Gilt & Shadow: The Art of Neil Lane
September 18 - December 5, 2026
Tuesday through Saturday from 12:00-5:00 PM

The PDC Design Gallery is pleased to announce Gilt and Shadow: the Art of Neil Lane, a retrospective of works by the artist Neil Lane. The exhibition will be on view from September 18 – December 4, 2026 in the freestanding building at 750 N. San Vicente Blvd in West Hollywood. Exhibition open hours are Tuesdays - Saturdays 12-5pm.

For more than half a century, Neil Lane has led a double life. To the world, he is one of the most celebrated jewelry designers of his generation—the cultivated eye behind red carpet icons--a name synonymous with glamor and design.  But since childhood, Lane has also been quietly making art—a private practice unseen even by many who know him well, a practice that has run parallel to his glittering public career for decades.

Exhibition curator Don Bacigalupi writes, “This exhibition is Neil Lane’s first public act of disclosure. Gilt and Shadow traces an artistic journey from Lane’s childhood work to his recent mature oeuvre, revealing an artist who has been in continuous dialogue with his own history and preoccupations.”

As a teenager, Lane began a nascent business of his own: finding and selling treasures from the street and flea markets, identified with an already burgeoning connoisseur’s eye. His knowledge about jewelry was only equaled by his interest in art and art history, and in both arenas he was largely self-taught.

When he moved to Los Angeles in the 1980s, Lane became the go-to jeweler for Hollywood’s leading icons. He reintroduced historic and vintage jewelry aesthetics into contemporary high style, revolutionizing the industry and styling a wide range of prominent figures for the red carpet over the following decades.

Throughout the years that followed, Lane continued to make art privately, though with less regularity than in previous years. That changed in the early 1990s following the death of a loved one from AIDS. The loss prompted a sustained return to studio work, including a monumental multi-canvas installation memorializing the final period of that person’s life. This installation is to be exhibited for the first time publicly in Gilt and Shadow.  From this point forward, art-making became a constant in Lane’s life, running alongside, rather than beneath, his public career.

In the 2000s and beyond, even as his reputation as a jewelry designer reached its height with his high profile role on television’s The Bachelor franchise, Lane devoted increasing time to his studio practice. Recurring motifs and characters again appear—a private iconography Lane returns to as stand-ins or avatars for himself: a hummingbird borrowed from Martin Johnson Heade; images of his younger self in classical poses; tulips grown in the artist’s garden, along with butterflies; and a cartoonish long-legged bird—a cousin to Max Ernst’s Loplop—a kind of alter ego in constant molt.

In these later works, complex layers of drawing, ink color manipulation, and reconstructed self-portrait imagery are laid beneath metallic leaf—gold, silver, and copper. The surfaces are physically abraded, gouged, slashed and punctured; their “wounds” are then repaired in precious metals, a process analogous to the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi. In ever more elaborate layers, the avatars are flagellated and abused, and then bandaged and adorned—trauma and triumph, destruction and creation, gilt and shadow—coexisting in richly laden and densely meaningful works.

Gilt and Shadow is Neil Lane’s first major retrospective exhibition as a visual artist.

The PDC Design Gallery is a two-level museum-quality exhibition space located in a freestanding building in the Pacific Design Center Plaza, (PDC)/West Hollywood. The gallery formerly housed MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) for twenty years. Led by Milan-based curator Helen Varola, the gallery re-opened in March 2022 with its mission to explore design as an extension of artistic practice. Programming is devoted to contemporary art and design engaging internationally renowned artists, designers, curators, and leading academic institutions to draw upon the collective intelligence and creativity of design culture.

The Pacific Design Center Design Gallery is an exhibition space located in the former MOCA building on the PDC campus. PDC Design Gallery is devoted to art and design, engaging internationally renowned artists, celebrated designers, noted curators, professional design organizations and leading academic institutions to draw upon the collective intelligence and creativity of California’s vast design culture, as well as international design invention and innovation.