Mario Ayala and Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.

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The Long Beach Museum of Art presents a focused selection of collaborative and parallel works by Mario Ayala and Alfonso Gonzalez, Jr.

Alfonso Gonzalez Jr. and Mario Ayala have worked together in the same Los Angeles studio building for six years. During this time, they have developed distinct painting styles through close proximity, conversation, and collaboration. This exhibition showcases their works from 2020 to 2026 and explores how two painters can share similar visual experiences yet arrive at markedly different ways of creating images.

Their relationship is not merely a story of artistic influence; it is fundamentally about circulation. Images move between their studios, murals are revisited, techniques are shared, and source material flows through their conversations before each artist reinterprets it. While their practices overlap at times, they more often evolve in parallel. Both artists can encounter the same image or place and subject it to different processes of selection, composition, material, and scale.

The exhibition raises important questions about art history by featuring works selected by Gonzalez and Ayala from the museum’s permanent collection. These selections create connections across generations by highlighting renowned pieces and surprising relationships, treating the collection as a dynamic archive rather than just a chronological timeline. This approach can prompt questions about fragmentation, representation, surface, and how images are created, even across different times and without direct influence.

The exhibition features images that shift between public and private experiences, observation and imagination, representation and abstraction, and across artists. What connects Gonzalez and Ayala is not a single theme or style; it is their ongoing interest in how images gain meaning—where they come from, how they spread, who changes them, and what happens when painting transforms them into something new.

Major funding provided by

Evalyn M. Bauer Foundation

RVCA Artist Network Program

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. 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.

Ayala has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX (2025); CAC Málaga, Spain (2024); David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Jeffrey Deitch, New York, NY (2022); and Ever Gold [Projects], San Francisco, CA (2021).

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).