Mario Ayala and Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.

The Long Beach Museum of Art presents a focused selection of collaborative and parallel works by Mario Ayala and Alfonso Gonzalez, Jr., tracing the evolution of their practices from 2020 to 2026. Beginning with their shared studio practice, the exhibition explores identity, community, memory, and the built environment of Los Angeles as their distinct practices developed onto national and international stages.

Working in close proximity, Gonzalez and Ayala draw from portraiture, landscape, abstraction, muralism, collage, photography, advertising, and popular imagery. Their paintings transform familiar images, objects, and surroundings into explorations of movement, labor, memory, and human presence, while humor and visual experimentation challenge how images acquire and circulate meaning.

The exhibition also features works selected by the artists from the Museum’s permanent collection, creating connections across generations of image-making while reflecting on craft, inheritance, and the relationship between painting as a trade and as a fine art.

Major funding provided by

Evalyn M. Bauer Foundation

RVCA Artist Network Program

Alfonso Gonzalez Jr. (b. 1989, Los Angeles) is an artist whose work developed from close observation of his father’s skillful trade in commercial sign painting. He draws inspiration in the permanence of hand-painted signage and the physical weathering remnants of Los Angeles to narrate his own familial histories of labor and image-making.

Gonzalez’s paintings, while seemingly passive still-lifes, excavate the sedimented interactions that happen on everyday public surfaces. His multi-layered works function as contemporary palimpsests, surfaces in which the original facade has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain. Gonzalez’s works are not merely metaphors, but objects that uphold the visual as a form of knowledge and language.

His solo exhibition In Between Stops is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through December 1, 2026. Select solo exhibitions include No Parking at Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2025); This Was Here at Jeffrey Deitch, New York (2024); and There Was There at Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2022).

Mario Ayala (b. 1991, Los Angeles) reimagines a contemporary landscape where identity, observation, and the presence of material fact play equal roles. In his paintings, Ayala brings together figures and forms drawn from every corner of his experience living on the West Coast. Ayala’s work lends interest in traditions and techniques with strong visual ties to California, such as muralism, tattooing, and industrial techniques used in automobile painting and commercial signage. Ayala’s influences also extend into postwar art historical movements such as the Cool School of Los Angeles and Bay Area Funk art.

Ayala’s highly personal, often surreal, tableaux are vivid representations of the way in which images course through the world, carrying with them fragments of the past, present, and a future still in formation. His creations live as collectively inspired documents that reflect issues, energies, and aesthetics alive in Mexican American, Latin, and Brown communities throughout the region. Ayala’s sculptures, site-specific works, and collaborations embody his capacity to envision the local and the global as interwoven phenomena. Like his paintings, they locate surprising—and even unsettling—moments of cohesion in a world defined by multiplicity and rapid, ever-changing flux.