Tristan Unrau makes ambitious Los Angeles debut at David Kordansky

David Kordansky Gallery presents Hopes and Fears, an exhibition of new paintings by Tristan Unrau, on view from March 19 through April 25, 2026. Occupying three spaces at the Los Angeles location, this is Unrau’s first show with the gallery and the artist’s most ambitious presentation to date. Drawing widely and freely from the modes, subjects, and moods that have preoccupied painters for centuries, Unrau assimilates a formidable range of references across canvases both self-contained and in dialogue with one another. The plurality of styles that make up Hopes and Fears functions like a selective, idiosyncratic revision of the history of visual culture, as if the entire Western canon were the work of a single, virtuosic author—or as if there were no locatable authors at all. Unrau’s polystylism has a dual purpose. On one level, a variety of aesthetic approaches is a way to produce a variety of experiences of looking. On another, his visual enactments interrogate th