The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery are presenting the first institutional solo exhibitions by Los Angeles artists Lukas Geronimas, Nevine Mahmoud and Vanessa McConnell.

The exhibits will be shown through Dec. 12 at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at 4800 Hollywood Blvd.

Working in painting, sculpture and installation, each of the artists possess a dedication to their craft and an obsessive compulsion to make. Though the artists employ radically different methodologies, they share a labor-intensive approach, painstakingly working and reworking their materials many times to transform them into entirely new objects.

In this way, Geronimas, Mahmoud, and McConnell all point to the alchemy of the creative process, inviting the public to consider the nature of subliminal responses to specific objects, shapes, textures and colors.

Geronimas has created a series of new sculptural works commissioned especially for the gallery that evoke ancient ritualistic objects. This includes a column, tomb, relics, as well as a series of pointed Gothic-style window frames that make reference to the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery’s church-like floor plan.

The exhibition will feature a sculpture incorporating iconic elements from a cross-cultural range of devotional figures. Evoking the auratic status of sacred objects and spaces, these works explore the alchemical process by which inanimate objects come to be imbued with spiritual significance.

In Mahmoud’s exhibition, several recent sculptures and installations will be brought together for the first time. Mahmoud makes provocative sculptures from glass, steel, resin and precious stones such as onyx, alabaster and marble.

Her work often takes the form of fruits or body parts, from curvaceous busts to voluptuous cherries. The works’ pristine polished surfaces and immaculate pedestals stand in stark contrast to their fleshy volumes and suggest otherworldly, surreal entities.

The exhibition will also feature a series of works that connote objects of play. Combining elemental compositions and primary colors with cold, fragile materials, the works frustrate the public’s instinct to touch and explore. The contrast between childish items and Mahmoud’s more sensual objects creates an unsettling effect, inviting the viewer to consider the psychological origins of such bodily impulses as abjection and attraction.

McConnell’s exhibition will present a selection of recent paintings and works on paper characterized by their thick impasto surfaces and decisive brushstrokes. McConnell creates densely-textured abstract compositions by adding multiple layers of acrylic paint, often working until her brush is too heavy with paint to be manipulated.

The expressive nature of her mark-making, which sometimes leads to tears and rips in the paper, evinces the artist’s powerful compulsion to paint. The exhibition will also feature a selection of ephemera generated by McConnell’s distinctive process, including a series of paint-drenched brushes and vessels from the studio that have acquired a lacquered appearance over time.

For information, visit lamag.org.