Exhibitions · Los Angeles
Reading time: 8 minAn electrocuted pickle. A cartoon character. Six larger-than-life animations, hand-made and projected onto wooden cut-outs shaped like the things they show. At Regen Projects, Alex Hubbard has built a show that runs directly against the glossy perfection of the machine, and it is open until 15 August.
There is an electrocuted pickle in Los Angeles right now, animated, larger than life, projected onto a wooden board cut precisely to the shape of a pickle. It is one of six such works in Alex Hubbard’s new exhibition at Regen Projects, Abstract or Regular?, and it is a great deal more serious than it sounds.
The show, new video work, and a painting opened on 11 July 2026 and runs until 15 August, arriving at a pointed moment. In a year when the image-making world has been overwhelmed by AI-generated pictures and digital fabrication, all of it frictionless, glossy, and slightly weightless, Hubbard has made a body of work built entirely from the everyday, the found, and the hand-made, and set it up in direct opposition to the machine. That opposition is the reason to go.
© Alex Hubbard, courtesy the artist and Regen Projects.
The problem Hubbard set himself
Every Hubbard project starts as a puzzle, and this one is unusually clean.
He wanted to put motion inside a fixed object. Animation is, by nature, something that happens on a screen: a rectangle, glowing, separate from the room. Hubbard’s self-imposed challenge was to escape the rectangle: to make an animation that lives in an object rather than on a display.
His solution is the shaped screen. Each of the six animations is projected not onto a wall or a flat panel but onto a wooden construction cut to the silhouette of its subject: the pickle-shaped board for the pickle, and so on. The image and the object it plays on share an outline.
And then, characteristically, he breaks his own rule. In several works, the animated movement pushes beyond the edges of the custom cut-out, spilling past the wooden boundary that was supposed to contain it. Having built himself a constraint, Hubbard immediately contests it, which is, as we will see, the most Hubbard thing he could possibly do.
The result stretches, bends and expands the borders between painting, sculpture, film and performance until you cannot comfortably say which one you are looking at. That confusion is the work. The title asks it directly: Abstract or Regular?
Installation view of Alex Hubbard Abstract or Regular? At Regen Projects, Los Angeles -July 11–August 15, 2026 – Photo: Evan Bedford, courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects.
Against the glossy machine
Here is what makes the show land in 2026 specifically.
The defining visual fact of this cultural moment is the flood of AI-generated imagery, technically flawless, infinitely producible, and utterly without incident. It has no hand in it. Nothing went wrong in the making of it, because nothing was really made.
Hubbard’s animations are the opposite in every respect. They are sourced from the everyday, the found, and the hand-made, assembled, drawn, filmed and constructed, with all the friction and imperfection that implies. Where an AI image is seamless, Hubbard’s work shows the seams on purpose. Where digital fabrication is exact, his wooden cut-outs are made into objects with edges you could touch.
This is not a nostalgic gesture, and it would be a mistake to read it as one. It is an argument about where images come from, and a wager that a hand-made, slightly wrong animation of an electrocuted pickle carries more life than any photorealistic render. On the evidence of Hubbard’s career, it is a wager worth taking seriously.
© Alex Hubbard, courtesy the artist and Regen Projects.
The painting, and the through-line
Alongside the videos hangs a new painting, and it is not a change of subject.
Hubbard has spent his whole career worrying at the figure-ground relationship, the border between representational form and pure abstraction, between the thing depicted and the field it sits in. The painting continues exactly that inquiry, and it shares the videos’ central idea: an idiosyncratic way of smuggling three-dimensional and kinetic elements into media that are supposed to be flat and still.
That is the show’s deep consistency. The videos take a moving medium and trap it in an object; the painting takes a still medium and tries to make it move. Both are pushing the same border from opposite sides.
Installation view of Alex Hubbard Abstract or Regular? At Regen Projects, Los Angeles -July 11–August 15, 2026 – Photo: Evan Bedford, courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects.
Who Alex Hubbard is
Understanding why this works requires understanding how Hubbard makes things, because his method is genuinely distinctive.
Born in Toledo, Oregon, in 1975, Hubbard took a BFA at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2003, and lives and works in Los Angeles. But the biography that matters is in the studio.
From 2007, he became known for his table-top videos, carefully choreographed studio experiments filmed from above, in which paint sprays and pours, objects are assembled and then knocked down or demolished, liquids spill, and Hubbard’s own hands are seen orchestrating the chaos. Working with fast-drying materials like epoxy and latex, he is forced to act quickly, embracing accident and chance because the material will not wait for him. Comedy, timing and gesture do the work.
And this is the sentence that explains the whole practice:
© Alex Hubbard, courtesy the artist and Regen Projects.
“I like to present myself with a challenge or puzzle and try to solve it in a graceful and interesting way. I see people make the same painting for like ten years and I just have no idea how they can stand to do it. I would just feel like I was pantomiming myself. I love a good studio disaster, then trying to get out of it.”
Alex Hubbard
A good studio disaster, then trying to get out of it. That is not a throwaway line; it is the operating principle. Hubbard builds situations that can go wrong, lets them, and then improvises his way out, and the record of that escape is the work. It is why an animation that breaks the edges of its own wooden screen is not a flaw in Abstract or Regular? but the entire point. He set the constraint in order to escape it, gracefully, in front of you.
His work is held by an extraordinary roster of institutions: MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney (which included him in the 2010 Biennial), LACMA, the Hammer, the Walker, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Victoria, and Mexico City’s Colección Jumex, among many others. This is not an emerging talent. It is a mature, mid-career artist, still refusing to make the same thing twice.
Installation view of Alex Hubbard Abstract or Regular? At Regen Projects, Los Angeles -July 11–August 15, 2026 – Photo: Evan Bedford, courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects.
Regen Projects
The venue matters, because Regen Projects is one of the defining galleries of Los Angeles.
Founded by Shaun Caley Regen (with Stuart Regen), it has for decades been among the most influential contemporary galleries on the West Coast, representing an exceptional list of artists and helping to build LA’s standing as a genuine centre of contemporary art rather than a satellite of New York. Its home on Santa Monica Boulevard is a serious room, and it gives Hubbard’s shaped screens the scale and the darkness they need.
For a city whose relationship to the image is more complicated than any other, Hollywood on one side, a deep experimental-art tradition on the other, a show about hand-made moving pictures, staged against the tide of machine-made ones, could not be more at home.
© Alex Hubbard, courtesy the artist and Regen Projects.
Visiting
Alex Hubbard: Abstract or Regular? Regen Projects, 6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90038 11 July – 15 August 2026 Gallery hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 10 am – 6 pm. Free.
Installation view of Alex Hubbard Abstract or Regular? At Regen Projects, Los Angeles -July 11–August 15, 2026 – Photo: Evan Bedford, courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects.
Frequently asked questions
What is Abstract or Regular? An exhibition of new work by Alex Hubbard at Regen Projects, Los Angeles: six larger-than-life hand-made animations projected onto wooden constructions cut to the shape of their subjects, plus a new painting. It runs 11 July to 15 August 2026.
Who is Alex Hubbard? An American artist, born in Toledo, Oregon in 1975, based in Los Angeles, known for his table-top videos and for work that dissolves the boundaries between painting, sculpture, film and performance. His work is held by MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, LACMA and many other institutions.
What is the show about? Putting motion inside a fixed object; animation that escapes the rectangular screen, and, more broadly, defending the hand-made and the found against the glossy perfection of AI-generated imagery and digital fabrication.
Where is Regen Projects? 6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90038. Founded by Shaun Caley Regen, it is one of the leading contemporary galleries in Los Angeles.
How much does it cost? Gallery exhibitions are free to visit, Tuesday to Saturday, 10 am – 6 pm.
Installation view of Alex Hubbard Abstract or Regular? At Regen Projects, Los Angeles -July 11–August 15, 2026 – Photo: Evan Bedford, courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects.
Final thoughts
The easy way to describe Abstract or Regular? is as a witty show about a pickle and a cartoon. The accurate way is as one of the more pointed arguments an artist has made this year.
At the exact moment the world decided that images should be effortless, seamless and machine-made, Alex Hubbard has filled a major Los Angeles gallery with animations that are none of those things: hand-sourced, imperfect, projected onto wooden boards he cut himself, and prone to breaking their own edges. He built each one as a disaster to escape from, and left the escape on view.
It is on until 15 August. Go and watch the pickle.
© Alex Hubbard, courtesy the artist and Regen Projects.
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