Sophie Kovel Photographs Jeff Bezos’s Fortress-Like LA Estate

1801 Angelo Drive, Beverly Hills, California: the Jack Warner Estate, 9.4 acres of pure Hollywood glamour. Named after its first owner, co-founder of the Warner Bros. corporation, the lavish neo-Georgian mansion is defined to the outside world by its enormous hedge, which, at more than six metres tall, precludes all views into the compound. At diez gallery, Amsterdam, artist Sophie Kovel confronts the famous property’s staggering perimeter – which, according to Kovel, is among the tallest residential fences in the United States. The artist’s interest, however, is animated less by her amazement at this feat of landscaping than by the estate’s history and the power of its current owner: Jeff Bezos.

The sparse exhibition consists of only four black and white images of the exterior of the trophy property. Kovel’s photographs feel forensic, like evidence from a crime scene, yet with the hazy romanticism of a Los Angeles postcard. Palm trees shoot into an empty LA sky (Two Palms, all works 2025); a monolithic stretch of hedge follows the curve of an empty, pavement-less road (Property Line). Kovel’s practice is concerned with the semiotics of power, and her spatial study at diez has been judiciously edited to its most spare, and therefore effective, form. A property map is also provided in the gallery handout. The parcel view of the estate and its adjacent neighbourhood illustrates how the massive compound was assembled, lot by lot, over a period of 100 years. Today, Bezos’s property – one of dozens he owns across the US – is roughly the same size as his 28 neighbours’ combined.

Kovel’s exhibition title, ‘Metes and Bounds’, alludes to this logic of enclosure. While modern planners in the US rely on ‘lot and block’ methods of land demarcation, dividing a tract into smaller gridded lots, the older metes and bounds system surveyed land according to geography and custom. Nobles in England, and westward ‘pioneers’ in the US, described the boundaries of their ever-expanding property claims according to distances and geographical features, pushing out peasants or natives along the way. Kovel’s show demonstrates the continued exclusionary power of hedge-laying. 

Looking closely at the photographs, the California bliss evaporates; what remains is paranoia. One photograph depicts stately metal gates that obscure any view up the driveway (Property Line); another features a pole with several cameras attached to it, peeking out into the public right of way (Cameras). In fact, Bezos isn’t the only tech mogul with a neighbourhood-eating fortress. In Palo Alto, California, Mark Zuckerberg is building his own super-compound, so far linking together a portfolio of eleven suburban homes. Local residents complain about private security details lurking on the streets and of the endless underground excavations being undertaken. In a political era where money makes might and might makes right, the tech-media overlords are unbound by silly bureaucratic precedents like lot lines and the need to respect the public.

Kovel’s restrained, external approach to telling the story of the Warner estate is frustrating for what it does not indulge in: the human desire to be nosey. Where is Marilyn Monroe’s guesthouse? What about the koi pond? Is there really a nine-hole golf course? Thankfully, a journey to Google tells you a lot about what’s behind the sky-high hedges – the fruit of $20 million in landscaping paid for by the mansion’s second owner, David Geffen of DreamWorks – yet Kovel intentionally ignores this hidden interior. Beating the bounds of Bezos’s mansion with her camera, Kovel instead makes art about media ownership. Here, at 1801 Angelo Drive, is an enclosed fantasy world, cut off from public visibility and accountability: a death of the commons and an ode to oligarchy.

Sophie Kovel’s ‘Metes and Bounds’ is on view at diez gallery, Amsterdam, until 19 October

^{Main image: Sophie Kovel, Two Palms, Jack L. Warner Estate, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles (detail), 2025, archival pigment print, 60 × 40 cm. Courtesy: the artist}