Gallery Luisotti is pleased to present 1911 Sunset Boulevard, an exhibition of works by six contemporary artists made in response to the former Taix French Restaurant in Echo Park. Comprising photographs, altered photographic works, and a single painting, the exhibition follows Taix through its final months, its closing night, and the landscape left by its demolition. The exhibition takes its title from the restaurant’s address.

For more than sixty years, Taix occupied a singular place on Sunset Boulevard. Its dining rooms, banquet halls, lounges, murals, and upholstered booths formed an interior world at once theatrical and familiar, too large and layered to take in whole. Private dinners gave way to performances, parties, meetings, and nights that continued long after anyone had stopped ordering.

The building and its social life cannot be considered apart. The scale and strangeness of the architecture allowed different publics to coexist. The restaurant’s informality let those publics alter the meaning of the rooms from one evening to the next, becoming a nightclub, a salon, a memorial hall, or a temporary refuge from the city outside.

The works in 1911 Sunset Boulevard approach the restaurant through distinct forms of attention. They do not assemble a unified portrait or treat documentation as a means of restoring Taix intact. Instead, the restaurant appears by turns as an arrangement of rooms, a crowded social world, a half-visible atmosphere, a damaged record, a worked surface, and finally a vacancy whose effects extend beyond the building’s footprint.

Maxfield Hegedus (b. 1986, Santa Monica, CA) is a multidisciplinary artist raised in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles County. A graduate of the Los Angeles Unified School District, Hegedus earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from SAIC. His additional studies include programs at NYU ITP, UCLA, and MSA. Hegedus currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Recent projects include collaborating with writer Gracie Hadland and editor Luis Ortega Govela on an article about Taix for publication in Flash Art Volumes 003. The volume titled “Opacity” examines the cultural, architectural, and political meanings of transparency and concealment, exploring how built environments and materials shape ideas of visibility, privacy, control, and complexity.

Marcel Alcalá (b. 1990, Santa Ana, CA) has had solo exhibitions at Marlborough, New York, NY; Deli Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Mickey Gallery, Chicago, IL; and Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. They participated in Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Their work has been featured in group shows at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA; Lyles & King, New York, NY; and Simon Lee Gallery, New York, NY, among others. Alcalá has exhibited in numerous museums and institutions including The Cheech, Riverside, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL; and Tom of Finland Foundation, Los Angeles, CA. They will perform in The Art Parade, presented by LACMA and Jeffrey Deitch, in Los Angeles, June 2026. Their work has been written about in Flaunt, Hyperallergic, LA Times, LA Weekly, and PAPER, among others. They have been an artist-in-residence at Fire Island Art Residency (2023), Skowhegan (2022) and Tom of Finland Foundation, Los Angeles (2020). Alcalá lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Photos by Marcel Alaclá, New Years Eve at Taix

Abdi Taslimi (b. 1982, Santa Monica, CA) is one of three founders of Gay Guy Night at Taix (GGNAT), a creator and host of the seminal Perfume Exchange event series, and the inventor of a novel erotic body odorant (forthcoming). Abdi’s practice includes video, photography, poetry, and experimental perfumery. As a longtime resident of Echo Park, Abdi’s devotion to Taix spanned multiple decades.

Evan Whale (b. 1987, Washington, DC) is an artist whose experimental photographic practice treats the print as both image and material — a surface to be carved, chemically altered, painted, and re-energized — in order to construct an expanded biographical view of the Southern Californian landscape. His work moves fluidly between photography and painting, drawing on California’s seismic faults, domestic interiors, desert ecologies, and the changing nature of the Los Angeles cityscape. Whale holds a BA from Bard College and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, and has exhibited at Regen Projects (Los Angeles), the FLAG Art Foundation (New York), Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (Paris & Salzburg), 321 Gallery (Brooklyn), and the Denver Art Museum, among others. Whale is represented by Tyler Park Presents in Los Angeles, with an upcoming solo presentation at the gallery in 2027 focusing on the recent erasure of Taix French Restaurant.

Arturo Soto (b. 1981, Ciudad Juárez, MX) is a Mexican photographer and writer living in Los Angeles. He has published the photobooks In the Heat (2018), A Certain Logic of Expectations (2021), and Border Documents (2025). Soto holds a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Oxford, as well as postgraduate degrees in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York and in Art History from University College London. He curated the exhibition Foreign Correspondence (2014) at the Architectural Association in London and participated in the first edition of Forecast Platform at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in the anthologies Decolonization and Diversity in Contemporary Photography, Imaginaria, and the Subjective Atlas of Mexico. Soto’s critical writing has been published in VII Insider, C4 Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, and ASX, among other places.

Kittipong (b. 1993, Guadalajara, MX) is a notary public, ribbon maker and midnight artist her practice consists of mistakes, accidents and following the light