The opening night of the LA Art Show offered the usual enticements—free food and drink, opportunities for schmoozing and networking, celebrity-gawking—but it also happened to have a great deal of impressive contemporary art on display. Here, in no especial order, are my top ten pieces from the show.

I.T. Kim, Christ on Cross at Primo Oro Gallery

The Korean artist’s material is gleaming 24-karat gold, subtly shaped into relief paintings. Here, only the basic outline of Christ crucified on the cross is discernible. It evokes medieval religious icons as well as raises damning questions about the intersection of wealth and Christianity.

Jordi Alcaraz’s, Ideas of Sculpture, at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts

Several pieces by this enigmatic artist were on display, but this large Plexiglas box with several pairs of pliers stuck in the act of rending the glass was impossible to look away from.  It’s tempting to look for referents, but they are better left unarticulated; Alcaraz’s alchemical art works best when contemplated on the same mental plane as reading poetry or listening to Beethoven.

Suh Seung Won’s Simultaneity, at The Columns Gallery

This gorgeous exemplar of “Dansaekhwa” (the Korean word for monochrome) painting features overlapping squares in airy pastel colors softly tumbling across the top of a monochromatic canvas. The subtlety of depth is achieved through restrained, repetitive strokes of the brush, demonstrating late 20th century Korean artists’ desire to explore temporality and the meditative possibilities of artmaking.

Carol Sears, Murrambiji, at Coagula Curatorial

Coagula Curatorial’s booth of  septuagenarian Sears’s work was one of the most welcome spaces at the show. This piece, which an effusive volunteer told me the paint was still drying on, is emblematic of her oil on canvas paintings with their precise black lines, warm hues, and intricate abstracted shapes.

Maria Berrio, He Loves Me…He Loves Me Not, at Praxis International Art

Berrio is a modern-day mix of Gustav Klimt and Frida Kahlo with her lush and dense works of minuscule pieces of torn paper comprising delicate flowers and girls with dark flowing  locks. In this piece three women with elaborately ornate and detailed dresses stand in place of the petals on flower stems. The title references the folklorish way for little girls to find out if their beloved returns the sentiment, but Berrio’s universe is fecund and inviting enough without outsiders.

Marcel Ceuppens, The Bather, at Vogelsang Gallery

The artist informed me he was a real-life “Mad Man”, and it certainly shows. His digial paintings are all bold mid-century modern, with hints of Calder and Picasso. Bright and flat graphic shapes and a small man in a gray flannel suit asking “Elle est bonne?” create a whimsical but irresistible image of art and advertising’s shared pursuit of evoking desire.

Kalish Editions, Native American (#1/25), at FP Contemporary

Michael Kalish takes found metals and fashions them into flat, Pop-inspired creations. At a distance his Native American certainly packs a punch with its bold color, but it should be viewed close-up in order to discern that it’s similar to a pop-up card made of metal –nine carved sheets of metal overlap and are bolted together to create a unified image.

Baas Meeuws, Untitled (#92), at Art All Ways

Meeuws’s vibrant still lifes are visually similar to the great works of his Dutch forbearers, but he achieves them by painstakingly photographing individual flowers and digitally combining them into the finished image. The result is that same appreciation for the beauty of nature and the exactness of the artist’s hand, but updated for the 21st century.

David LaChapelle, Jesus is My Homeboy -Footwash at Vogelsang Gallery

The oftentimes-controversial artist, drawn to kitsch, celebrity, and spectacle, takes on the biblical scene of Mary Magdalene washing the feet of Jesus. In the staged photograph he keeps Jesus beatific but sets the scene in a dingy kitchen and makes Mary a trashy blonde. It was hard to ignore with its humor, subversiveness, and glossy, garish colors.

Performance by Angel Delgado

Almost everyone who walked by these doors fused together in a freestanding square couldn’t help but peer through the peepholes. They were greeted with the figure of exiled Cuban performance artist Angel Delgado, standing in a space barely large enough to move around in and certainly too small to sit down in. While the revelry of the art world swirled around him, he endured in straitened and uncomfortable quarters.