John Millei has had a long and illustrious career as a quintessential Los Angeles based artist. Over the years his work has been described as “anthropomorphic abstraction,” and with his most recent solo exhibition, the first in over ten years, at Lowell Ryan Projects in Mid City, Millei turns his attention away from more familiar themes of women sitting in chairs, their faces contorted into undulating shapes and swathes of glorious color, to focus more precisely on the intimate gesture.

Millei’s earlier works appear to be direct antecedents of Pablo Picasso and Willem de Kooning, both of whom brutally abstracted the features of their respective women, and while these new images also take the human form as their main focus, Millei’s ...