1911 Sunset Boulevard at Gallery Luisotti looks at Taix French Restaurant through the period between its final months and the empty site left after demolition. On view from August 8 through September 12, 2026, the exhibition brings together work by Marcel Alcalá, Maxfield Hegedus, Kittpong, Arturo Soto, Abdi Taslimi and Evan Whale, alongside Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip.
For more than six decades, Taix occupied an unusual position on Sunset Boulevard. Its dining rooms, banquet halls, lounges and upholstered booths held a succession of lives: private dinners, parties, performances, meetings, memorials and late nights that outlasted the meal itself. The building’s scale and theatrical interior allowed different communities to claim the same rooms, changing their meaning from one evening to the next.
The artists in the exhibition do not attempt to reconstruct Taix as a complete or stable image. Maxfield Hegedus photographs its corridors, bathrooms, dressing areas and banquet halls with close attention to the building’s excessive details—murals, mirrors, patterned carpets, chandeliers, artificial plants and competing architectural styles. Abdi Taslimi approaches the restaurant through darkness and grain, allowing figures, flowers, booths and painted landscapes to emerge only partially.
Other works interrupt the idea of photography as reliable evidence. Evan Whale scratches into his prints and covers recognizable interiors with oil pastel, turning documentation into a marked and revised surface. Kittpong’s image carries two forms of accident: multiple exposures caused by a faulty film advance and X-ray fogging before development. Marcel Alcalá’s painting GGNAT, made in response to Gay Guy Night, binds bodies, DJ equipment and brick walls into a single restless scene.
Arturo Soto photographs the property after Taix has vanished, focusing on fences, debris, exposed ground and the surrounding intersection. Ruscha’s earlier surveys place the address within Sunset Boulevard’s longer history of continual change. Together, the works suggest that Taix persists not as an intact building, but through fragments, memories, damaged images and the altered relationships left behind.
Image: Dining room, 2026. Fujicolor Crystal Archive Super Type C Glossy print © Maxfield Hegedus
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