LOS ANGELES — For the first time in its history, the recessed, ground-floor gallery at the Marciano Art Foundation looked like the backstage of a women’s fashion show. A clothing rack held odd garments and hair extensions, a model sat having her makeup touched up, and others shuffled around in white robes.

But when these eight models — a mix of cisgender women and trans performers of different races — walked out past a large scrim and drifted onto an island of white sand to pose near colorful steel sculptures, they moved extremely slowly, with no hint of a runway swagger. And they wore body paint in place of clothes: a blue bikini-like form here, a green chaps-like shape there. The only tangible garments were see-through vinyl and molded-plastic pieces worn for warmth.

It’s a new twist by the Berlin-based artist Donna Huanca on the work of Yves Klein, who drenched nude models in his bright blue paint starting in the late 1950s. And it’s a new use for a space that, pre-Marciano, was a 2,400-seat theater where male members of the Scottish Rite Masonic Temple staged their own plays to attain higher levels of initiation or “education.”