Hotel Bel-Air
701 Stone Canyon Road
Los Angeles, CA 90077

Phillip K. Smith III
February 28 – May 15, 2024

The Hotel Bel Air welcomes the installation of four works by artist Phillip K Smith III via a contemporary arts initiative recently established at the historic Los Angeles property. Curator Jim Hedges originally conceptualized the creation of a sculpture garden for the hotel’s Garden of Eden-like setting in order to create a dialogue between the natural beauty of the surrounding landscape and the work of important contemporary artists.

Smith is thrilled to be the third artist included in this important exhibition as he has a strong desire to exhibit work in atypical spaces, outside the realms of the traditional, white-walled gallery. The hotel’s lush grounds provide a perfect backdrop for Smith’s light-based and reflective installations, allowing light, landscape, and the atmosphere of the day to become artistic medium within the works.

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When one encounters Arced Line: Double Push/Pull Vertical (Gold), 2014, at the end of the Grotto walking path, it’s like stumbling upon an ancient golden monolith, enveloped by verdant green fronds and trees. At full frontal view, the grand scale lozenge figure is marked by perfectly symmetrical ridged lines. Yet as one closes in, the work appears to breathe – its surface revealing fluctuating volumes of form. Throughout the day, the piece transforms, producing multiple perspectives defined by the shifting sky in union with the encompassing foliage; at times it becomes a canvas for dappled sunspots streaming through the leaves; at times a stark silhouette; and at others, a highly textured surface of precisely terraced topography composed of light and shadow.

Tucked into a quiet, paradisical courtyard stands Garden of Reflections, 2022, consisting of five columnar extrusions wrapped in reflective corrugation at the top of steel posts, informing an impression of futuristic treetops. The reflective surfaces provide an ever-changing collage of present reality as they display shards of the light, landscape, and guest movements, perpetually mutating throughout the day into a continuum of impressionist pieces. The layering of reflections also reconfigures and compresses directionality and space, amplifying one’s perception of their surroundings in a way that becomes powerfully immersive day or night.

Hung on a wall in a stunningly intimate, terracotta pink-colored breezeway lined with potted palms, one comes upon Flat Portal Variant 4:1, 2022, unexpectedly. Part of Smith’s ongoing series of Portals, first debuted at the 2016 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, the 80-inch diameter piece merges light and shifting choreographed color across an undulating surface providing a memorable entrance to the hotel’s legendary restaurant. Dynamic and alive, as the hues change, the varied surfaces appear to shift forward and backward in space or merge seamlessly together, delightfully challenging the viewer’s normal understanding of depth. Furthermore, in relationship with the changing ambient light from day to night, the work projects variants in sheen, translucence, and opacity.

Found in The Restaurant at Hotel Bel-Air, Faceted Disc 36, 2023, presents light in its simplest state across an all white, undulating three dimensional surface, contained within the confines of a visual cone. At their core, the Discs are about interaction – interaction with light, form, surface, and the viewer. Seeking to be perceived within a “blurred” state between two and three dimensions, the Discs oscillate from a seemingly flat circle to a folded form of light and shadow as the viewer aligns with and shifts off axis with each work.

Smith’s love of light and space grew out of his lifetime spent living in the desert of SoutherCalifornia, where light as defined in relationship to a vastly open natural terrain has provided inspirational source material for his palette and portfolio.

About Phillip K. Smith III:

Smith's other-worldly creations draw upon ideas of perception, space, form, color, light, shadow, environment, and ephemerality. He cites the elemental root of his work as change – such as shifting color variations or the movement from translucence to opacity – which implies a sense of life or breath and is offered in abundance as the driving force behind projects such as Detroit Skybridge, Santa Monica Linear and Three Half Lozenges. Smith is drawn to sites where he can engage directly with the existing beauty of the surroundings, whether on the edge of the ocean, the middle of the desert, or amid urbanity. He seeks to create highly memorable experiences, seemingly ephemeral and directly conditioned by the specifics of the site. Smith is known for creating large-scale temporary installations such as Lucid Stead in Joshua Tree; Reflection Field and Portals at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival; ¼ Mile Arc in Laguna Beach; and Open Sky for Milan Design Week. His public artworks are sited in Los Angeles, La Jolla, San Francisco, Kansas City, Nashville, Oklahoma City, and beyond, and is currently working on public works in Seattle and Scottsdale.

In 2022-2023, Smith had two concurring solo museum exhibitions: Three Parallels at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and Light + Change at Palm Springs Art Museum. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Toledo Art Museum, Laguna Art Museum, and Sonoma Valley Museum of Art. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Toledo Museum of Art, Palm Springs Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, and Newark Museum of Art, and has been featured in hundreds of print and online publications, including Architectural Digest, artnet, ARTnews, Forbes, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Wallpaper*, Yatzer, and Whitehot Magazine, among others.

Rogan Gregory
June 14, 2023 –

Hotel Bel-Air, a Dorchester Collection hotel, is delighted to announce the highly anticipated debut of its stunning Sculpture Garden with an exclusive exhibition by acclaimed artist Rogan Gregory. Showcasing a captivating collection of thought-provoking sculptures, Gregory's exhibition will immerse guests in a world of artistic brilliance.

Recognized for his mastery of transforming raw materials into awe-inspiring works of art, Rogan Gregory has gained international acclaim for his unique approach to sculpture. Beginning at a very early age, Rogan spent any spare time using his hands in the studio working on a sculpture or artwork. Time spent in the studio making art began to take up all of his time and eventually eclipsed his fashion career. Gregory began making sculpture at intimate and large scale. Through this three-dimensional expression, Gregory was able to articulate his true vision. “I produce works that encourage sensory and emotional engagement with the evolutionary processes deeply embedded in our consciousness.”

The exhibition features three pieces. Venus I and Venus II, are sculptural works consistent with Gregory’s ongoing Fertility Form series, where he sculpturally interprets the cycle of life— sexual intercourse, fertilization, cell division, and subsequent processes— placed in situ, these two sculptures take part in the historical tradition of the Venus form and are integral to Gregory's ongoing lifecycle saga. The works draw on personal biology, figuratively and literally, through forms of machination. The last piece, Pink Sphinx, is a prime example of his ability to merge the sculptural and functional while participating in, like Venus I and Venus II, an ancient practice of carving a Totem sculpture out of living rock. In this case he perpetuates another one of the oldest known sculptural traditions, the mythological Sphinx form, through his own lens of organicism and abstraction in the use of pink lioz marble, quartz, and sedimentary stone

Hotel Bel-Air's Sculpture Garden, an enchanting haven of artistic expression, is designed to enhance the hotel's existing lush landscape and provide guests with a harmonious blend of nature and creativity. Set against the backdrop of verdant gardens and the iconic Swan Lake where the swans gracefully glide across the lake, the garden serves as the perfect backdrop for Gregory's sculptures.

The exhibition was curated by James Hedges, the hotel’s Curator of the Arts. It is complimentary and open to the public seven days a week. All sculptures are available for purchase through Hedges Projects.

About Rogan Gregory

Rogan Gregory’s (b. 1972) work reflects his life-long interest in abstract forms, geology, ecological systems, evolutionary biology, and the impact of humans on the natural world. Inspired by the ways in which elements and the continuum of time shape our world, Gregory works repetitively—fluent with the recurring developmental processes of life on earth.

Gregory began his career in the fashion industry. In 2001, he designed his first eponymous clothing line and later became a leading voice in sustainable fashion. His early Manhattan atelier featured monumental wood benches, tables, and chairs that he had designed and made himself. The space reflected Gregory’s incredible ability as a craftsman, and his attention to the ways that objects are experienced in space and in dialogue as a cohesive whole—sensibilities that he has carried forward in his career. Beginning at a very early age, Rogan spent any spare time using his hands in the studio working on a sculpture or artwork. Time spent in the studio making art began to take up all of his time and eventually eclipsed his fashion career. Gregory began making sculpture at intimate and large scale. Through this three-dimensional expression, Gregory was able to articulate his true vision. “I produce works that encourage sensory and emotional engagement with the evolutionary processes deeply embedded in our consciousness.”

Gregory meditates on line and proportion to achieve incongruous balance and asymmetrical harmony; ultimate truths in nature. He works in a wide range of time-honored materials such as stone, bronze and wood, pairing these known materials with those less familiar to develop aggregated surfaces that elude simple classification. This process is best realized in Gregory’s Fertility Form series, where he sculpturally interprets the cycle of life— intercourse, fertilization, cell division, and subsequent processes— to create functional objects that take on a presence of their own. The artist has also begun to experiment with upholstery, using shearling to further encourage physical engagement with his work and defy the boundaries between art, design, and sculpture. Altogether, Gregory shows a unique mythos that is elegantly executed through minimal forms and distinct materials, seamlessly translated into sculptural and functional pieces.

“We have become separate from our evolutionary past and from each other...as so many aspects of our daily experiences are mediated through flat screens. My work reintroduces asymmetrical amorphous forms, textures and colors into our uniform, rectilinear environments. In doing so, I hope to evoke joy, and emotion more broadly, to encourage new connections to and awareness of our biosphere because it is critical to our existence, to our health, and to our conversations about sustaining life...”—Rogan Gregory

Rogan Gregory has been featured in prominent media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Architectural Digest, Elle Décor, Wallpaper, Surface Magazine, and more. Gregory’s work has been exhibited in galleries across the country, and in notable institutions such as the Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, VT. Gregory is currently based in Santa Monica, California.

Chris Wolston
October 25, 2023 –

Hotel Bel-Air is pleased to present sculptural artworks by Chris Wolston. Featuring 20 pieces inspired from Wolston’s adopted home of Medellin, Colombia, this body of work probes and celebrates the cultural significance of the region. It highlights the tropical flora and fauna and the practice of planting and cutting flowers to express joy, love, remembrance, and romance, and reimagines the masonry techniques utilized by the bricklayers in buildings throughout the country as gestural designs.

Featuring a new series of terracotta chairs and two of Wolston’s renowned Nalgona series, this collection continues the artist’s examination of craft-traditions, materiality and symbolism through objects that are as profound as they are joyful.

The exhibition is complimentary and open to the public daily.

For more information the artist and exhibition click here.