The public will be offered a unique chance to become acquainted with the fantastic Los Angeles art scene when Louisiana opens the exhibition entitled Sunshine & Noir. Art in Los Angeles 1960-1997 on the 16 th of May, 1997 - the first attempt ever at showing the development from the beginning of the 60 's to the present.
Opening in Humlebek, the exhibition, which is organized by Louisiana, will subsequently tour Torino, London and Munich with a final showing in Los Angeles in the fall of 1998. It will be a major representation with 50 different artists exhibiting 140 paintings, installations and videos. In connection with the exhibition an ambitious concert programme has been arranged, featuring music from Los Angeles as well as lectures and performances.
The exhibition has been named Sunshine & Noir, two words intimately tied up with Los Angeles, the dream of California, and Hollywood. It may at times seem as if the-culture of this city - not only its visual art but also its movies and literature - is constantly oscillating between these two poles. On the one hand there is the dream of California, of Sun and Suff and a new life on the Pacific coast, and, on the other hand, there are the shattered illusions, and the exploitation of nature and hopeful individuals. This last aspect constitutes a well-known, postwar genre in films and in the Noir literature, from Raymond Chandler to James Ellroy.

In visual art, Sam Francis is the obvious representative of a life-affirming Sunshine attitude, while Ed Kienholz represents the dystopic, Noir view of things; both are artists who will be familiar to Louisiana's visitors. Actually, many of the most important and original artists of the last decades have worked in Los Angeles, and this exhibition features works by such artists as Ed Ruscha, the "Light and Space" artists James Turrell and Robert Irwin, and two of the key figures in conceptual art, Michael Asher and John Baldessari. One of the very most influential artists of the last.two decades, Bruce Nauman, is also represented, and so is the generation of artists that dominated the American art scene of the 90's: Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Charles Ray, Chris Burden and Raymond Pettibon, as well as those who currently seem to be permanently on the covers of the international art magazines: Jason Rhodes, Diana Thater, Catherine Opie and Jennifer Pastor, all of them in their 30's.