In his philosophical treatise Poetics, Aristotle aligns intelligence with the ability to perceive metaphor, to see “the similarity of the dissimilar.”¹ The curation of LACMA’s permanent collection in Peter Zumthor’s 110,000-square-foot inhabitable sculpture depends on this kind of associative, idiosyncratic thinking. It asks viewers to draw connections, spot similarities between what might appear divergent—even chaotic—in exchange for unexpected revelations and resonant meanings. Dispensing with traditional museological categories, works across mediums, geographies, and periods, arranged along a single wending plane, meet, challenge, and reframe one another. Organized loosely around the oceans of the world, sculptures, paintings, textiles, ancient artifacts, and decorative objects line the perimeter walls or rest on minimalist wooden tables. Others are gathered in intimate interior galleries—what one might think of as collecting pools—with the meeting points between them like eddies. Without oceanic markers or prescribed routes, you’re left to make your own way, following your own divining eye into territory that might feel radically open or confoundingly opaque, depending on your comfort with ambiguity and familiarity with art history.

The formal affinities are most readily legible. Diego Rivera’s Flower Day (1925) hangs beside the Mesoamerican sculpture Goddess with Temple Headdress (1325–1521 CE), whose stout, blocky form evidently inspired the Mexican painter’s volumetric approach to the human figure. A few doors down, the cylindrical women in Fernand Léger’s paintings create a similar rhythm. Elsewhere, the orange and fuchsia biomorphic curves of Craig Kauffman’s Untitled Wall Relief (1967/2008) echo Issey Miyake’s nearby molded resin bodice, Plastic Body (Fall/Winter 1980–81), while the slick, lacquered finish anticipates the surface of Raymond Loewy and Studebaker’s classic car, Avanti (1963), stationed around the corner. In Lauren Halsey’s monumental gypsum wall relief, Untitled (2026), the car returns as an icon amid the hieroglyph-inflected figures and symbols chronicling the history of her hometown, Los Angeles. With each recurrence, resemblance reveals itself as variation, with motifs accumulating new perceptual and emotional weight as they transfigure under different temporal and material conditions.

The building itself offers its own pleasurable correspondences, perhaps none more affecting than the undulating folds of textile designer Reiko Sudō’s sputtered-chrome curtains lining the floor-to-ceiling glass panes that mimic the swaths of fabric draped about the Greek and Roman sculptures. When the sun begins to set, casting long, thin shadows across the floor, the steel, stone, and limpid light appear continuous. The building, a single, elevated plane, refuses the calcified hierarchies that customarily afforded paintings and sculptures (especially Western ones) privileged placement in museum layouts while quite literally marginalizing other cultures and disciplines. In their stead, an updated version of history emerges that accommodates a porous, reciprocal flow of influence and suggests a simultaneity of aesthetic development. Still, the lack of geographic and temporal coordinates means the conceptual stakes and the sociopolitical implications of the approach are often lost in translation.

Among the exceptions is “The Global Appeal of Blue-and-White Ceramics,” a display that gathers porcelain from across the seas and centuries, beginning with an Iraqi bowl from the Abbasid period (c. 801–900 CE) and ending with Stephanie Shih’s 梅國 (Still life with chamoy and Dirty T Tamarindo) (2025–26), a brilliantly saturated photograph of two vases, one Mexican one Chinese, overflowing with flowers, cacti, and candy. The presentation manifests the history of art as a perpetual game of telephone. Functioning as a kind of visual key to the whole, it makes the migration of a formal language across continents easily comprehensible, proving that the right framing can engage and orient. Walter Benjamin wrote in 1923 that “fragments of a vessel that are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another.”² Observing dozens of objects oriented around a central theme, it is easy to imagine that the many divergences are merely matters of translation.

Elsewhere, the intermingling of contemporary and canonical works carries a poignant political charge. It is, in part, harrowing to emerge from a passageway filled with Spanish colonial treasures—including casta paintings, like Miguel Cabrera’s From Spaniard and Morisca, Albino Girl (1763), which were used to enforce elaborate racial stratifications—to find rafa esparza’s large-scale adobe wall-relief depicting a Mexican migrant, their arms raised against a chain-link fence in we are the mountain (2019). Or, in the Atlantic wing, to see Winslow Homer’s The Cotton Pickers (1876), of Black American field laborers in the postbellum South, installed beside Betye Saar’s sculptural tableau I’ll Bend But I Will Not Break (1998), where a bright white cotton sheet suspended from the wall and appliquéd with the monogram KKK frames a wooden ironing board imprinted with an image of captured Africans packed tightly into a slave ship.

Though, these pairings, while heightening aesthetic and thematic relations, can disorient. With very little wall text and even less wayfinding, navigating the currents, pools, and intermittent eddies risks frustration. In a single sightline, for example, one might encounter a gold-ground devotional painting from medieval Italy, an assemblage-inflected grandfather clock outfitted with porcupine quills and rubies by a contemporary California-born artist, and a sepia-toned etching of an American bridge in the style of a Japanese woodblock print. In lieu of adequate labels, the museum offers a virtual guide (accessible only through a QR code), which, while helpful, seems to undermine the embodied, intuitive experience that presumably justified removing the tombstones in the first place.

This layout requires viewers to act as interpreters, tracing formal and critical connections across six millennia of human production. At its best, it produces startling revelations. But such interpretations depend largely on prior expertise or at least an elementary fluency with art history; associative reasoning is a learned form of thinking, looking. The abrogated didactic framework was also a form of welcome. By withdrawing that invitation, the exhibition risks reinstating the barriers it claimed to dissolve, transferring the burden of explication onto the viewer without acknowledging who that might leave behind. Openness alone does not guarantee accessibility.

These are not irresolvable problems. One can imagine, for instance, one of the vast streaked and speckled concrete walls allocated to identifying different possible pathways or demonstrating this associative method: something not unlike the blue-and-white ceramic display where the cultural correlations are clarified. If the oceans are to remain the organizing conceit, subtle notations that distinguish them each from each other might allow for more, not less, curiosity. Constraints, by all accounts, foster ingenuity, creativity.

Translation, Benjamin reminds us, depends not merely on resemblance but on intelligibility. Small adjustments could steady more visitors amid the drift, without so much as slowing the current.

     Tara Anne Dalbow

 

Inaugural presentation in the David Geffen Galleries (installation view) (2026). © Museum Associates/LACMA.

Inaugural presentation in the David Geffen Galleries (installation view) (2026). © Museum Associates/LACMA.