Matthew Brown Gallery is pleased to present NO PARKING, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, opening Friday, September 19, 2025, with a reception from 6–9 PM.
In Los Angeles, vehicles are everywhere—rushing across freeways, tucked along crowded streets, or abandoned to rust. In this exhibition, cars become proxies for the people who move through the city, their stories embedded in metal, paint, and dust. Gonzalez Jr. focuses his attention on fire-gutted vans, graffitied pickup trucks, overstuffed RVs, and stationary food trucks. No human figures appear, yet their presence is palpable. These vehicles stand as silent witnesses to labor, survival, and lives lived. And the car itself becomes a central icon of Los Angeles modernity.
Upon entering, visitors encounter two human-scale sculptures that recall the improvised constructions often used to haphazardly reserve parking spots. Layered with textured paint and dirt, these objects transform the familiar “No Parking” barrier into forms that evoke both ancient ziggurats and minimalist strategies. Three corresponding paintings abstract the visual language of building exteriors into quiet compositions that eschew imagery and text, meditating instead on texture and form.
In the adjacent gallery, a polyptych of ten paintings spans two walls in an L-shaped formation. A single stroke of spray paint across the lower section of each canvas links the individual works, creating a mural-like installation. Offering portraiture without faces, each painting records the lives of commuters, drivers, and residents left behind. In Medrano, a scorched van rests on a tow truck beneath a mural of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. In Tocco, a Porsche consumed by the Palisades Fire gleams against the Malibu coast. Gonzalez Jr. depicts cars in stasis: parked, immobilized, abandoned. Meditating on the passage of time, the artist renders every scorch mark, dent, and layer of rust with careful attention.
Trained as a sign painter, Gonzalez Jr. leaves his hand visible. Brush marks, spray streaks, and collaged wall surfaces echo the layered streets of Los Angeles. Together, the works in NO PARKING invite viewers to slow down and witness how both the city’s landscape and the vehicles that inhabit it bear the marks of what endures and what is lost.
Alfonso Gonzalez Jr. (b. 1989, Los Angeles) lives and works in Los Angeles.
Select solo exhibitions include This Was Here, Jeffrey Deitch, New York (2024) and There Was There, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2022).
Recent museum group exhibitions include Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2025); Xican–a.o.x Body, American Federation of Arts, New York (2023); Singular Views: Los Angeles, Rubell Museum, Miami (2023); Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from ICA Miami’s Collection, ICA, Miami (2022); Loveline, Long Beach Art Museum, CA (2022); and and Hot Concrete, K11, Hong Kong (2022).
Select group exhibitions include 4x4, Karma, New York (2024); Group Shoe 4, Veta, Madrid (2024); HOMEWARD, WHAAM!, New York (2024); At the Edge of the Sun, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2024); Come One, Come All, Anthony Gallery, Chicago (2024); Flesh & Flowers, Made in America, No Name, Paris (2023); Cathartic Creatures, Jessica Silverman, San Francisco (2023); Horizons, Sow & Tailor, Hong Kong (2023); Group Shoe Two, Public Access, New York (2023); Shattered Glass, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2021); Ni de aquí, ni de allá, Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles (2021);L.A Views, MAKI Gallery, Tokyo (2020).
His work is in the permanent collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, ICA Miami and the Rubell Museum.