There’s a slice of Hollywood in Paris’ Almine Rech Gallery in the Marais — courtesy of artist Alex Israel’s Summer exhibition. A Los Angeles native, Israel’s work is intimately tied to his hometown roots. For starters, he mostly works out of the Scenic Art department at the Warner Brothers Studio backlot. Then there’s his palette — the crisp blues and dusky pastels of California skies — and the subjects themselves; Israel endlessly draws from and riffs on the Los Angeleno culture.

As It Lays, for example, is a series of film interviews with celebrities, such as Bret Easton Ellis, Cheryl Tiegs, Molly Ringwald and Phyllis Diller, in which he asks them seemingly innocuous questions. (To Diller: “How do you handle telemarketers when they call?” The reply: “I say goodbye.”) It’s his take on art history’s long lineage of portrait painting; as Israel once told W magazine, “Today, the portrait is the celebrity interview, and the great portraitist may be Oprah.”

Meanwhile, a number of his installations consist of actual film props — like the convertible and cactus sculpture in Desperado or the curiously juxtaposed lockers, classical statues and hanging vertebrae in Property. Those oversized colored and curved lenses casually leaning on the gallery walls? The culture of the lens is very much a Hollywood thing, sure, but these minimalist sculptures — made from actual UV-protected plastic — also nod to Israel’s own Freeway Eyewear company, which he founded in 2010. And what better symbol of the L.A. life than a pair of shades?