Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion

The Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion operates as a temporary exhibition space within the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, functioning as a venue for thematic presentations rather than a collecting institution with a fixed permanent display. The pavilion's character emerges through its curatorial approach to temporary installations, which has tended toward contemporary and modern art organized by conceptual frameworks rather than historical survey. Its architecture—a modernist structure designed by Renzo Piano—establishes a particular relationship between artwork and viewer: clean sightlines, abundant natural light, and generous wall surfaces that accommodate both monumental and intimate scales. The space rewards sustained looking; its design discourages casual transit. The institution positions itself as a laboratory for thematic exhibition-making, often drawing from LACMA's broader collections while also hosting loans and traveling shows. This curatorial model allows for flexibility in emphasis, though recent programming has reflected interests in figurative practice, abstraction, and cross-media investigation. The pavilion serves an implicit curatorial thesis: that contemporary viewing calls for environments stripped of museological apparatus, where the encounter between object and eye occurs with minimal mediation. The viewer it rewards is one patient with sustained visual argument.

Signature collections

As a temporary exhibition space, the pavilion does not maintain a signature permanent collection; instead, its identity emerges through the loan works it cycles and the selections drawn from LACMA's holdings. Recent presentations have engaged with figuration in various registers—from painting and sculpture to photography and video—often examining how the human form or portraiture operates across historical periods and mediums. The pavilion has hosted exhibitions treating modernist abstraction alongside contemporary practice, suggesting a curatorial interest in lineage and formal conversation across decades. Its programming reflects an approach to figurative work that privileges conceptual rigor over narrative accessibility, frequently organizing presentations around questions of representation, embodiment, or the body's relationship to medium rather than biographical or chronological frameworks.