With gallery after gallery announcing plans to open in Los Angeles, the international art scene is closely watching what’s taking place in the city. Part of the reason for this sudden burst of attention is Frieze Los Angeles, which launched its third edition on Thursday morning with a VIP preview. A tight affair of around 100 booths set in a custom-built tent across from the Beverly Hilton, the fair saw a steady stream of visitors, and dealers reported strong sales throughout the day.
Before the fair opened, Frieze hosted a small breakfast in which the mayor of Beverly Hills, Robert Wunderlich, who had arrived on a bicycle and was holding his pink helmet, gave remarks. Speaking to a reporter afterward, Wunderlich said that Frieze is a “great fit,” as the city “has had a strong connection to arts and culture since its founding that continues today.” He added, “We’re thrilled Frieze is here and are pleased to be its host. To misquote the ending of Casablanca, I hope this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship.”
Below, a look at the ten best booths at Frieze Los Angeles.
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Amelia Toledo at Nara Roesler
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Though she was included in the landmark traveling exhibition “Radical Women,” which opened at the Hammer Museum in 2017, Brazilian artist Amelia Toledo remains woefully under-recognized in the United States. Nara Roesler, a leading Brazilian gallery which has worked with the artist’s estate since 2019, is looking to change that at this year’s fair. A student of Anita Malfatti and Waldemar da Costa, and a friend of Mira Schendel, Lygia Clark, and Lygia Pape, Toledo created an expansive body of work over her almost-eight-decade career prior to her death in 2017. For its booth, Roesler is highlighting two series that emphasize the role that nature played in Toledo’s practice. On the walls are her poetically simple “Horizon” paintings, made during the last decades of her life, in which shades of the same color—oranges, blues, reds—meet at a center horizon line. On the floor are several examples from her “Minas de cor” (Color mines) series in which Brazilian stones—yellow and red jasper, crystal quartz, blue quartzite—are piled in stainless steel bands. Toledo polished the stones to further highlight their beauty.
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Samuel Levi Jones at Vielmetter
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews At this solo booth, Samuel Levi Jones is presenting a powerful new series of mixed-media works in which the covers and pages of Indiana history and law books are juxtaposed in various compositions. These works are eye-catching, no doubt in part because the artist has pulped and dyed his books, lending them a material quality. Though at first glance these abstractions can seem simple, Jones is looking to contend with the many ways that recorded history can systemically perpetuate inequities.
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Tania Candiani at Vermelho
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Mexico City–based artist Tania Candiani is showing two powerful bodies of work at the booth of São Paulo’s Vermelho gallery. In Sobre el tiempo (2008–22), two wall installations of rows of black and white alarm clocks form diamond and hourglass shapes. There are also two life-size sewn paintings from her “Manifestantes” series (2019–22), which she began a week before the “revolución diamantina,” a 2019 march protesting the rape of a woman by four police officers in Mexico City. In a statement, the artist said she wanted to portray the “women in different marches and protests around the globe. Privileging the moment of protest and unison—when the voice rises. Sewing for me is a kind of loud drawing. These portraits are voices.”
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Jennie C. Jones at Alexander Gray Associates
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Currently the subject of an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Jennie C. Jones has one commanding canvas in the booth of New York’s Alexander Gray Associates. Titled Red Tone #5 and part of the series featured at the Guggenheim, this 2021 painting contains two brilliants hues of red. On the side, the artist has attached a gray piece of architectural felt, which can be used to dampen sound. For the artist, it’s a way to visually represent an auditory experience, as well as the painting’s potential for sound—or silence. Using simple tones, Jones also calls to mind Minimalist painting. Red Tone #5 finds a counterpart in this both in a wall-mounted sculpture of vintage wooden boxes by Valeska Soares, Palimpsest (I), from 2016.
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Evelyn Taocheng Wang at Carlos/Ishikawa
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Evelyn Taocheng Wang was born in Chengdu, China, in 1981, and has been based in the Dutch city of Rotterdam for the past decade. Her work often looks at the dichotomy between Chinese and Dutch culture, and the differences in ideas that those cultures have when it comes to notions about class, gender, and beauty. Having immersed herself in the golden age of Dutch painting and the fashion of agnès b. (both of which present classical ideals of European beauty for women), Wang presents two related sculptures in the booth of London’s Carlos/Ishikawa. In them, handmade textiles that appear to be oversized undergarments are lain out across drying racks.
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Christina Quarles at Pilar Corrias
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews In its group booth, London’s Pilar Corrias has brought a sundry of works by artists on its roster, including a Philippe Parreno “Marquee” sculpture and a mixed-media painting by Gisela McDaniel. The gallery is also showing a stunning new work by Christina Quarles, who will be included in the main exhibition of this year’s Venice Biennale. Titled Another Day Over, this new painting builds on the recent body of work that Quarles began creating in 2020 as lockdown set in. In the past few years, Quarles has become known for her paintings in which various bodies meld into each other, but in Another Day Over, there appears to be just one figure—a nod to the loneliness felt by many as the pandemic continues. It hangs between two chair sculptures by Tschabalala Self.
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Tschabalala Self at Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Speaking of Tschabalala Self, Galeria Eva Presenhuber has brought one major work by the artist that was last seen in Los Angeles at the Hammer Museum three years ago. The piece, which depicts a Black woman bending over, originally existed as a plaster-and-gauze sculpture, and has since been cast in bronze and painted in pink. A pink carpet has also been added. Self has said her work is concerned with reimagining the ways Black women have been represented throughout art history, and here, she portrays her female figure as a person revitalizing the environment around her.
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Helen Pashgian at Lehmann Maupin
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Pasadena native Helen Pashgian has a beautiful installation on an exterior wall of Lehmann Maupin’s booth, which faces a mural that Betye Saar (at Roberts Projects) will be recreating throughout the run of the fair. Currently the subject of a survey at SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico, Pashgian is showing two recent entries in her ongoing series of mystical orbs created with cast epoxy, each of them resting atop four-and-a-half-foot-tall pedestals. Between the works is a rare work by Pashgian taken from the artist’s personal collection. For it, she has adapted her signature cast epoxy method for a square canvas, where brilliant strands of color dance together. The gallery also trotted out new pieces by Liza Lou, Catherine Opie, Nari Ward, and Lari Pittman, as well as a study for Calida Rawles’s recently unveiled commission at the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, where the Super Bowl took place last Sunday.
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Camille Henrot at Hauser & Wirth
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews After recently joining Hauser & Wirth, following the closure of Metro Pictures, Camille Henrot presents a new series of paintings in a custom-built installation that includes pale green walls and cut-outs that are filled with frosted glass. Titled “Do’s and Don’t’s,” the works take as its source materials various old-fashioned etiquette books that the artist’s mother once owned that are then compiled into intricately layered canvases that involve gesso, peeled-off vinyl, screen-prints, directly applied paint, and more. As is often the case with Henrot’s work, the artist is looking to explore the impact of technology on our daily lives, in particular, here how digital technology has changed our social codes.
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Bruce Nauman at Sperone Westwater
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Emanating from an old-school television in Sperone Westwater’s booth is artist Bruce Nauman saying “thank you” over and over again for four minutes. This 1992 video sculpture, titled Thank You, at first appears rather straightforward. But as Nauman repeats the phrase, his words become increasingly more aggressive and intense. That simplicity becomes unsettling, and calls into question just how menacing a simple “thank you” can be in the right—or, in this case, wrong—hands.