Working across sculpture, painting, drawing, installation, performance and video, the artist explored relationships between the self and others, between inner life and external reality, and the doublings and repetitions that continually resurface in our past and present. never, never ever, never in my life, never in all my born days, never in all my life, never is the first solo exhibition of Upson's work in Los Angeles in over a decade, and the first in the United States since her death in 2021. Titled by the artist, the exhibition premieres several new series that demonstrate an artist at the height of her creative powers.

On view for the first time in the United States are two projects that debuted in the 58th and 59th Venice Biennales respectively: Kris's Dollhouse (2017–19) and Portrait (Vain German) (2020–21). Each illustrate Upson's deft combination of painterly and sculptural modes, as well as her complex method of casting and enlarging objects to produce uncanny effects and environments.

Upson's Portrait (Vain German) panels, which feature ghostly, abstracted visages, begin from a similar principle: the artist first created a miniature painting, which was 3D-scanned, enlarged and cast using a silicone mold. Working with the mold on the floor, Upson painted one layer at a time, from front to back, making marks with pigment-tinted Aqua-Resin. As she built up the image, the marks she put down first were hidden by later ones, a process she dubbed "blind painting." The final image is thus a combination of deliberate actions, chance effects and forgotten gestures, while the series as a whole relates to the theme of "vanitas" and its consequent notions of time, transience, death and beauty. In some panels the figure is clearly visible, while in others, traces of facial features are absorbed into Upson's network of Technicolor painterly motions.

The exhibition also presents a major new group of paintings on canvas that Upson embarked upon during the early months of the pandemic. Alone in her studio, she returned to the medium of her early Kiss Paintings (2007–10), reviving some of the same techniques.

The grid of gingham patterning reappears in a suite of arresting figurative sculptures that began as miniature wooden whittled dolls that were then enlarged and cast—another example of Upson's play with scale, as well as her interest in materials and process.

Throughout the exhibition, Upson's persistent characters, symbolism and gestures materialize through an array of aesthetic approaches and mediums, always returning to the inner workings of the self. Merging personhood and objecthood in ways both alluring and disturbing, the works on view demonstrate Upson's unwavering urge to interpret the psyches and psychoses of our complicated twenty-first century lives, with vigor, depth and beauty.