About the exhibition
The Shape of Elsewhere
Moving across painting, collage, abstraction, figuration, street art, and fused glass, The Shape of Elsewhere explores how familiar forms open into unexpected worlds.
Brigitte Puschmann | David Gordon | Haleh Mashian | Itaewon | John Grande | Mark Engel | Mike O'Guinn | Rachel Berkowitz
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THE SHAPE OF ELSEWHERE
Opening Reception: September 26, 2026, 6–9 PM
On View: September 26–October 24, 2026
Mash Gallery, 812 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90069
Mash Gallery presents The Shape of Elsewhere, a group exhibition featuring Rachel Berkowitz, Mark Engel, David Gordon, John Grande, Haleh Mashian, Mike O’Guinn, Brigitte Puschmann, and Itaewon.
Moving across painting, collage, abstraction, figuration, street art, and fused glass, the Shape of Elsewhere enters a world where the recognizable becomes expansive. Familiar forms carry the sensation of another time or place. Bodies, landscapes, architecture, natural elements, and cultural imagery become starting points for experiences shaped by imagination and transformation.
Rooted in the early twentieth-century Surrealist movement's interest in the unconscious and the liberation of imagination from rational constraints, the element of the surreal within The Shape of Elsewhere emerges as a fluid mode of perception. Familiar forms move beyond their expected contexts and reorganize through altered scale, layered space, and surprising material relationships. The surreal functions as a way for each artist to make the familiar feel open to possibility.
The exhibition’s shared structure becomes clearest when the same visual idea passes from one work to another. A flower appears half-submerged in atmosphere and returns elsewhere with almost photographic clarity. The subject remains recognizable, yet its role changes from memory to image to object. This visual tension creates the exhibition’s central rhythm. Forms emerge and recede. Surfaces hold traces of movement. Solid elements appear to float, dissolve, or shift.
The works also share a fantastical quality that emerges through composition. Layered realities and unexpected relationships give the exhibition its sense of wonder. Each work begins within the visible world and opens a passage toward something more elusive.
Light also moves through the exhibition in different forms. Some paintings create luminosity through color, allowing a surface to suggest an internal glow. The fused-glass sculptures hold and redirect actual light, changing as the viewer moves around them. Together, these works turn light into a connective material.
“Elsewhere” emerges the instant a recognizable form moves just beyond where memory expects it to stop, dissolving into gesture, fracturing into geometry, or accumulating through layers until it becomes something new. Within this heightened state of perception, the familiar feels both distant and intimately known, while imagination becomes a way of seeing more deeply.
Although each artist arrives through a distinct process and medium, the exhibition reveals a common pursuit. Every composition establishes a world with its own internal logic. Some are ordered and architectural; others are fluid and atmospheric. Together, they all create a continuous movement between form and freedom, clarity and mystery. These echoes and contrasts allow The Shape of Elsewhere to unfold as one continuous conversation, giving the exhibition the feeling of a world that is continually remembering and reinventing itself.
RSVP to the openingThe artists
Brigitte Puschmann works between Germany and Austria, painting transformation, layered realities, and the interplay of color, form, and perception. She turned to art full-time in 2024 after a career in business focused on organizational transformation. She studied at the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts Salzburg and is completing her diploma at the Academy of Fine Arts Kolbermoor under Prof. Markus Lüpertz. Her work has shown throughout Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy, including a solo exhibition at Samuelis Baumgarte Gallery, and is held in the Copelouzos Family Art Museum, Athens.
Mike O'Guinn is a neo-expressionist painter blending the emotive force of 1950s and '60s Expressionism with a contemporary urban sensibility. Having moved from photography to painting over the past decade, he works spontaneously, letting music, from punk and grunge to underground hip-hop, and memories of the Pacific Northwest guide each piece, holding fluidity against boldness and chaos against structure. He calls the raw, vulnerable moments this produces "glimpses," in the spirit of performers like Kurt Cobain or Jeff Buckley.
John Grande is a New York–based artist whose constructed paintings, sculptures, and murals draw on techniques from the Old Masters to Pop Art and mid-century advertising. Born in 1969 in Huntington, Long Island, he earned his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1995. His work remixes art history and popular culture, from Hollywood glamour to street art, anchored by the presence of his hand rather than a single style. Grande has exhibited internationally, including in New York, Los Angeles, South Korea, Italy, and India, with work collected worldwide.
Haleh Mashian is a Los Angeles–based artist working in Contemporary Abstract Expressionism, known for dimensional surfaces, sculptural paint, and psychological atmosphere. Her Tree, Water, and Rose series ground organic structure in pure visual rhythm. In 2018, Mashian founded MASH Gallery as an extension of her artistic philosophy, curating exhibitions with the same intuition she brings to her painting. Since opening, it has become a hub in Los Angeles' art and design community, and Mashian has curated hundreds of artists from around the world.
David Gordon was a porcelain artist for more than thirty years, creating public art, sculpture, and murals, before turning to glass. He now builds freestanding sculptures of solid fused glass set in metal bases, working thickness, color saturation, and flow, some pieces taking weeks to fire before being cold-worked by hand. Gordon is drawn to glass's translucence and its ability to hold and reflect light, capturing an environment the way a photograph captures a moment. Each sculpture is finished on every side, offering a different view from every angle.
Itaewon is the professional and street-art name of Jake Attewell, an East London–based artist born in Britain and raised in South Korea. His aesthetic draws on the energy and architecture of Seoul, and his work is known for modern abstraction, geometric line work, and vibrant color that challenges traditional perspective. Itaewon has worked extensively in public and street art, including residencies and collaborations featured by Global Street Art.
Mark Engel is a figurative painter whose work treats the body as a site of transformation, shifting perception, and psychological complexity, merging figures with evolving landscapes through layering, fragmentation, and distortion. Engel earned his MFA from San Jose State University and teaches at Mission College in Santa Clara. His recent solo shows include Shifting Terrain at the Triton Museum of Art, Shapeshifters at Know Future Gallery, and Constellations at Vargas Gallery, with work featured in Artsin Square, Content Magazine, and Curatory Magazine.
Rachel Berkowitz is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, photography, and performance. Raised in London and now based in Los Angeles, she creates luminous, emotionally charged work exploring biophilia, femininity, movement, and transformation, merging London's romantic nostalgia with LA's saturated, atmospheric glow. A 2016 UCLA Fine Art graduate, Berkowitz has exhibited across the US and Europe, performed at Paris Fashion Week, completed a residency at the La Napoule Art Foundation in France, and been featured on Netflix's Selling Sunset and in The Wall Street Journal. She directs æsthetíque studio, a Los Angeles creative hub for art education and community events.
The Shape of Elsewhere opens September 26th and runs through October 24th, 2026. MASH Gallery is located at 812 N La Cienega Blvd, West Hollywood. Gallery hours: Tuesday–Friday, 11am–5pm, and by appointment.
