Yaron Michael Hakim | Antecedents

October 24 - November 26, 2025

Sargent’s Daughters is pleased to present Antecedents, a solo exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Los Angeles-based artist Yaron Michael Hakim. Adopted from Colombia as an infant, Hakim draws on his personal history and on interviews with other Colombian adoptees in a body of work that considers the interconnected stories we tell about ourselves, our families and cultures. These stories do not resolve into linear narratives or static identities, but exist instead as ever-changing collections of memories, influences, and dreams.

Hakim's practice is rooted in his search for personal origins. Following his displacement through adoption and an itinerant childhood that spanned three continents, he has worked to rediscover his cultural heritage and grow his own family in Los Angeles. Hakim’s paintings are always on recycled sailcloth, a material that represents ideas of movement and transformation for the artist. While his past bodies of work have focused on personal experiences, Antecedents foregrounds the experience of others whom he has interviewed about their adoptions and reunions with birth families. In these paintings, their stories become surreal portraits and narrative scenes. Human figures blend and intertwine with tropical plants against the real and imagined landscapes of Colombia. They reference, at once, the drama and monumentality of Diego Velázquez and the strange beauty of the anthropomorphic figures from the ancient Americas. 

Hakim’s Ancestor Gourds map the family trees of nine Colombian adoptees. Each sculpture is a gourd the artist grew in his garden, which is engraved with an individual’s birth family and adopted family trees, with no distinction drawn between the two. Unknown relations are marked with a circle, signifying their absence. In ancient South American cultures, gourds were commonly used as vessels, and had symbolic associations with women and fertility. In these sculptures, mothers, both known and unknown, are connected to the adoptees’ lost motherland of Colombia.

Throughout Antecedents, Hakim draws on the concept of creolization as explored by Martiniquais writer and thinker Édouard Glissant. Glissant wrote that creolization occurs when “the most distant and most heterogeneous elements possible [are] put into relation with each other. This produces unforeseeable results.” Hakim’s work is produced from a constellation of diverse citations and inspirations. The flora and fauna he depicts are not all native to Colombia, but rather imports that have become pervasive symbols of the Caribbean and parts of South America, like sugar cane and mangoes. The magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez is also an inspiration, as are narratives and memories of adoptees, the art historical work of Diego Velázquez, botanical illustrations, personal narrative, and the ecologies of Colombia. There are no boundaries between these sources, and Hakim combines them to produce images that speak to cultural connectedness and a shared search for meaning.

Yaron Michael Hakim (b. 1980 Bogotá, Colombia) lives and works in Los Angeles. Working across media,  Hakim’s practice reflects upon assimilation, living between cultures, and exoticization. Through detailed, surrealistic  depictions of flora and fauna, his paintings on recycled sailcloth investigate translation and migrancy, offering new  insights and approaches to understanding hybrid identities, in which the exotic is rendered personal and familiar. In  these paintings, as well as in small sculptural works, Hakim reconsiders identity through the lens of speciation,  disrupting the established boundaries of self and other, human and animal.

Hakim’s artist book, Yaron Michael Hakim: Psittaciformes was published with Grand Central Art Center and X  Artists’ Books in September 2023. The book features a foreword by John D. Spiak, GCAC Director/Chief Curator,  a text by poet Amy Gerstler, and a conversation between Hakim and MoCA Senior Curator José Luis Blondet. It  received the Bronze award from the Publisher’s Association of the West’s 2023 Book Design Awards in the Photog raphy/Art/Design Category.

Hakim received an MFA from the University of California (Irvine, CA) in 2013 and a BFA in Painting from the  Maryland Institute College of Art in 2002. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Sargent’s Daughters (Los Angeles,  CA), California State University (Sacramento, CA), Grand Central Art Center (Santa Ana, CA), Herrnando’s Hide away (Miami, FL), and LAXART (Los Angeles, CA). His work has been included in group exhibitions at The Float ing Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), California State University (San Francisco, CA), Praz-Delavallade (Los Angeles, CA),  Art+Chateau (Ladoix-Serrigny, France), The Pit (Los Angeles, CA), BBQLA (Los Angeles, CA); and The Box (Los  Angeles, CA), among others. Hakim’s work has been featured in Los Angeles Magazine, Hyperallergic, Georgia Review, and the Miami New Times, among other publications. He is represented by Sargent’s Daughters.