While the LACMA's retrospective of Frank Gehry is based off a previous show organized last year at the Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, its Los Angeles locale (plus an additional gallery not present at the Paris show) provides a different context. Some critics took a fawning approach to the show; others looked at the work in the context of Gehry's recent undertaking of the redevelopment of the Los Angeles River, and his history in Los Angeles generally.

KCRW's resident art critic Edward Goldman said that "LACMA, with its unique history of collaboration with Frank Gehry as a designer for a number of the museum's high profile exhibitions, was able not only to deliver a thoroughly researched lecture, but also succeeded to bring us, visitors, inside his studio and even inside his mind." Goldman, who marveled at how lovely it would be to travel to Minneapolis to see the Frederick R. Weisman Museum, gushed that "it's simply amazing how prolific and unstoppable Gehry has been in his career, which stretches over five decades" adding that "the exhibition conveys the magic of Gehry's architecture, and shows him as an inspired artist who shapes his buildings like monumental sculptures." 

 Dyanne Weiss of The Liberty Voice helpfully explains that the "retrospective at LACMA traces the arc of Gehry’s career from the early 1960s to the present. It shows how the ideas flow into buildings" before offering a technically descriptive overview of each gallery. While The Guardian's Jordan Riefe called attention to the new gallery of more recent models, including Facebook's HQ, he was more interested in Gehry's comments to the press attendees about his Los Angeles River project, which he notes is not featured in the retrospective. Gehry reportedly said about his controversial involvement with the L.A. River project, “You can’t just come in big King Kong, I’m going to change the river without spending the time talking to those people. So we’ve brought in a lot of people who know how to do these kinds of things." 

It falls to Anna Katz of Blouin Art Info to cast a more thoughtful critical eye over the LACMA exhibition. She writes that "his experimentation with materials has been a hallmark of Gehry’s work since he first opened his eponymous practice in 1962, and the early projects presented at LACMA are especially exciting because they offer a timely reminder: before he elevated twisting, torqueing planes of titanium to the status of high architecture, Gehry did much the same with commonplace scrap wood and chain metal." She touches on the inherent contradiction of a man who conceives of himself primarily as an outsider being the central luminary of a notoriously competitive and difficult profession, and reviews Gehry's often fraught past with influential figures in Los Angeles (among them, Eli Broad). Ultimately, she closes with an elegant summation of the context of the LACMA show, both for Gehry and Los Angeles in general: "But even if Gehry is content to let go of the past, Los Angeles won’t allow it. I passed the Gemini G.E.L. gallery on Melrose Avenue while walking home from LACMA  — an early Gehry building circa 1979, with inventive insertions of plywood and steel to an otherwise placid white front from the days before he could afford to work in titanium — and its stubborn, subtly aggressive façade still demands a double take."