figure of the Mexican male,” says Becerra, “who is just so memorable that he can be used as a lounging spot to distract the seagulls.”
This story appeared in the March 11 issue of The Hollywood Reporter. Click here to subscribe.
