Tracey Emin‘s first Los Angeles solo show, “You Left Me Breathing”, opened at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills on November 2nd. Emin, who was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999, is one of the hyped Young British Artists whose work gained notoriety in the mid 1990s. She recently represented Britain at the 2007 Venice Biennale, installing large-scale neon signs and drawings on the walls of the British Pavilion. Emin openly uses her life as her subject matter and her work vacillates between virtuosity and one-liner candor. Paintings, like “Reincarnation III” (2005), explicitly play on the expressive style of Edvard Munch while neon works, like “Very Happy Girl” (1999), are gaudy and blunt. Emin’s expansive oeuvre includes sculpture, drawing, video, photography, and needlework and “You Left Me Breathing” emphasizes her ambiguous, controversial breadth. At Gagosian, Emin’s confessional drawings, including “Family Suite II” (1994), hang alongside her crude, tongue-in-cheek textile assemblages and her flashy neon signs contrast her large, expressionistic paintings. The Gagosian show also features a recent series of delicate jesmonite sculptures that incorporate bronze, bundled wood, cement, and glass.

Opening this Thursday at the Deitch Projects 76 Grand St. Gallery will be new works by painter Kurt Kauper. The exhibition, entitled “Everyone Knew That Canadians Were the Best Hockey Players,” will feature four larger than life size figurative paintings, along with two other smaller paintings all of which reference vintage hockey stars. Within each portrait, the artist has removed the clothing from the subject, rendering the masculine sportsmen with a strong sense of vulnerability and defenselessness. The shows title was appropriated from a sportscaster who was noting the superior ability of Canadian professional players over Soviet Olympians. Despite popular thought, the Soviets nearly defeated the Canadians, and lost only after the Soviet’s lead player was intentionally injured by a Canadian player. Kauper has stated, “images of hockey players are intended to teach boys how to behave like men,” and his intention is to break the illusion of conventional expectations and offer the viewer something new entirely. This will be his first exhibition in NYC since 2005, partly because it takes him upwards of a year to complete a single work.

Kauper had work included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and in an exhibition titled “Dear Painter” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Kunsthalle Wien and Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. Kauper has taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Yale University School of Art in New Haven, and is currently a Professor at Queens College in NY.

Currently on view at David Zwirner Gallery in New York City is an exhibition of new work by English-born artist Chris Ofili titled, “Devil’s Pie.” This show will feature works in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing, uniting the artist’s interest in the themes of birth, death, seduction, and salvation. Religious references are also found in these works as the artist repeats and reinforces his imagery through multiple manifestations. Ofili is a graduate of the Royal College of Art, and first drew international acclaim during the 1990’s through exhibiting with the Saatchi Gallery in North London and the traveling exhibition Sensation (1997). Ofili’s work was the cause of much controversy when the exhibition traveled to the Brooklyn Museum of Art for “The Holy Virgin Mary,” a painting of a black African Mary surrounded by images of black exploitation and close-ups of female genitalia, and elephant dung. The painting resulted in a law suit between the Brooklyn Museum of Art and Mayor of NYC, Rudy Giuliani. Ofili developed as member of the Young British Artists, exhibiting with the Serpentine Gallery and wining the Turner Prize. The same year, the artist represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. In addition to David Zwirner, Ofili is represented by Victoria Miro Gallery.

Los Angeles artist Dawn Kasper is currently exhibiting a morbid series of photographs, Life and Death, at Hollywood’s Circus Gallery. The sleek photographs in the exhibition document performances in which Kasper compulsively enacts her own death. Kasper’s preoccupation with life’s temporality has led to a diverse span of mock deaths over the last three years: she has enacted her own impalement, choked herself, bled herself, and imagined her body’s decomposition. She staged a fatal car crash at Anna Helwing Gallery in 2004 and she was thrown out with the trash in a 2004 performance for Zurich’s Migros Museum. Life and Death is the first exhibition to show all the documentations of her gruesome performances in the same space. When seen together, the photographs each read as scenes in a surreal drama and the show’s glitzy, theatrical aura nicely accentuates Circus Gallery’s Hollywood locale. Kasper received her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1999 and graduated from UCLA’s MFA in New Genres program in 2003. Since then, she has shown in Los Angeles, New York and Zurich.

Opening later this month in Los Angeles will be new work by Mark Mothersbaugh, one of the founding members of the band DEVO. “Rugs During Wartime and Peacetime,” are a collection of works that are to be presented by the Scion Installation L.A. Gallery, which investigate how we interact with illustrative imagery in our home and how it can be used for comfort rather than conceptualism. Mothersbaugh has been creating illustrative works since the late 1960’s, and as Devo rose to global success, the artist suddenly found himself with an immense audience that could be reached through the band’s films, videos, costumes, LP covers, stage shows, and printed materials. Over the years, the artist has developed two major series of work, “The Postcard Diaries” and “Beautiful Mutants,” both of which have toured the US extensively. The artist now creates musical scores for movies, TV, and computer games at Mutato Muzika Studios and he still tours with Devo worldwide.

New York-based artist Adam Shecter is currently exhibiting new works in a show titled “Fables,” with David Castillo Gallery in Miami. The artist’s work is founded on misinterpretations of his visual and musical experiences and is manifested in both two dimensional and time-based media. Shecter creates work based on his misinterpretations of movies, shows, posters, television, pop songs, and other related media. What results as his work is an attempted resolution of these mis-readings. The formal qualities of the artist’s work, which are often animated or digitally produced, seem to reference pop culture, Disney, cartoons, and cinema. The artist received a B.A. in Film Studies from McGill University in Montreal, and in 2006, Shecter completed the Skowhegan Residency Program in Maine. That same year Printed Matter Inc. in NYC, a source for artist publications, produced his book “Like Ghosts.”

The Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) is currently presenting the exhibition “Three,” which features works by three leading artists from the IMMA Collection, Maria Simonds-Gooding, Charles Brady and Callum Innes. This is the beginning of an ongoing exhibition program by the IMMA which will bring three artists from the collection together for solo exhibitions that are placed in close proximity to one another. The new program allows viewers to experience the work alone or through a dialogue with the other shows as all three shows are physically linked. New-York born artist Charles Brady spent most of this life in Ireland and is recognized as a prominent painter known for his approach of treating everyday objects with grandeur. Maria Simonds-Godding works predominantly with plaster and fresco pigment referencing man’s relationship to the land, and Scottish artist Callum Innes is an abstract painter who has developed an atmospheric aesthetic by removing paint with washes of turpentine. The exhibition is curated by Christina Kennedy, a Senior Curator and Head of Collections for the IMMA.